Ted Talk: Is war between China and the US inevitable? by Graham Allison, 2018 (19 m)

Graham Allison is a prominent American political scientist. He is a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 1971 he became internationally renowned after the success of his book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976. More recently, in 2017, he published Destined For War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Editons), a book that I read about one year ago and that I found pretty interesting. Among several fascinating parts of his book, are those in which he describes new Chinese, civilian and military technologies, little spoken of in the West.

In this Ted Talk, Dr. Allison takes lessons from a historical pattern known as the “Thucydides’s Trap”, where he shows why a rising China and a dominant United States could be headed towards a violent collision no one wants and how we can summon the common sense and courage to avoid it.

References:

YouTube. 2018. Is war between China and the US inevitable? | Graham Allison. Retrieved on November 24, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlahWQC2smE