0:08 [Music] i got off the plane uh two days ago from an intense week in china if i look jet lagged shout at me and i'll wake up okay i had a chance to talk and listen to the leaders of the government the academy think tanks business community and i can report to you that folks in beijing are almost as confused as people in washington
0:54 and trying to understand what the hell is going on so from washington perspective a country that for a generation has been seen as a friend even a strategic partner is now officially classified as a quote strategic adversary a nation that president obama and before him president bush and president clinton tried to integrate into the global community is now seen as a threat as a disrupter of the international order so what's going on and what i'm going to try to do is clarify as best i can what i think is going on
1:39 and most importantly so what what should we be doing to prevent this story this rivalry following the path that we've seen so frequently in previous history and what can people like us do to help think about this so what i'm going to do is three things first i'm going to present a big idea i'm going to resolve a prickly puzzle and i'm gonna pose a cardinal challenge the big idea is thrucidity strap now i know thucydides is a mouthful multi-syllabic some people have difficulty pronouncing it so who is this guy thucydides
2:26 and how do we pronounce his name one two three thucydides again one more time thucydides so if nothing else today you can tweet or post you met a great thinker you can pronounce his name who was thucydides he was the father and founder of history he wrote the first ever history book about what happened in classical greece about 2500 years ago and thucydides trap is a term i coined a few years ago to make vivid thucydides insight so thucydides insight is that when a rising power like athens or china today threatens to displace a ruling power like sparta or the u.s today
3:13 that creates a dangerous dynamic that frequently ends in war real bloody devastating war and then through city's famous line it was the rise of athens and the fear that this instilled in sparta that made the war inevitable so that's lucidities and thucydides trap now first i want to make a comment about this trap i find difficult because i even don't know how to pronounce its name strap the thucydides trap thucydides trap the thucidity's trap if it's a disease trap okay so through thucydides trap has entered the bloodstream you now know who is
4:00 thucydides and what is lucidity strap in my book i look at the last 500 years of history i find 16 cases 16 times a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power 12 of those cases end in war four of those cases in the not war for example when spain rose to rival portugal at about the time of christopher columbus that ended in no war the rivalry between us and the soviet union in the cold war ended in no war that is no thousands of people being killed by combatants so to say that war between us and china in this case is inevitable would be wrong but to say that it would
4:46 be likely would be correct one of the biggest surprises that came to me in the course of this study was that in most of the cases neither the rising power nor the ruling power wanted a war in few of the cases was the war initiated by either the rising power the ruling power so how does this happen and the answer is this rivalry creates a level of misunderstanding and misperception that leaves both vulnerable to external shocks some third parties action or even an accident that then one of the other fields obliged to respond to that triggers a spiral of reactions that
5:32 drags them to a place they don't want to go the classic case of this is world war one in that case what happened so 1914 britain is the dominant power in the world has been for 100 years has an empire in which the sun never sets has a navy that's ruled the waves for 100 years germany is growing rapidly its national economy overtakes britain by about 1900 but both britain and germany do not want war with each other in those circumstances in june 1914 a serbian assassin a terrorist assassinates archduke franz ferdinand just an accident the emperor
6:20 of us to hungary feels obliged to punish the serbs the russians uh feel obliged to come to the support of this of the serbs who are uh orthodox christians the french honor their military treaty with the russians the britons have gotten involved with the french so within six weeks all the nations are caught up in a conflagration at the end of which 25 million people laid in 25 million people and in the flanders field the poet puts it pointedly and you can read that for yourself where the puppies grow three takeaways from this first you
7:06 don't have to want war to get war you may not be interested in war but war may be interested in you secondly at the end of world war one who won the answer was nobody everyone lost every one of the leaders lost what he cared about most so the austro-hungarian emperor was trying to hold together his empire empire is dissolved he's out russian czar his whole regime has been overthrown by the bolsheviks kaiser out france bled of its youth for a whole generation never really recovers as a great power and britain which has been a creditor for centuries has turned into a debtor and on a slow decline uh from that from which they've not recovered
7:51 so everyone lost and third after the war one of the key players the chancellor of germany bateman was asked by a colleague well how did you guys let this happen and he said famously ah if we only knew so hold that thought ah if we only knew john kennedy lived through a similar crisis like what happened in 1914 in what's the most dangerous crisis in recorded human history the cuban missile crisis 1962. in this event there was a face-off between kennedy and khrushchev the head of the soviet union kennedy thought there was a one in three chance
8:38 that this would end in a nuclear war that would have killed uh hundreds of millions of people fortunately he had just two months earlier before the crisis on vacation read barbara tuchman's wonderful little book called on world on world war one the guns of august and he determined and he was haunted by bateman's line if we only knew so during the missile crisis he kept looking over his shoulder worrying that he wasn't doing everything he could conceivably do to prevent this being the missiles of october that led to the third world war that killed hundreds of millions of people which it could indeed have done so
9:24 what to do what to do i've been on the chase since i sent this book to the publisher three years ago for how to escape through city's trap i've so far identified nine possible avenues of escape each one has pros and cons no one of them seems to be yet compelling so i'm hoping actually today to get some further ideas i would like to have 10 11 12 13 and even after if you're thinking about it email me please this first one actually came from a viewer of the first said talk i gave last october this is a lady who's a student of negotiation and she said to me first in an email and then in a conversation
10:10 in negotiation theory sometimes a good technique is to put the problem on one side of the table and the people who are negotiating on the other side of the table so externalize the problem identify thucydides trap and the vulnerability it creates for dragging both parties to war as the problem and then see how the two parties can work to prevent that happening well what might that mean is i suggest here in the first instance it would be realism in recognizing the vulnerability that comes from the systemic structural stress that china is going to be rising and we're going to be ruling and that's going to be friction so recognize really this is a rivalry that produces huge
10:57 risks secondly ask ourselves what can we do to prevent crises that could drag us to war the two at the top of my list right now are taiwan and north korea and third recognizing even if we do the best job we can there still would be crises we should prepare be prepared for crisis crises to manage them so prepare for crisis management taiwan is an especially dangerous situation which you'll hear more about in the next 10 months as they run up to their presidential election two of the key candidates right now are flirting with greater independence for taiwan china regards taiwan as unalterably
11:44 and unambiguously an integral part of the chinese landmass china is determined to fight to prevent taiwan becoming independent actually we've seen this story before in 1996 i was in the pentagon as an assistant secretary of defense a taiwanese president made small moves towards independence the chinese government responded violently by bracketing the island with missiles which caused ships that were going to the which are the lifeline to the taiwanese island economy to stop going because the military balance at the time was overwhelmingly in america's favor the pentagon felt comfortable
12:29 recommending to president clinton and i supported this and clinton decided to move two u.s carriers up into the area china was forced to back down and what happened the day after that from that day to this day china has been deploying offensive military capabilities to prevent a scenario like this ever happening again they now have deployed thousands of missiles on the mainland that would be able to attack and sync our carriers or destroyers if we replayed the same hand in another taiwanese scenario so if i were in the pentagon today and we had a scenario like this i would be very reluctant to recommend what we recommended at that time so we
13:16 should with chinese now today be sitting down vigorously exploring how can we prevent this going where we don't want it to go a second idea is even a little wilder this would involve inventing a whole new strategic rationale and combining two big ideas one comes from ancient china in the relationship between the sun dynasty and the liao which is about a thousand years ago and the second from john kennedy when he after the cuban missile crisis having been terrified by the prospect of killing hundreds of millions of people decided we had to change what we were doing so here in 2005
14:03 the liao and the sun agreed to have a rivalry partnership they would be fierce rivals in one arena and partners in the other arena that sounds like a contradiction but it gave them 120 years of peace what kind of a peace do i mean and what kind of a peace do we seek not a pax americana enforced in the world by american weapons of war and if we cannot end now our differences at least we can help make the world safe for diversity for in the final analysis our most basic common length is that we all inhabit this small planet we all breathe the same air we all cherish our children's future and we are all mortal so could we imagine putting these two ideas together having a rivalry partnership
14:49 in a world safe for diversity in which americans would compete to show that a freedom-based democracy can better deliver what people want and the chinese can compete to show that a party-led autocracy can better deliver what people want we compete in one arena but in other arenas for example preventing getting dragged to war are trying to deal with a climate which if each of us emits greenhouse gases makes an unsustainable biosphere managing the global economy and financial crises this sounds like a contradiction but lo and behold in the business world this is not that strange so life is often more complex than diplomacy apple
15:35 and samsung have a strange relationship they compete and cooperate together they sell smartphones apple uh used to be the dominant cell phone supplier samsung has overtaken it so samsung the largest supplier cellphone but samsung is also the biggest supplier of apple so how can your fiercest competitor be also your biggest supplier on whom you're dependent the answer is life can be complicated so i'm thinking this this is this is an interesting arena so there's two uh small or modest items on the list of nine i'm hoping some of you will be able to add to the list so
16:20 thank you very much [Applause]
