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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe.
Wasn't thal Joe?
In preparation for this conversation today, I sat down this morning. We're recording on what is it? November twentieth, that's correct, and I typed US China into Google news results. Here's a selection of headlines. US Commission says China could invade Taiwan with little advance warning, China leveraged India Pakistan conflict to trial and tout its military strengths, Pacific Islands on frontline of future US China war, and then finally the US China Chip War. Are we ready?
I was just gonna say, I feel like the Chips in particular, or every other day, there's a different headline about what's allowed or what's not. But to your point, this is the story. I mean, there's Ai, there's a couple other things, and then the US China relationship.
Absolutely, and it seems almost inevitable at this point that we talk about US and China in competitive terms, right and also in militaristic terms. And this has been going on for as long as I can remember.
At this point, it's building up right, Like really in the last decade. You know, when we were younger, thought oh, we're just going to trade together and maybe they'll even liberalize it become a liberal democracy.
One day, it didn't happen. But in the last ten years or nine years, it's really picked up. How much people are framing this in military terms.
Well, I wrote that paper back in like two thousand and two that China was going to invade Taiwan by the two thousand and eight Olympics. So my view of this might be different to yours. My view has also been proven to be incredibly incorrect, So I'll leave it at that. But you know, we recorded this episode with Henry Wang a few months ago where we were talking about US China relations and he mentioned one person, Yeah, and he said, you got to get him on the show.
You got to get his perspective on this view of US China competition and are we doomed destined to end up in a military conflict. So here we are, We're going to do it.
We're in his office. Let's do it, all right.
We have, in fact, the perfect guest. We have Professor Graham Allison. He is the Douglas Dylan Professor of Government at Harvard University, and he, of course is the one who coined the term the Thucidities trap to describe the potential outcome of US China competition. So really the perfect person to speak to about this, Professor Allison, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts.
Thank you so much for having me.
So I mentioned the thucidities trap, and I think a lot of listeners will know what it is, and probably a substantial portion of our listeners are really into ancient Greek history and know all about it. But when you first came up with that term, was there a light bulb moment in your head where you thought like, this is the way to characterize the future of US and China relations.
So thank you and answers. Yes, I think I had actually speaker Kevin McCarthy here at the Forum event a couple of nights ago, and he was reminding me that when he was trying to figure out what was happening with China, he called me up and he said, would you give me a tutorial? I said, of course, I'd be under too. We've started this conversation and his first question when we began was what the hell is going on here?
That should have been my first question.
Good question.
Basically here, every day and every way, somehow or another, there's a story about China, threat, China, competition, China, China, and China, I said in a word, if you're trying to capture this from a phrase, this is a classic lucidity and rivalry. So China is a meteoric rising power never before in history as a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many different dimensions. A country that we couldn't even find in our review mirror at the beginning of the century because it was so far behind us.
It's very hard to find in our rearview mirror today because it's either beside us or ahead of us if you think about arrival. So a meteoric rising power. The US is a colossal ruling power. Never since Rome has a country been so powerful in so many different dimensions for such an amazing period of time. In fact, I just have a peace. They'll be in foreign affairs next week. On the longest piece, this is the longest period without great power war since Rome eighty years. We celebrated in
September without great power war. Historically, every generation or two, for the last few thousand years, there's been great power or wars, so amazing, colossal ruling power who's not only been good for itself, but actually good for an international piece. So Thucydides, when he was trying to understand what the hell was going on in ancient Greece, wrote about what he called the rise of Athens and the fear that
this instilled in Sparta that made war virtually inevitable. So think about a seesaw on a kid's playground, and one heaviest on the one end and one lightest on the other. And the heavy is kind of in control. I can jiggle you if I want to, blah blah blah. Now, all of a sudden, the light starts heavy weight, and he gets a little bigger and a little bigger. Pretty soon I'm feeling Wait a minute, I maybe I have only one foot on the ground. Maybe maybe I'm feeling less.
So when you see this tilt of the sea saw and the tectonics of power, this concretes a discombobulation for both parties. The ruling party thinks, hey, wait a minute, what's happening here? I used to look down on you. Now you're looking me straight on. And maybe even so my perspective. I used to be able to push a button and things would happen, and now I push the button and the things don't happen because my relative power has changed. Psychologically, I'm accustomed to being at the top
of every backing order Americans. My wife says about me, wa, wash the cosmetics off my chest, and it says, USA is number one. Number one is who we as our identity. If you do the television, they scan you know whatever people hold up there, number one for their team, whatever, whatever. So the idea that somehow somebody is challenging my position, as I used to be the biggest economy. Now I've an economy. I used to be the main trading part of it. Yet now I used to be everything that
was made was made by us, that was made. So as this happens, historically, we've seen over and over this discombobulation that leads into lots of misperceptions, miscalculations, misjudgments, and unfortunately, in about three quarters of the cases, this sends up in war, often a catastrophic war. So sorry, that's a long version.
Of that's perfect.
Sparta ended up attacking Athens, right because they were scared of the rising power.
Well, basically what happened, I mean, it's a little more complicated than that, but yes, basically, as the discombobulation was occurring and Athens became more and more full of itself, as the rising power always does, and the ruling power become more and more fearful, then it turns out that some third party activity in Corsera that wouldn't have mattered to the two parties otherwise. So something that's otherwise incidental or easily managed with throwing a layer of misperceptions and
miscalculations and you get there. Another wonderful example, I think the one that's closest to what we're now seeing is the period from nineteen hundred to nineteen fourteen that led to World War One. So if you ask yourself, how in the world could I assassinate an archsdooke in Sarajevo, which was so inconsequential that it didn't even make the front page of the newspapers in New York. Within five weeks,
all of Europe was caught up in a war. And when you looked afterwards, people said how did you guys let this happen? And as Beulau, the chancellor for Germany, he said, ah, if we only knew.
So, the rising distrust and the anxiety about status position, it's not that it directly provides the impetus for war per se, but that it creates the conditions such that reserve as an incident or an and that oh, because there's no trust, because there's all this concern. It can be that random thing, an large duke, some people in a third city.
Something happens in Taiwan, something happens here, something happens here. And because as this seesaw is shifting as the rising and ruling, the technonics or moving, the mis perceptions or magnified, and miscalculations multiply, and the impact of third party incidents or accents amplified, so things that would otherwise be manageable. This is just nonsense. Let's deal with this problem. All of a sudden, I see it as you doing something, and then when I see that you see something, one
thing leads to the other. So if you look in the case of Athens and Sparta Corran a city state, that neither of them cared much for it. In particular trusted at all gets involved with Era, which is now Corfu, and there's a fear that they're going to have a navy that will be able to challenge Athens, so that the Athenians get more excited. So one thing leads to
the other. You get kind of a vicious cycle of misperceptions and miscalculations that then all of a sudden, certain happens, and once they something happens, oh my god, I have to react that action and reaction, and there you get to somewhere you don't want to go.
We don't talk about ancient Greek history enough on this podcast, in my opinion, but I do need to bring it up to date. So you know, some people would argue that China has been on the rise for decades now, and I'm sure people have different starting points, but let's say since the nineteen nineties, and you know, now thirty or forty years later, we're at a point where there is competitive rivalry both militarily and economically, but we haven't
had war so far. As you just noted, we've had eighty years of peace between the great powers, which is our good news story of the day. But why is that and doesn't mean that you need to reconsider the throcidian framework.
Well, again, Thucydites is very thoughtful about this. He didn't say that there was a specific moment or point in the story. And in the book that I wrote called a Destined for work in the US and China, Escape through Cynities Trap, I looked at the last five hundred years and find sixteen incidents or sixteen cases in which a rising power seriously threatens a ruling power, the World
War One being one interesting and dramatic example. So in these, sometimes before the rising power has actually overtaken the ruling power, something happens sometimes after. So it's that is not about some specific moment in time. It's about a dynamic that then when something happens, something happens. So if you look, for example, at the Cold War, which is one of the so in the sixteen cases, twelve in the war. If you want to model for war, think World War One,
but four in the No War. So that's good news, one of which is called Cold War. So it's called war, but it's not war. It's war on every four bullets, bombs and bullets. So in the Cold War we had several very very close calls, for example, the Cuban missile crisis, about which I read a book, and that if you look at that chart over there on the wall, that's
Kennedy's doodles during the Cuban missile crisis. Thinking about the choices that he's making, he thought that was between a one and three and even chance this was end in the nuclear war. That it ended in a nuclear war, we would have had a couple hundred million people killed. We wouldn't be doing this interview. So it could could he could have happened in that insence, but it didn't.
How did it come not to happen? First, there was some brilliant state craft, for example, to get out of it so that they could otherwise there was a great, great glob of grace and good fortune, I say, But also there was a rivalry that went on for long enough in which one of the parties, the Soviet Union, ended up holloway being hollowed out by the contradictions that were part of a Soviet command and control system turned out not to be commitative of the lower So that's
how one story ended that successfully, and that could be a possible analog for the current US China rivalry, and which Chinese would say, we see in your divisions, in your society and in your come up decadent of you know, whatever, whatever, whatever, maybe you'll be the one.
They perceived us as the Soviet Union.
And we many Americans trying to tell our side of the story, say well, they're going to be sort of like the Soviet Union because actually they were coming us and blah blah blah.
You know, obviously we look to the US Soviet relationship
for perhaps lessons from history. China feels in many ways very different from the Soviet Union in some ways with respect to foreign policy, you know, like I read Henry doctor Kissinger's book on China, and he starts off by pointing out that China has never never been particularly interested in people beyond its borders, outside of the territorial questions, say, related to Taiwan or Tibet, and even still today, it's not obvious that China's interest with the rest of the
world expands much beyond the goods trade at all. Does that affect your calculation the sort of internal when you think about these statistics, the fact that yes, there are these patterns of history, but also countries are different internally and may have different motivations.
Absolutely, I mean a can you can take it at the kind of level one, level two, level three, level four. Obviously, each of the country's story is different. If you look at Portugal and Spain, which is the first of these sixteen cases, back of the time of Christopher Columbus, they both were Catholic and there was a pope, and so when the conflict got to the edge of a conflict, the pupe said, I got a solution. Here's a line.
I'm gonna draw the line down here. This side is going to be Portuguese, this side is going to be Spanish. Then that's why people in Brazil speak Portuguese, because they got on the Portuguese side of the line. But you had a situation which you had a kind of a ruling guru who could make a declaration. Unfortunately there's no
such person today to do that. But looking at the Chinese cases, as you say, China's history has been one in which historically it is wanted to be and thinks of itself as the sun around which everything else rotates. They've got a line about there can be only one, you know, tiger in.
The valley, but It's literally called the Middle Kingdom right in the Middle Country, and.
The Middle Kingdom was the meaning of it was the middle between the Earth and heaven. So we're the We're the that. But not about the Soviet not like the Soviet Union wanting to convert everyone.
Right, China's never had a come intern.
Fort and they haven't been trying to take over territories of other parties other than just you know, they're in their periphery and they haven't had an aspiration. Enry actually has a good line about this. He said, you know that the Americans and Chinese are very similar in that both of us have a superiority complex, but only one of us is a missionary. The other one doesn't think people are even good enough to be Chinese, so they'd
like for you to mimic their behavior. But they don't think you're ever going to become Chinese, and they don't wanted you to become Chinese. I want you to rule your country the way Chinese do. They want to They want you to have respect, yeah, and they want to be in their own domain. I would say that's roughly right. Leak On you was the best, the most insightful China Watcher and she China Watcher was leak On You. Leak On You was the founder and father builder of Singapore,
and he was one of my mentors. I wrote a little book about him. And uh Hey said about China, this is going to be the biggest player in the history of the world. It's going to be very uncomfortable for Americans to get used to it, especially the idea that some smaller yellow ration. There's a racial element in the history and orever, he said. But he believed that it was possible that the US in China could find the way if they were smart, to share the Pacific
in the twenty first century. And I would say that, you know, that would be the good news home.
So both Joe and I did international relations, I guess in the early two thousand, yeah, around that time, and a line of thinking back then was that globalization was going to save us all and we were going to have our economies so enmeshed with each other that the idea of going to war or military competition would just be completely insane because it would mean mutual self destruction, not with bombs, but with I don't know, consumer goods like La booboos. So I had to throw that in there.
Do people still believe that, because on the other hand, it seems like the central conflict between the US and China right now is economic. But on the other hand, we haven't had outright military war.
So good to remember how the cycles go. And I think I remember that period since I've been teaching for a long time. The theory that somehow economic entanglement would prevent war was a famous theory in the beginning of
the twentieth century as well. So the biggest, the best selling book in the decade before World War One was Norman Angels book I write about this actually in Destined for War, called the Great Illusion, and he said, there's not going to be wars anymore because the cost of war will so greatly exceed the benefits that the winner
will be a loser. And if you asked Andrew Carnegie, who was the richest man of the time in nineteen fourteen, for the Christmas nineteen thirteen fourteen, he sent out Christmas cards to his favorite four thousand people, who included the pins of every state, and he said, there's not going to be war anymore because now we have this.
You know, Merry Christmas, No more war.
Exactly, and he said, and I have built the peace Palace at the Hague where people can go and resolve disputes, So it's not going to be necessary to have the fighter war. I would say that's a grand delusion. It turned out out to be right. Now, what's right and wrong about it? Interesting? So is it true that the US and China, both financially and in terms of supply chains and in terms of economy are so entangled today that this should provide some counterbalance to the geopolitical and
military impulses for confrontation. Absolutely right. And this is what you can see in Trump and She at their recent summit. I mean, of the people in the current foreign policy world, Trump is a far, far, far outlier in this respect, in that he thinks it's possible that the US in China can actually both be involved in such a kind
of economic relationship that will be beneficial to both parties. Now, partly that's because I think he's so some of the people who are pessimistic about this have kind of given up on American competitiveness and thinking, you know, maybe we're not as competitive. Trump has I think a romantic view that the US can win, you know, every race. But on the other hand, he also has a businessman's view that's possible for people to be entangled in ways in which they can be fierce rivals and can also be
somehow cooperating. So I've been stretching for silver linings because there's as many, many, many things. Nothing like about true, but I think it's conceivable if you look look at see what he said after the summit, when he tweeted at first he said it was great success for us on a ten point scale, that was a twelve. Actually what he understood was he came up against somebody who's as strong and has as many cards as he does, so you have to find a way to cooperate with him.
But if that's true, if the both of the parties are searching for ways to cooperate, could this be a stabilizer in what would otherwise be I would say yes it could, and could it just end up in some kind of a a So Henry, who was my other most mentor about China, kept saying, Henry Kissinger, sorry that we need a new strategic concept that's that's comprehensive enough to encompass the fact that we're going to be the fiercest doucinity in rivals at all times, each of us
really really does want to be number one, and it matters in many many But at the same time we're so entangled that we require cooperation or the other for our own survival. So this sounds like a contradiction. It is, But we managed a version of that a little bit in the Cold War. This one's much more complicated because the Soviet Union was never really a serious economic rival. By the time you go to high codeor in the Chinese case, China is media. But is there something in
that space? I think there is. How did this might be?
So you mentioned that like compared to many others, Trump is a US unto optimist and maybe even a dove venu measures, which is a little weird given that, But it clearly is how did this happen? Like how did so much of the foreign policy elite in the US over the last several years, it feel like, becomes so doumor jaded, pessimistic about the prospect of peaceful coexistence.
I think I think the main driver was structural in the thucidityan story. Okay, so if you look at the British in the period from nineteen hundred to nineteen fourteen. They become to be more and more shocked by the fact that the Germans are doing things that are supposed to be ours. They're producing something that we're supposed to be in charge of. Actually, it's interesting, and I can describe this in the book as a famous document called the crow cr W Memorandum. So the King of England
asks his foreign minister. He says, why is it that we're being so nasty about the Germans? This is my cousin. Guys are ruined.
They literally his cousin.
They go on vacation together in the summer, and he says, but every time I read anything, every time I see anything, everybody is blaming them for everything. Why is this? And Crow explains to him the sea shock is shifting, and as the seashell shifts, everybody's perspective is impacted and they exaggerate. And this is kind of like normal. And I think if you look at that Athens Sparta story, you can
find a very similar thing. The Athenians are doing what they're doing, and the Spartans are talking to said, these guys are hopeless. Look and see what they do every day they get up and they think of some other thing to be bishopous.
Just real quickly, if we zoom forward to World War two in that scenario, is the US the rising power that that Hitler was completely anxious about?
Is that?
How you fitted into that?
I'll say that World War two cases a complicated one, and they've been a good question where Hitler is attempting to become a rising power in a situation that's already stabilized,
but then he has actually such territory. Mostly in most of the cases, the rising powers don't have great territorial or imperial aspirations in the in the in the Cold War, in the Soviet Union, I mean, the Soviet Union did really believe in their ideology that every country should be ruled by a communist government and that they needed to have a continuous expansion in order to basically legitimize their own rule. Fortunately, most of most.
Cases, how much of the current tension between the US and China, tension, discomfort, discombobulation, How much of that is down to China rising as a power versus the US declining as a power.
I would say, in the good question, So in the China's meta narrative, who ask Chiesian paying or when they're talking, it's the inexorable rise of China. So there is confident and he's just confident that they're rising into what will be a Chinese century, as Teddy Roosevelt was if you take the equivalent period in American history. But the other component of this, which was not part of Teddy Roosevelt's, is that the US is irreversibly declining.
That's what she believes.
That's what she believes. And the person who works for him, who's is number four, and this closest idealogical person is one Hu Ni. Now by some accident of good fortune, have become one of their people, whom they one of the people whom they enjoy talking to. I think mainly because Kissinger I'm you know, his mentor or mintee, and
because I introduced them to Ducydities. I mean, is what I said as the best publicity agent for a author than ever in China, because they've sold more copies of Thucyddy's Plopannian War in Mandarin since my book than in the previous two thousand years. So in any case, one Hu
Ning is a serious thinker. He was a political scientists in Originally he came to the US in nineteen eighty nine on American Political Science Association fellowship or something to study at the university or to be a fellow at the university. And then he traveled all around the US and he wrote a book that's called America Against America, and you could go and it's in English. You can see the English comic and it's a as the analysis of the factors that we're going to splinter the country.
It's pretty good for the time, pretty hotel, and they clearly continue thinking about that. I was there just before the Trump She summit in Korea talking again to a couple of people in the first circle, and they were saying about the US. You know, the US. I mean,
here's one he was this stranger than we thought. I said, what strang And she said, well, let me just let me give you this to start that the list, he says, New York is the city is the largest Jewish population in the world, and they're gonna elect a Muslim mirror. New York City is the YEMPI center of global capitalism. They're gonna like somebody who's a socialist. It we're socialists.
The US is the government is providing food for one in nine people in the US, and now they're talking about with all theygat we used to do that, you know when when when we had people who were poor, but that we think that's one of our great achievements. We don't. We don't hand out food and people have food. The US is sending troops to cities. Said, we remember tenement. Is this like tenement? This is not like you know, the division of income has now become so great. They said,
you know, we saw this. This is data that two thirds of the consumption is now by the top twenty percent of the income owners. Well, excuse me. In most societies, the people who were not that were being left out with riot or you know that that would be that's why we say we have to be a modern socialist state, because they have to so you know, they're going down all this like that. I said, what do you have to remember is this is a strange country. It's absolutely.
Contradictions.
Contradiction. I sometimes I kaleidoscope of contradictions, because every time you move it it's another one. On the other hand, it's been remarkably resilient and no other society with no other governing system has been as successful over so long a period of time, is this one? And then I usually do my lines about God looks after drug so children in the USA I love. But I would say reasonable person could look at the country today and say this looks pretty strange. Yeah.
Yeah, So obviously there are the big structural questions that will last for a long time, both China's economic rise, US internal tensions, et cetera. But this year in particular, Tracy started episode with all these headlines and that's daily and Trump himself is you know, there's the contradictions within the White House, et cetera. But just the events of this year. Have they from today from January first to today or from the inauguration today? Have your views changed?
Are you more optimistic less optimistic?
Like?
How what have you learned in twenty twenty five?
That's a good question. So I would say two thirds or eighty percent of the story is baked into the structure. So if and as China continues rising, which I believe it will, and growing at about twice the rate we do, which I think it will, and advancing in technologies the way it has been, which I think it will, even though it has many many, many problems, but I think they will manage more or less on that path, and Americans will wake up more and more every day that
China is in your face doing something or whatever. So that's point two in this doucentity and rivalry. Again, it's natural for the ruling power to blame the rising power for everything, and blaming China or hyping China threat or demonizing China is kind of normal. And I would say that Spartans were demonizing the Athenians, maybe not quite the extent. So for Americans, we do it our way, But I would say that that part is right. Those are the
negative components. While it may seem strange, especially in Cambridge, for somebody to look for some signs of hope or or silver linings in Trump, I think Trump understands that nuclear war would be catastrophic and really really worries about that in a way that the only other person in the foreign policy establishment equivalent lately that has done that was Biden, not Obama, not you know, eighty percent of the others. So that's number one. More, he understands per
a bit. Secondly, he somehow he has this respect for she. He admires China some of what he admires. Is there autocratic rule? He says, how in the world did you managed to rule one point five billion people with so little objection? I wish I could manage my press the way you do. You know, bab Baba, you've got a lease on life. I mean, he's leader for life. Is anybody any suggestions for me? So he admires that he
wants to be a great peacemaker. So I think it's not inconceivable that we might come to have a strategic concept that would be something like a partnership, which would then balance. I think, will the thucydity rivalry continue in every case? Yes? I believe it will, And will it mean that this feeds of fear and all the things
that will be normal? But if it's also the case that my survival as a country depends on a degree of cooperation with you, so that we don't have a nuclear war, because at the end of a nuclear war, my country's caught, so that Hei doesn't end up ruling us all with the two AA leaders. So could we find so financial system in two thousand and eight, we would have had the financial crisis, would have become a depression, had it not been for a joint US China state
no trade. I mean, if we look at the rare earth story, I mean that's what those are there?
Yeah, okay, metal on Graham's table.
We were going to ask, so there are a bunch of these are mission coins?
Is that right? These are just from from services. But this here, see if you can separate it, these are rare earth magnets. And you can seet careful, okay, in any case, because we'll get it. We have become dependent upon China for how many things in our supply chain, and they fortunately depend in honice for how many things. So part of the reason why they got the stale made in the current. What would otherwise be? You know, Trump's bullying another country is that he comes up against
somebody as strong as we are. So in that case he's adapting and adjusting. No, I would say, you know, if I'm looking for silver linings, I'm looking in that space.
I hate to end on a down note, and I'm conscious of the time and you have to run off. But in terms of the US China cold war turning into a hot war, what should we be looking out for? Because as we started this conversation, every day, there's a new headline about, you know, China's moving this naval vessel into this particular body of water, and there's propaganda airing in China that's prepping the population for an imminent Taiwanese invasion.
That sort of thing. What would you actually look for as a warning sign.
So I think most of the news lines that we hear or statements from people are China hype. And you cannot accuse China of anything today in the US without getting a residence. So nobody, I mean, I get blamed it Casley for being the China sympathizer by simply saying what you're asserting is false. Yes, of course there's many
many things Chinese doing, but it does so. For example, one of the favorite cluses out China has the fastest nuclear build up in the world because they're going from about five hundred weapons to about one thousand weapons in twenty which answers, well, that's a historical statement. And if you look at the number of warheads we went to from in the Eisenhower period or the Kennedy period, in both cases there were more that just happened not to
be true. Not there'll be many, many, many accusations of that kind, and I think those will continue because so China has developed a manufacturing ecosystem. It basically can produce anything at scale that half the price that we can well lo and behold. If you go to Walmart, sort to home depot, half the stuff or more is made in China. Well, people will complain about that. So that part of seems right, But I would say that most
of this is just hype. Where you find danger is where there are third parties whose initiative might in this like the story of Coursera, produce a set of reactions, and they're the most The leading candidate of Taiwan and the current president of Taiwan Lie who done taking many, many dangerous actions. I think fortunately, both in the Biden administration and in the Trump administration, they've had conversations at that leader level about not letting this person by some
irresponsible action. Dragosoptism. You know there is that the Chinese rules of engagement in their exercises in the Straits and in the South China Sea are now such that it's not very difficult to imagine a collision of a ship or a plane. We saw that at the beginning of the Bush administration when they collided with one of our spyplanes,
and so could that escalate? And I think that's why again getting back to communication channels between the two parties where they can talk candidly and privately in order to have a circuit breaker if some accident happens, which I think on the current path would be likely to happen.
I'm going to ask one more very quick question because you brought up manufacturing just then, and something else that we've been noticing lately is there's a tendency among a lot of Western economies, especially to talk about building up their own manufacturing capacity, including in terms of munitions and rare earth minerals. As you just mentioned. There was a headline I think just yesterday about the UK wanting to build ammunition within its own borders instead of relying on allies.
What's the underlying motivation there, Because most people would look at a headline like the UK wants to make its own bullets as you know, a predecessor maybe to some sort of military conflict.
Well it's good. I mean it is puzzling, and there are a lot of puzzling things. But I would say that whenever it's pointed out that people that you're dependent on some other party for supply of something. So for example, for the US, rare earth magnets are required for almost everything, so for cars, for iPhones, for laptops, for f thirty fives,
for comahook whistles or whatever. So how would we allow ourselves to be dependent on China because that gives them something that they can squeeze that supply chain and be coarse. So I would rather be independent on that. And so any politician would then make an announcement, Okay, we're declaring they were going to be independent, asking what would be required to be done in order to reach that stage? People are not asking, so that would be at the
next level. Similarly, if you look, for example, for most pharmaceuticals, most of the pharmaceuticals and the pharmaceutical precursors that we use for any medicines come from me, the China, or
from Indian. Well maybe we should do these ourselves. Munitions we shouldn't be giving out a So the fact that politicians, when they see somebody says here's it been, it's your vulnerability, declared that we're going to be independent, as I would say, predictable if you look and see what behaviors follow from that,
the answer is not very many. So I'm almost thready to accept the proposition that we're going to be inextricably entangled in supply chains and economics, in which case some version of mutual deterrence of the sort that we found in the nuclear balance maybe where we end up. Now. Is that a good place to be compared to the elsewhere? No, I've read to be independent, but compared, I mean, is that something we can manage if you have competent governments and managing And I would say, you know, yes.
All right, Professor Allison, thank you so much for coming on all lots and inviting us to your office here at Harvard. Thank you so much. Yeah, a lot to look at to have you here.
Glad to be on the problem. I thank you good questions, and I'm glad to see two serious students with international there.
We took our background and went and took final highest praise I got, Joe.
That was a real treat.
It was a real treat. Just being in doctor Ellison's office was really nice. I just I could go You've heard me already say this, But like being a professor at an elite American professor Tess so sick and then like it would say, such a it's like such a dream career they have.
You know what bothers me is you and I both did international relationship. Yeah, and I think we have a similar complaint. But like that conversation that we just had with Professor Allison was what I thought international relations was going to be. You know, we were going to sit there and pontificate about US China relations and then compare it to Sparta versus Athens in ancient Greece. And instead
it was basically all philosophy. It was like game theory. Yeah, I know it's and like it was so abstract, Like I think I had entire courses where we didn't even name a single country like by name. It was just if country A does this, what does country be do?
It's such a weird discipline for that reason, and as an adult, I've tried to read some international relations books and it's all this like weird game theory and tables and stuff like that and just not my thing. I think there's there's probably I know we're going off on
a little bit of a tangent here. It feels a little bit like, you know, the same phenomenon in economics, for example, Like you study economics, you're you're gonna think about like, well, what's gonna happen to the unemployment rate, what's gonna happen with the stock market, cetera, And then you read academic economics, and I'm not as like, you know, I'm like, as I've grown older, as I've matured, I'm like, you know, I've like I appreciate academic econ more than
I did when I was in my youth, and I was like, this is done with all these equations and stuff like that. It's all fake. I don't think that isn't much anymore, but it does feel like kind of disconnected from like, wait, I thought economists talked about, you know, the unemployment rate and stuff like that, and then you read what a paper is about.
It's very abstract.
You're right.
One thing that did surprise me was when the professor was talking about his latest trip to China. Was it his latest trip, well, one of his trips to China where he was talking and trying to or hearing from Chinese policymakers about how they're very confused by America and in particular the example of capitalist New York electing a socialist mayor, and I thought like, if anyone can understand socialism with capitalistic characteristics, it must be the Chinese.
It should be it should be very intuitive. No, I thought that was like just overall though very I mean, it was a little bit grim, the idea that almost like we're kind of a borrowed time here. It's like, it's been a really long time since a Great Powers war by historical standards, and so it's already been a long time. Historically, they come along work frequently, and now the conditions are in place for this, you know, the
so called a Thucididy's trap as he sees it. I'm not thrilled that in the best case scenario, for the rest of my life, there's always going to be a risk of that being right around the corner the moment some third party country does something, you know.
Well the leash the other thing. And again this goes back to why I'm so frustrated with IR as an academic discipline. But like the emphasis on good state craft, good state craft makes a difference. Yeah, right, you know, he talked about the Cuban missile crisis and JFK and we came very very close to absolute disaster there, but it was ultimately averted by the individual actions of human beings,
both in Russia and in the US. And I feel like that's kind of what's missing in ir It's that like emphasis on individual choice and motivations and incentives and how to actually do good state craft rather than just like look at everything through the prism of either neoliberalism or realism power. Yeah, or did you ever do gender theory?
I don't think I took that.
There is an interesting one. The reason we had the Cuban missile crisis is because men and large objects.
I've but it I am really interested in this idea that unlike the US, So he used the term I think he said missionary sort of to characterize how the US sees and spread democracy and liberalism and capitalism. And of course the Soviet Union also had this impulse to spread communism, and everywhere there was a communist party, it felt some tug to back them up, and that's how the Soviet Union got mired in Afghanistan for years and years.
China doesn't really seem to have that. It wants to trade, I mean outside of it wants to consolidate it's physical territory. But it does not seem you know, like, you know, there's a great story several months ago, apparently the Cubans came to China, And as for advice, I said, well, have you tried liberalizing your economy? Have you tried basically not being communists? Like it doesn't have that impulse the same way the Soviet Union did, and nor does they
have it like the US does. So I'm curious, like, as China truly becomes a global power, is a great power, it seems fairly rare historically for it to have so little interest in how other countries manage their affairs.
Yeah, I did.
I enjoyed the line about, you know, like, it's not really about getting more people to be Chinese, because it's special to be Chinese in the first place.
We're not good enough to be Chinese.
Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there at Chinese.
Joe, let's leave it. Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
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