RECOMMENDED: Book. “Destined for War" by Graham Allison.

RECOMMENDED: Non-fiction Book. “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?” (2017) by Graham Allison. Another book, published in 1976 and co-written by Mr Allison with Peter Szanton, that I found in rummage sale in Manila during college: “Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection.” The book had a significant dent on Jimmy Carter’s dovish foreign policy as he took office in 1977. That time, I was already into voracious immersion into Washington’s overseas tact. 

       I must say, Graham Allison is a top 10 major read for me when it comes to U.S. national security and defense policy, and governmental decision making on times of crisis. What is Thucydides Trap? According to Allison, it refers to the theory that "…when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result.” 

       Without expounding, and which I assume you already “see” through it, President Biden’s hawkish playbook seems bent on jumping into that hole although, especially via Ukraine, he sends a pitch that delivers the contrary. 

       Meanwhile, since “Destined…” was written in 2017, the author was referring to President Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Writes Allison: “Both major players in the region share a moral obligation to steer away from Thucydides's Trap." And we know that both leaders didn’t fall into the war trap—although China has been very successful with its “art of war,” delivered via Sun Tzu: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” That’d be trade and economics. 

       Trump was faced with a plethora of foreign policy boiling points: North Korea, Iran, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria etc etcetera. Yet war didn’t happen in the level of Russia/Ukraine tempest. Sure, the other side of the polar/political extreme will still thumb-down Donald, no matter what. 

      Allison's Thucydides Trap follows the ancient text “History of the Peloponnesian War,” in which Thucydides wrote, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." Of course, those were past tense parallels. Yet although we are faced with an entirely different (high-tech) reality along a geopolitical grid that has long shuddered and tilted, West to East, still the theory makes sense.

       “Divide and rule” is another ancient policy that gains utmost effectivity these days. Attributed to Philip II of Macedon, the strategy means gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.

       Anyways, you don’t have to believe in a book or other people’s perception, scholarly analysis or simply whacked-out theses, to learn what’s going on and what fits humanity. Try this book. Another book that I disagree with but enjoyed reading is “Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific” by Robert D. Kaplan. I scored it for $1 at Dollar Tree. 

       Mr Kaplan served as consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces, the United States Marines, and the United States Air Force. I first encountered his work via The Atlantic Monthly, through the article “The Coming Anarchy." From that, I am led to Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.” The struggle between primitivism and civilizations etc etcetera. 📚✍️📚