China Is Inching in the Right Direction
Never mind “Thucydides’s trap.” Today’s rising power seems to have taken history’s lessons to heart.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images
It is appropriate that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are flying to Buenos Aires for their showdown summit at the close of a month that began with the centennial of the end of the First World War. America’s economic tussles with China are all too reminiscent of the rivalry at the beginning of the last century between Britain, the superpower, and the rising power, Germany.
This is not as bleak a comparison as it sounds, for two reasons. First, nobody now seems to be planning on imminent armed conflict — partly because of the awfulness of nuclear weapons and partly because of the terrible lessons of the 20th century. Instead the main threat is of an economic iron curtain dividing the world’s two biggest economies.