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在2018年初冬的北京，本播客主播游天龙对提出”修昔底德陷阱“理论的哈佛大学肯尼迪学院创院院长、前美国国防部助理部长格雷厄姆·艾利森教授进行深度专访。在本期节目中，您将听到：

1. 中美双方如何看待修昔底德陷阱理论
2. 中美关系是否处于修昔底德陷阱之中
3. 艾利森对于逃离修昔底德陷阱的建议
4. 美国的国内政治将如何影响中美关系
5. 从美国的角度看中美如何走向贸易战
6. 两国将会在何种情况下爆发武装冲突
7. 艾利森对华为孟女士遭遇的简要分析
8. 逃离陷阱后中美关系未来应如何发展
9. 两年后的总统大选将会如何影响关系
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英文原文
Q: Dr. Allison, nice to have you in our podcast.
A: I am honored to be here.
Q: Your bestseller book, Destined for War, is translated into Chinese and it is also a very popular book in China I believe right now. You are right now here promoting this book across this country. I'm very curious what kind of responses you receive in general from your Chinese readers?
A: That's a good question. So, uh, the book has only been published in Mandarin for about two weeks, but I’d uh, spent two days in Shanghai because Shanghai Publishing Company is the publisher. And so I was at Fudan, meeting with people in the government in Shanghai as well as in the think tanks. And then I’ve been right now two days in Beijing, and I am here at this conference. I think generally the reception been quite positive. I was last night at Renmin University, and there were three or four hundred students who seemed very excited and very lively engaged. Two or three professors did reactions to the book, and we had a debate with students and others. Uh, so I think, uh, and I’ve been talking to people in the government about it, who read the book carefully. So I think a good reception. I think people when the English version has been published till now for about eighteen months. And when I was here in Beijing last December, uh, it was also being read widely in the English version, even though the government had a mandarin version that they had been circulating around and many people at that stage wanted to debate whether there was such a thing as Thucydides traps, or whether the forces were the sort that I described. Now, I think that argument, most people believe, is over, of course, there is Thucydides dynamic. Of course, china is a rising power. Of course the US is a ruling power. Of course, this impact is very risky. Uh, so now the question is how to escape the Thucydides traps. And that's the question I’m extremely interested in. So I’ve been listening especially to Chinese friends and colleagues. And students, I said last night, young people are likely to think of some ideas that old people are not going to think about.
Q: like what?
A: If allowing the forces of history as usual in the Thucydides and rivalry between a rising power and a ruling power as a serious risk of a war, a real war that can kill many many many millions of people. Then, what can sensible people do now to prevent this? We should be thinking of ideas. And I now have collected a menu. It's called avenues of escape, and no one of which yet is compelling to me. But all are interesting and I’m looking for more ideas. So I’m hoping you can, maybe from some of your, uh, your audience that people will think, okay, how could countries, like china and like America, how could they escape the Thucydides trap? And I bet some of them have some good ideas. 
Q: Yeah, I believe so. Just now you mention the responses from your Chinese audience and readers. I'm also curious, is there difference between your Chinese readers and American readers?
A: That's an interesting question.
Q: Because we are from different perspective, different cultures.
A: Well, initially, uh, there was some similar reactions in the US for people who wanted to say, no, we don't really believe that there is something like China is not rising that far that fast. And no, the US is just a benevolent hegemon, not a ruling power. Okay, yeah. And ah, but again, I think in the US that argument is now pretty much over. And most people accept the diagnosis. Uh, there's been less imagination in the US that I would wish or hope about how to escape. So currently in the American government, uh, you have this default to what uh, in the Pence outline of the current administration strategy, the Trump strategy, it's kind of cold war 2.0, but without a coherent idea what that means, and without an appreciation of whether it fits the objective conditions of 2018. So I’m hoping that actually, and for the next several days, we'll get more ideas from the Chinese. Then we may have got from the Americans. 
Q: You also have some readers and audience in White House, and I read an article last year that you visited the White House to give the lecture on the bilateral relationship with China. I'm also curious what they say when they read book and listened to your lecture.
A: Well, the person who was the national security adviser, not now, but was, H.R. McMaster, is a big fan of Thucydides's trap and he likes the analysis and he was even spurring the administration to think big about how. Matt Pottinger, who is the NSC staff person responsible for china. He's very thoughtful about this topic and very, uh, um, but he knows this is his problem, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, I talk to him regularly about this issue. He's thinking about it actively. Secretary Mattis, the secretary defense, is a great reader of Thucydides. He can recite about a hundred quotes.
Q: He recited that during his confirmation hearing.
A: Yes. So, uh, I think the administration is taking it quite seriously. And in the Chinese government, at the highest levels, there’s a serious conversation. In fact, Xi Jinping regularly talks about now, about how to escape Thucydides Trap. Uh, and uh, I was talking to somebody this morning, uh, um, at last year and asked me, he said, you know, why do you think Xi jinping calls for a new form of a great-power relationship? He's put out this request. We should pick a new form, or a new model, of great power relations. And he said, well, because we understand the old form goes right down the Thucydides’ path, where we don't wanna come. So we should construct the new form. I like that idea. 
Q: Yeah, but the new form is not being defined yet and I am curious how they're going to define this new form. 
Q: Well, I was asked this morning and the answer the same. Uh, that was before that, we haven’t defined the detail of the new form. We put it out as an idea. And we don't think that Chinese should write the whole script, should be done jointly with the Americans. And we shall all be thinking of ideas. So I put one idea on the table. Uh, so it's called “a world safe for diversity”.  The world, safe, for diversity. This was the vision that John F Kennedy came up with. 
A: Oh, that's 1963.
Q: 1963, after he lived through the Cuban missile crisis. So before, his objectives had been burying soviet communism, very anti-communist. Um, and he didn't give up being very anti-communism, but in the confrontation and the Cuban missile crisis, he thought it was a one in three chance that this would lead to a nuclear war. That would kill hundreds of millions of people. And when he thought about it, he thought, yikes, this is crazy. So we should think of a better way. And in the American University speech in June 1963, he said, I’m not giving up on my belief that democracy is the right form of government for everybody, and I’m not giving up on my belief soviet totalitarian communism is evil, but we cannot live in a world in which we have confrontations like the one we just have. So we're going to have this revise our strategic objective for the time being, to, we need to, tone it down a little bit. It's kinda be a world safe for diversity, in which communist totalitarian can live and we can live. So at least we survive. And then we compete to see which system is the better system. And over decades we'll find out. So that was the idea that he had. And that actually turned out to be a pretty good idea. So then we didn't have confrontations like missile crisis for the rest of the cold war. Well, I think maybe, maybe, something like that, uh, in which the US and China could together, uh, figure out how we have the world safer Chinese one party-led government, if that's what Xi Jinping wants, and that we have American democracy of the sort we have. And I think actually there's a big reason why this is maybe a very good idea now. So Chinese always say, Chinese government officials, you know, you need to understand how many problems we have. Look at all the problems of China. And Americans now are becoming more and more aware. Oh, my god, look at all the problems of America. So American democracy is now not working for sure. 
Q: Yeah.
A: So Americans have enough to do at home. Let's work on our problem. The Chinese, they work on their problem. And then maybe in ten years or twenty years, we see how that's working on.
Q: Just now you mentioned American democracy is not working at this moment. And Chinese also have our own domestic issues to deal with. And do you think how much domestic politics play into this conflict at the moment?
A: Well, the answer is a lot, a lot. So, and I don't know enough about the nuances of how the politics within the Chinese contexts is working, but I certainly know a lot about how it's working in the Thucydides dynamic, as Thucydides writes about it, you start with the objective reality. So China really is rising. It really is encroaching on Americans ‘ custom prerogatives and positions. And that's a fact. And secondly, you have perceptions and misperceptions of what's happening. And those are often exaggerated, especially if you are awake to a new fact. And you think, well, my god, I didn't see this before, so you can see in America now waking up to the fact that “Oh China is bigger than I thought.” So you overreact and you and your perception of what it is is exaggerated. Third level is emotion. So, uh, uh, Thucydide wrote about what he called the fear that is instilled in Sparta. So not only you're bigger, not only I am perceiving you to be twice as big as you are, so that's mistaken. But then my reaction to it is exaggerated further by this emotion of fear. So I’m not having a clear-eyed assessment of what risks are. And then finally, just as you said, in the struggle within a democracy, in particular competing parties, uh, stake out extreme positions in order to show that one is tougher than the other one. So some Democrats are now arguing they should try to be the one that is tougher on China than Trump. So you look and say this is crazy. 
Q: Reminds me of JFK’s missile gap.
A: Yeah, exactly. So JFK ran against Nixon, and was determined to show he's more anti-communist and Nixon, ok, even though he was way more sensible. It's a perfect example. 
Q: just now you talk that you have uh, you have ears of national security advisor, former though, but did you get an ear of Trump? Did he listen to your advice?
A: I have not had an opportunity to talk to him about that Thucydides Trap. I would love to do. Uh, I don't know him, my met him a couple of times, but I don't know him and he hasn’t asked me to come and see him, but I would go within a second.
Q: Some people you mentioned just now, H.R. McMaster and Bannon, and those people, they're not in the white house anymore. You know, white house has been through so many shakeups.
A: every week,
Q: Yeah, on weekly basis. So do you think this kind of people in and out will affect relationship with China, with foreign policy, policymaking process. 
A: But for china, it's very difficult dealing with the American government anytime because the American government is always much more divided than the Chinese government. So with the minimum we have the executive branch and the legislative branch. So you have to try to deal with two governments. Sometimes the legislative has a different house and a different senate. But in this case, as one of my Chinese friends says, dealing with the Trump White House is like dealing with the warring parties. So there's no unified position in the White House and especially with respect to China. So this makes it a very difficult job for somebody trying to negotiate with. So Liu He, he has negotiated with Mnuchin, back in last spring. He thought he made a deal. Mnuchin thought he made a deal. He did make a deal. They had a deal, yes. But pretty soon the White House said they didn't have a deal with anything. So it's chaotic. 
Q: Uh, right now we got this trade war between China and the United States. I just wonder how we get here. It's not just something that happen all the sudden, but people like you and me who watch this bilateral relationship very closely, we know we slip into this trade war gradually. But for most of others they don't know, they just wonder how we get here.
A: Well, it's a long story, as you know, you watch it for a long time. But for people that are just waking up to it… So basically, here, this is the 40th anniversary of normalization of relations. When relations were initially normalized, China was an extremely poor country, extremely poor, so poor, hardly any Chinese today can remember. I wrote a piece about this called Pyramid of Poverty. So in 1978, 90% of all Chinese were struggling to survive on less than two dollars a day. You think about it. Then, by a miracle, by any part of it, probably miracle I’d call it, China has flipped that pyramid completely on its head. So now only 1%. So 99 of every hundred up, amazing. And by 2020, the end of 2020, uh, Xi says it's going to be zero. Well, this is a great human achievement. So all that's happened. The China economy in 1978 even jump to 2001 when China entered the WTO. China economy is very small compared to the US so nobody even notices this. Today China's economy is bigger than the US measured by purchasing power parity. So if you haven't been watching, and all of a sudden you wake up and you discover, my goodness, here's this huge… Uh, Lighthizer has a metaphor for this. He says, you know, in 2001, at the time of the China’s entry into the WTO was like, somebody gave you a tiger cub, a baby tiger. And what is your pet. What happened is you gave him some food and pet him, he is very nice. And now end up watching he's been eating more and more and more. And you wake up one day and you have this big tiger who is sitting in your house. Maybe look at you. So, basically what's happened is China has grown up. And therefore, behavior that used to be, who cares? It's still little, so small. Now Americans here to say, well, how did china grow so fast？With the answers that well, Chinese work very hard work, market and economy's pretty amazing. They have four times as many people, but in any case, for Americans, look like, where did this tiger come from? What is this tiger now going to do? So that's I think the psychological process by what now seems shocking, is actually been an evolution. And Chinese say, correctly, I believe, that China today is not doing anything that are worse than they did twenty years ago. Such as stealing intellectual properties, they are stealing less. Forcing more tech transfers? Doing Less. They are not having higher tariffs, they are lower. But, because it's bigger now, Americans react to it in an alarmed way. 
Q: So what could possibly go wrong from here? Right now we have this kind of truce between United States and China on trade negotiation. And we got only ninety days. 
A: If I'm making, again, nobody knows. But if I’m making a bet today, I would bet that, the Chinese government will come forth with a good enough package that Trump will be able to declare the has a big victory. And that this will therefore calm the problem. Maybe they'll be like an extension of the cease-fire or even some step by step process. But I also believe that unless we come up with a new strategic concept for the relationship that will soon be back into the Thucydidian dynamic in which we will be back into not only a tariff and trade conflict, but also the technology conflict, which we’ve already seen, and other parts of the cold war, which will be a fairly incoherent effort. But it’s certainly the path that the Trump administration is on.
Q: So how likely do you think the two countries will end up with armed conflict? 
A: Well, if you were only going on the historical record by book. So my book looks at the last five hundred years and found sixteen cases, twelve end in war and four in no war. So I would say, war is certainly likely, possible, certainly likely. How likely? I don't know, but a real possibility, not because China wants a war with US, and not, for sure, because US wants a war with China. So fortunately, neither side thinks a war as a good idea. Both sides know it's crazy. But the way war happens in the Thucydidian dynamic is some third-party action. Irrelevant, except that it impacts either you or me, one of us feels obliged to respond, like the Korean War, which is completely crazy. So we try to think, how in the world could there have been a war between US and China in 1950? It's unbelievable. It was really unbelievable, as I described in the book, but it happened. So historically, often this happen, if you called this Thucydidian dynamic, a third-party action ends up being so provocative. So what should we be doing? We should be very, in a very adult fashion, recognizing the reality. This is extremely dangerous. So if it's extremely dangerous. What do we have to do? We have to be cautious, we have to be careful we have to be imaginative, we have to be adaptive. So that's what the conversation should be about. And then we should be saying, well, so who could drag us into a war? How? We should, we could explore scenarios. And then what can we do to prevent that? So with North Korea, what's happening now, a freeze of North Korean nuclear advance and even start denuclearization. That's good example of what can happen if we cooperate, because otherwise we were just about to get dragged into something that could be as dangerous, more dangerous than the first war. Taiwan. That's another very dangerous case, we should be talking about. What could happen? How could it happen? And so what can we do to prevent it, we should be preventing crisis that could drag us into a conflict. And then finally, I would say the third, we should be prepared for crisis management, because even we do our best job for preventing crisis, some other crisis we didn't think of it can happen. So we should be able to have crisis management mechanisms for especially for communication, but also for the details of managing the crisis. So that even if it happens, we can stop before it drags us into conflict.
Q: But I think right now the Trump administration is doing exactly the opposite.
A: In many areas, like Taiwan. So Taiwan is extremely dangerous, I believe, because if the Trump administration imagines that it can put Taiwan back into play. Well, the recognition that there's one China and that one China includes Taiwan, and the capital of the one China is Beijing. That was the basis for the establishment of the relationship initially. And if that were called into question, then we, from the Chinese perspective, hardly any reason left for the relationship, except as adversary. So I would say that's extremely dangerous. And I don't worry so much. I think the Trump administration is more like playing with the issue. But in a way that’s dangerous. The danger part comes if the Taiwanese politics should be misled by the Trump's playing with this issue to imagine that that therefore they have an opportunity to move in a dramatic way towards independence. Because I think if they did, the Chinese government will act. I believe that's very likely. And if it did, then either the Americans are going to get dragged in or they're not. I was in Taiwan, just before I came to Shanghai and I said, if I’m offering advice to an American government, and I have been involved in this before, when I, you know, when we have potential crisis like 1996. I would say to them, if you provoke a crisis that leads China to war with you, don't count on us. Because as an advisor for America, I would not fight for China, for Taiwan. Well, that's pretty chilly. That's right. You need to be very, very, very cautious. And so right now there’s a status quo that's good enough for the two parties. I would say that's pretty good. And I don't think the US should be encouraging the Taiwanese to be more aggressive. And I don't think that the Taiwanese should be more aggressive. Because they will be taking a very extreme risk. But politics in a political campaign encourages people to take rather extreme positions. And so it's quite possible, by this time next year, they'll have been, you know, they'll be in the midst of a pretty heated campaign, and it will be possible that some candidate could be arguing for a much more extreme position.
Q: And also the Trump administration, they are doing something like recently they urged Canadian government to arrest Huawei CFO, do you think that's wise? 
A: No, I think that was stupid. Whether the Trump administration did this deliberately or whether it was just the Justice Department, and some attorney overly aggressive given the climate that to be tough on China. It's not clear yet. I have seen there are many stories out of the as there's always, there's many stories, but my bet is because the Trump administration and the White House is pretty chaotic, that they were not directing this, that this is more some aggressive attorney. But the fact that they are not controlling what the American government is doing is even maybe more dangerous. You know that if I was doing it deliberately, in any case, I think it was a mistake. And I think I hope, the Canadians become more reasonable fairly soon and let the CFO go.
Q: In your book you mentioned there are two cases, the great power, eventually they didn't come up with wars.
A: Four.
Q: Yes, four cases. The two of them, I'm pretty interested in. One of them is from Great Britain to the United States. And the other one is with, is about the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Uh, but one of my friends who is from Fudan University, she told me she's not convinced by the story of the Soviet Union and the United States Cold War, because eventually the Soviet Union lost the game, also the whole country divided up, that's not very good endgame for… 
A: Well, it's not a very good endgame, but it's better than a nuclear war, better than the nuclear war. So the two cases are both great cases though. So for the case of the rise of the US, the rival then surpassed Britain, that happened at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning of twenty. And also at the same time, Germany was rising, so that the main difference in that case and the Germans were closer to home. In the Cold War. Basically, the Cold War process let both American-free market-style democracy and Soviet-totalitarian-command-and-control political economics compete. And as it turned out, totalitarian-command-and-control system couldn't compete. So I would say if we had a world safe for diversity, even in a constrained cold war, though I think it’s not a good metaphor, I say this because China is too central to the global economy to make sense to think of a full-scale cold war. But in any case, even if it was a cold war with China, in that case China tries to show if its economic and political system can perform, [in] the way it’s doing now. And the US tries to show, if its economic and political system can perform, as it’s not doing very well right now but I’m hoping it will revive. Then I will say that’s life: if it turns out that one economic political system satisfies citizens’ demands better than the other one, well that’s - the human story is one [where] there’s never a solution to history, history goes on for a long time, and there’s no guarantee that the American position as the number one in every arena in the world can be sustained. Obviously it can’t, because China is going to be as big and strong as the US in many areas, maybe bigger, maybe stronger. And if the Chinese-one-party-led governance system can’t work – well it’s not going to work – and if it doesn’t work, then China is going to have its own problems. So Lee Kuan Yew, whom I quote often the book, he was my key tutor in this whole [process] trying to learn about China, he said he told Xi Jinping you’re trying to use an old 20th-century operating system in the 21th century in which people have smartphone with apps. This is not going to work. So you are going to have to invent a new political system if you’re going to manage China. And Lee Kuan Yew did not think that that would be American democracy. He didn’t think that was the right system of government for everybody, he didn’t think that was the right system of government for Singapore, but I think the challenge for both the US and for China inside their own borders, is to make a government and economy that works for their citizens. If it turns out that one or the other one is less successful – well, that’s life.
Q: Some critiques address that your book is actually advocating appeasement of aggressor. They think measured confrontation may be better in some cases. Do you agree with that?
A: I don’t agree that the book is advocating appeasement, and I don’t think it’s advocating war, and it’s not advocating even being aggressive with China. What I do in the conclusion is say, either we’re going to invent a new strategic concept and a new grand strategy for America dealing with China, and similarly for China dealing with US; or we’re going to be in big trouble, maybe even be dragged into a war. So that’s a real possibility, and then I say we should now be inventive about what to do; and in what to do, I say we should think widely, and I have in one pole, accommodation and appeasement, like the British did the Americans; and I have the other pole, seeking discipline and undermine China. And I’m not recommending either of these, I’m simply saying we should think broadly about the whole strategic spectrum and we should then find something that is good enough for China and good enough for US. If I had to pick just one today, I mean I have this menu of evidence of escape, but if I were picking one today, it would be something close to the world safe for diversity – let the two systems compete, but we find ways to constrain the competition externally and to cooperate on the areas where we have to cooperate, if we were both going to survive.
Q: Ok, one last question. [A: Yes, please.] 2019 is coming, as I think the presidential election is upcoming, this invisible primary. Last time, China was mentioned so many times by Donald Trump during the primary, and also during the general election. Do you think China will be another target again during the 2020 general election?
A: It’s a very good point. So during the 2016 election, Donal Trump was the only person that talked about China, I think. [Q: Yes.] And every time he talked about China, he had very nasty things to say, he said China was raping the US, stealing and taking our jobs, blah blah. 
Q: Do you think he is going to play the same trick again?
A: So what is he going to say this time? If China and the US were able to find some new relationship, a new strategic idea, even for Trump, that he could declare to be ‘I did this big great thing. There was this great problem of China, and I solved this problem. And only I, the great Donald Trump, can do this.’ Then I think he would make that argument. And now Democrats would argue, they would probably be the anti-Chinese ones, say ‘oh you were tricked, it’s not as good as you say’, so forth and so on. But it would be interesting to tell. I think it’s also possible that in the campaign you’ll have people competing to see who’s going to be tougher on China, and you could already see that in the politics of Washington, where across the spectrum, Democratic and Republican, there’s a lot of negativism. I think it will be a very nasty campaign, but before we get to that we’re going to have two years of ugly ugly politics in Washington with Democrats investigating everything and accusing of everything, and maybe even engaged in impeachment hearings. So I think we should look forward to, sadly, a pretty ugly period.
Q: Two more years.
A: It’s not too encouraging, we should have higher than that… I’d say very candidly, I am not a fatalist, I do not believe we should say 'oh our fate is in the hands of the Gods', or 'the forces of history is going to overwhelm us'. That’s not what I think. I don’t think we should be pessimistic, I’m very optimistic as a person. But I think we should be very realistic, that this is going to be a very very stressful relationship at the best case. But life is often stressful, that’s not so bad, adults can deal with stress, and then we need to be very imaginative in figuring out some way to live together, and if the alternative is to die together, then living together may be difficult, that’s a lot better than the alternative.
艾：So thank you, it’s a great opportunity to be here, I heard so much about your show and so I’m honoured to be on it.
Q: That’s my honour, actually.
A: Thank you.
采访：游天龙
受访：格雷厄姆·艾利森
听写：游天龙、杨冰清、吕小卉、Litian
翻译：华思睿、杨冰清、鲁漪文、游天龙
校对：游天龙
后期：王梦尧
视频：王梦尧
微信：胡素素
联系：郭彦哲、Chris Li
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