Review: The Inevitable War
By Graham Allison 2500 years ago, the Greek Historian Thucydides wrote: ““It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Allison, Graham. Destined For War. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. These words have proven prophetic. Allison and his colleagues have analyzed a series of changes in the balance of powers in the world and found that they have often led to war, perhaps most catastrophically in the early Twentieth Century when the rising power of Germany ultimately led to the First world War and its aftermath, including the Second World War. Today it is the rise of China, which has now become the world’s largest economy and is in the process of becoming a military superpower which poses the threat. Neither Thucydides 2500 years nor the Allison much more recently believed that war was truly inevitable, however. Rather, it is the missteps of leaders and nations that lead to war, and Allison believes that if we ar...