The Next World War Will Be in the South China Sea. Ask Thucydides…
20th February 2016
The rise of Germany and the threat that Germany’s ever-expanding navy posed to Britain set the scene for the Thucydides Trap of the First World War. The nature of the danger was spelled out in 1907 in a note by a British Foreign Office official called Eyre Crowe. “Germany would clearly build as powerful a navy as she can afford,” Crowe wrote, and that navy would pose a fatal challenge to the British Empire whatever Germany’s protestations to the contrary. As Crowe noted, dry as sandpaper, “Ambitious designs…are not as a rule openly proclaimed, and even the profession of unlimited and universal political benevolence [is] not conclusive evidence” against “unpublished intentions.” Seven years later these two brotherly powers were duly fighting to the death.
The growth in tensions between the US and China has been uncannily similar. In Seattle, Mr Xi pooh-poohed the dead Greek but in the years before that speech, China had converted thousands of merchant ships for military use, developed a “carrier killer” missile specifically designed to sink American aircraft carriers, tested hypersonic glide vehicles said to be capable of striking the US with nuclear warheads, and stealthy submarines armed with ballistic missiles. In 2015, despite the general slowdown of the economy, China increased its military budget by 10 per cent, and one Chinese general warned that once the build-up was complete, “No enemy will dare to bully us.”