Obrnuta Tukididova zamka: struktura i proces rivalstva SAD i Kine
The Inverse Thucydides’s Trap: The Structure and Process of the US-China Rivalry

Summary/Abstract: The rising severity of the United States-China rivalry has become the primary element of contemporary international relations, posing the “million-dollar question” of whether there will be a war between the two world powers. American political scientist Graham T. Allison formulated and applied the concept of Thucydides’s trap—the structural stress caused by a “rising” power’s threat to displace a “ruling” one—to the US-China rivalry, which in most historical cases resulted in war. The author sees the fundamental weakness of Allison’s concept in the neorealist emphasis on the structural factor of the distribution of power among the actors at the expense of the process factor of their revisionist or status quo orientation, besides which Allison makes an unfounded presumption about “ruling” power’s status quo orientation. From the neoclassical realist viewpoint, the author corrects Thucydides’s trap concept, pointing to the revisionism of one or both rivals “caught” in it as the decisive factor in the outbreak of war while singling out hegemonism as a particularly dangerous form of revisionism. The author refers to the situation when the "ruling" power attempts to achieve hegemony as the reverse Thucydides trap. This paper’s principal thesis is that there is an inverse Thucydides’s trap between the contemporary United States and China due to the US’s endeavour to impose its hegemony on China and the rest of the international system. Through reinterpretation of Allison’s historical case studies based on neoclassical realism and the introduction of the concept of inverse Thucydides’s trap, the author formulates new recommendations for the prevention of the US-China conflict in the future.

• Details
• Contents