[China Lecture Series] 34강 미·중 전쟁은 불가피한가? : 그레이엄 앨리슨 (Graham Allison)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so first let me say thank you so much to the secretary-general for coming in for such a generous introduction and thank you to president Park for the invitation to be here this is a great honor for me if I started talking about your fellow citizen bank' moon and his great service to the world I would give another lecture but let me here simply say I've had the great good fortune as he said to know him now for more than 25 years and to be amazed at his service to Korea and but also to the world and as a secretary-general every day he was doing remarkable things to make a better environment a peace more peaceful environment for all of us I probably shouldn't tell the story but I will in any case that when he first showed up at the Kennedy School in 1983 at the time the school was so small that I would welcome all the new students the reception they would come by and I would shake their hands and say welcome and they would say hello and they would move along and so when he shook my hand he said hello my name is JFK and I said I was a little surprised when I said welcome to this originally I went and asked him and he said the JFK just from Korea so his nickname among his fellow students was JFK and I think it was inappropriate and inspired the similarity so I'm so happy that he's here today and I enjoy the opportunity to continue working with them and have always admired this Korean contribution to international be and security so the topic today that the title of my book is destined for war question mark can America and China escaped lucidity strap but the topic of my lecture is going to be peace or the avoidance of war because the question about which I'm passionate today and have been since writing this book and publishing it a year ago is the one that the Secretary General identified which is how can the US and China and friends like South Korea together with imagination and ingenuity and adaptability escape lucidity strap so where I'm going with this lecture in the conclusion is a question and the question is how to escape lucidity strap and in this I think we have a at least slightly hopeful or promising pointer in the recent developments on the Korean Peninsula just in the last six months we're relative to where we were at the beginning of this year I can see at least a glimmer of hope about the possibility of defusing a potential crisis that could have been the path to war on the Korean Peninsula but indeed a war that could have involved the US and China in a global war so what can we learn from that lesson as well as from the rest of history for making this the fifth case of no war in the last 500 years as opposed to the 13th case of war that I'm getting ahead of myself that's where I'm going in the conclusion and I'm hoping that in the conversation afterwards and then the questions and answers people may have some suggestions about how specifically how to escape lucidity strap and an example of how would be diffusing crises that could otherwise have served as triggers to war of which the events on the Korean Peninsula would be an example but let me tell you what I'm going to try to do today I'm going to do three things first I'm going to introduce you to a great thinker second I'm gonna present a big idea a big idea that if you get your head around it will help you look through the news and noise of the day to the underlying driver of what's happening in international relations totally but also especially with impact here in Korea and then third I'm going to explore a provocative question a fateful question the subtitle of the book can America and China and their friends escape through Citadis trap so let's see here the great thinker when I gave this lecture in Beijing about four months ago I told him I'm gonna introduce a great thinker and they imagined it was she champagne so I said I'm not saying anything about the wonderful thoughts of jumping that had been written into the into the Constitution but the great figure I have in mind this lucidity circuit now who is Stu Siddha T's for some of you he may not be part of your mental library if he's not especially you students shame on you this is an opportunity for you to meet a great thinker and to engage him so through Siddha teas was the father and founder of Street he wrote the first ever history book its title is the history of the Peloponnesian War so through Citadis lived about 2,500 years ago roughly a contemporary of Confucius in classical Greece and he wrote about the war the Peloponnesian War between the two great city-states of classical Greece that laid them both waste so through cities is somebody whom you should get to know you can actually go online and download for free the book the history of the Peloponnesian War and I would suggest as a start just download book 1 100 pages every other page if it doesn't knock your socks off check your pulse this is a serious thinker in fact in my book I use it from at the beginning of every chapter of the book I have a little quote from Thucydides just to remind you he has many big ideas the one that I'm focusing on is the big idea I want to present to you today which is this lucidity strap lucidity 'he's wrote famously about the Peloponnesian War that it was the rise of Athens that was the upstart and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable so through siddha t-strap is the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power in this case Athens was the obstruct after the defeat of the Persians Athens was exploding with imagination the athenians were inventing everything so drama Aeschylus Sophocles Aristophanes philosophy Socrates Plato Aristotle architecture I just came to Korea from from Greece I was looking out my window at the at the Acropolis and the Parthenon the Parthenon is a building built by atheists for Pericles 2,500 years ago there's not a finer building in the world today nowhere history Herodotus and Thucydides democracy that's a Fenian democracy that's where democracy was invented with Pericles a Navy the first professional Navy so on and on Sparta had been the ruling power in Greece for a hundred years so the Spartans thought what the hell is going on in Athens what do these people think they're doing they just get up every morning and think of new things to do so a rising power feels I deserve more say I deserve more sway the current arrangements don't take full account of my interest and the ruling power Sparta fearfully thinks wait a minute they're trying to change the status quo they're trying to upset who's at the top of every pecking order what do they think they're doing they should know their place in this dynamic rarely is it the case that athens decides this is a good time to attack sparta that didn't happen or sparta we should attack athens instead in this dangerous dynamic a third party's action or provocation or accident or event becomes a trigger that one or the other of the major competitors feels obliged to respond to and then one thing leads to the other and at the end of the story they find themselves an award so in in the peloponnesian case Athens and Sparta each had decided war was a bad idea they had actually negotiated brilliantly a 30 year peace which was doing fine 15 years on but two of their allies Corinth and Coursera got into a conflict they each felt obliged to support their ally then one thing led to the other and there you were or if you want a more vivid example in 1914 how in the world could the assassination on an Archduke who was the successor to the throne in Vienna have provided the spark that created a war that burned down the whole of Europe it's is a case that deserves to be studied I have a good chapter on it in the book it's something I've been studying for 50 years I still don't know the answer it's amazing to imagine if you would offered any of the leaders who were involved a chance for a do-over in 1918 they would never have made the choices they made but the Archduke was assassinated his father who was the emperor in Vienna thought he's obliged to punish the Serbs that was reasonable the Russians felt that that the Austrians were going to overdo it as they punished the Serbs and so they were trying to protect their Orthodox allies the Germans had only one ally the Austrians so they supported them the French had a treaty relationship with the Russians so one thing led to the other and at the end of a sequence that occurred over about six weeks all the parties found themselves at war as I say after the war what had happened to the ambitions of every one of the leaders they had lost so the Austrian and Hungarian Emperor was trying to hold his empire together Empire is dissolved he's out Russians are trying to back the the the Serbs he'd been overthrown by the Bolsheviks this whole regime is gone the German Kaiser is supporting his alliance iana he starts out the French they're supporting their military allied them the Russians they've been bled of their youth for a whole generation society never recovers and Britain which has been the creditor for the world for a hundred years and ruled the world now becomes a debtor and is on a slow slide to decline so the fact that a war is not in someone's interests and then nobody wants a war doesn't mean a war cannot occur so Thucydides trap is this dangerous dynamic and as president Park that's already mentioned in my book I review the last 500 years of history I find 16 cases where rising power threatens to displace a ruling power 12 over the wind and war four of them in no war so to say that war between the US and China is inevitable would be wrong on the record not inevitable to say that the odds are against us and that if we accept simply business as usual we should expect to go the way of history as usual would be correct so that's to Sidda t-strap now first I want to make a comment about this trend I found difficult because I even don't know how to pronounce theirs name you know the two city and trap that people talk about the so-called CCC days trap the Thucydides trap to set these traps the Thucydides trap acidities trap the Thucydides trap okay so lucidity strap has entered the bloodstream of the current debate both in Beijing and in Washington and I think elsewhere appropriately because this is a lens that will help you look through the noise to see the underlying dynamic in the relationship between the US and China as a rising China threatens to displace a ruling us so that's the underline the basic storyline just in case those of you who are not interested in the policy world last year the blockbuster movie was Wonder Woman and if you'll go back and look at the movie you'll see that when Wonder Woman goes to dance with Ludendorff he's trying to put her down by quoting this line peace is only an armistice between the last war and the next war and she being a wise lady says through Citadis okay so if you hear a piece of wisdom that sounds like something that you should have known say through Citadis you'll be have a good chance of being correct there's nothing what if there's Citadis good insights so here the last summit between Xi Jinping and Barack Obama both of them are talking lucidity strap understanding that it's the destructive tensions that occur in this interaction between the emerging power and the established power but that if parties find ways to work together imaginatively they should be able to escape through Citadis trap so again just to go back here one second the question the fateful question is a subtitle of the book can America and China escape lucidity strap and my answer in the book - that is very professorial so it's no and yes so no if we settle for business as usual if we accept diplomacy as usual if we only see statecraft as usual then we should expect history as usual and history as usual in this case would be award even though it will be crazy and even though after the war everyone would agree that this made no sense and that it had destroyed all the things we care about but on the other hand yes we can escape through siddha t-strap if we remember santa anna's great line only those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it so there's no obligation for human beings to make the same dumb mistakes over and over though we often do we can sometimes learn from our own mistakes maybe if we're slightly smarter we can learn from somebody else's mistakes so my objective in writing this book is to try to motivate a conversation about what we can learn from both the failures and the successes on the historical record plus our imagination to try to address the question how to escape lucidity strap which as I said before is where I'm going at the end of this so three questions first question what has been the biggest geopolitical event of the last 25 years second question if we look forward 25 years what will be the biggest geostrategic challenge for the world and third the same old question can we escape Thucydides track to the first question what's been the biggest event in the last 25 years my answer is the rise of China never before has a country risen so far so fast on so many different dimensions those of you who live here in Korea probably a more conscious of this but if you haven't been watching carefully you probably still haven't quite got the whole picture so I have a pretty good chapter in the first the first chapter of the book is one the rise of China that just tried to give you a jolt and I quote václav Havel the former Czech president who has a great line he says things have happened so fast we haven't yet had time to be astonished so to illustrate this I compare this bridge at Harvard with the bridge in Beijing so this is the bridge that goes across the Charles River at Harvard between the Business School and the Kennedy School was called the Anderson bridge I can see it out of the window of my office at the Kennedy School the conversation about renovating this bridge began when I was Dean of the Kennedy School and I quit being Dean in 1989 the project began in earnest and 2012 was a two-year project in 2014 they said it's not yet finished take another year 2015 they said it's not yet finished it'll take one more year 2016 they said we're not telling you whether it's going to be finished well it's three times over budget now actually it's essentially finished but they've been embarrassed about how long it took so they haven't had a ceremony to declare that it's that the project is over that's three times over budget so for those of you who go to Beijing from time to time you probably have ridden across a bridge called the sun-young bridge it's got twice as many lanes of traffic as the as the Anderson bridge in 2015 the Chinese decided they wanted to renovate it how long did it take to complete the project take a guess please six months ten months how much so the answer is forty three hours you can go to youtube and watch this video speed it up they of course work at night so the deputy mayor in Beijing I saw last year and he had been at a Kennedy School executive program and I said if you would send your people who did this onion bridge to Cambridge I would even make a small contribution if they would finish off their Indian bridge so 43 hours so in my course at Harvard I give students a quiz a quiz has 50 key indicators this is a short version that you could find in the book and it asks when could shine they become number one and students have to write on the right-hand side their answer 2020 2030 not in my lifetime so the biggest automaker or manufacturer trading nation or just middle class most billionaires greatest solar power capacity fastest supercomputer leading AI research primary engine of global economic growth largest GDP so you don't have to take a quiz but you could imagine your answers and I showed them a second slide which is already so all these things already happened so in 2011 China became the number one manufacturing country in 2015 the largest middle class actually the Chinese middle class is larger than the total American population yes most billionaires in 2016 fastest supercomputer they won the prize in 2010 there's gonna be another contest this year and they may not win it's a close call but they'll certainly win three of the first five places primary engine of economic growth every year since the Great Recession and most Americans are shocked by the fact that in 2014 China actually became the largest economy in the world measured by the yardstick that both the IMF and the CIA think is the best yardstick for comparing national economies namely purchasing power parity so if you go look at the big takeaway from the IMF World Bank meeting in 2014 the takeaway is China is now the largest economy in the world so this is the rise of China and I think in every dimension in every arena in every space one will see China rivaling the US and others to become number one in some cases surpassing in some cases a competition the second question then is looking forward the next 25 years what will be the biggest geostrategic challenge and my answer is the impact of the rise of China on the US and the international order that the US has been the principal architect of for the last seven decades so this is a cartoon I made for testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee back in 2014 another former student of mine Jack Reed is the ranking Democratic senator on the committee and they wanted a testimony as a context for reviewing the Obama administration's initiative towards Asia you remember the name of the Obama administration initiative towards Asia what was it called the pivot okay or sometimes called the rebalance that what was the pivot about it was about putting less weight on our left foot in the Middle East fighting wars in order to put more weight on our right foot in Asia where the future is that's what a President Obama said so I said well for perspective on this we should think of the US and China as if they were two children on a playground on opposite ends of a seesaw in 2004 and the size of each of them is the size of their GDP so in 2004 China is about 20% the GDP of us in 2014 about equal just slightly larger on this trajectory in 2020 for 40% larger so what so while the US has been discussing whether to put more weight on our left foot or on our right foot the growth of China has both has essentially lifted both feet off the ground so the impact of the rise of China when the US or an Americans conception of who they are and what our role in the world is and on the international order one sees this in every domain here's just one example trade which you're familiar with in 2000 the beginning of the century the US was the principal trading partner of all the Asians essentially and today China is you can see here for South Korea about almost three-quarters so what does it matter that I'm your principal trading partner well I think the South Koreans have seen recently what happened to Lotte what happened to the sales of cars when China is displeased they play very hard ball squeezing people economically where they can to try to get compliance and I think that level of trade interaction which is crucial for growth and an important part of the story of how all the Asian countries are becoming richer is also simultaneously a story of how China is becoming more influential one could go through every arena and tell this same story but for today I think this should be sufficient in the book I have a lot more so that the world's premier China watcher until he died in 2015 was the founder and prime minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew unfortunately he was a mentor of mine and a person who spent a long time trying to help me understand China he said I would never understand China but he would any case try to teach me as much as he could so I wrote with Bob Blackwell a little book on Lee Kuan Yew the Grandmaster back four or five years ago which basically consists of us asking him questions and then getting the nuggets of his answers so one of our questions is this one our China's current leaders serious about displacing the US as the predominant power in Asia in the foreseeable future well that's a provocative question if you read my old professor and mentor Henry Kissinger's book 600 pages about China it says on the one hand and on the other hand it's complicated so you won't find many people who will answer this question in the chat in the Chinese specialist community but Lee Kuan Yew who was 90 years old and said what he thought he says of course why not who could imagine otherwise how could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time in the world so I have a discussion of that in the book I think that's basically correct I think that's part of turning those long term objective and in fact if you wanted any reinforcement of that proposition looking first at the speech that GCM brain gave in October at the 19th Party Congress and then week before last at the foreign policy gathering in Beijing basically China seeks to become the predominant power in Asia now if Chinese would say about this well but don't put us in the through sylheti and dynamic because we're not a rising power we're just a returning Power we're only being restored to our natural place which we enjoyed for 4000 years until you showed up you Westerners with your technology a couple of hundred years ago to exploit us but now you're going to recede and we're going to return to our position as the Middle Kingdom the center of the universe in which other parties in our region other parties that we can see will be tributaries they will revolve around the Sun as the cosmology of China did in the past so I would say that's the dynamic one seeing with the impact of the rise of China everywhere but especially on a country that's defined itself as being number one so Americans think that somehow being number one is our god-given right or the natural condition of mankind or it's somewhere stated in authority but any case that's the way things are supposed to be I actually believe that as a red-blooded red red-necked American so that's that's where where I feel and so when I look and see a China that's bigger and stronger and rivaling the US and different domains actually displacing the US in different domains I feel uncomfortable well lucida these helped us understand this problem for a ruling power it is very normal to think the way things are the way things are supposed to be but or not just the way things are supposed to be they're right they're good they produce order they provided opportunity for everybody and actually this is often true and especially is it true in Asia the security and economic order that the Americans provided in the period since World War two has been the underlying enabler of miracles across Asia including in Korea but especially in China so in that sense that the impulse to say well everyone should be grateful and they should just support this order because it's clearly been good for everybody is an understandable view of the ruling power but for a rising power as lucidity explains whether it's the rising Germany as it rivals Britain a hundred years ago right before World War one or rising China today the thought is well don't but wait a minute I'm just being myself I'm just trying to grow up to exercise my rights to express my interest to pursue my interests this is quite normal so you see this story this dynamic in basically disruptive upstarts and incumbents in business actually in guerrillas between the alpha gorilla and the wannabe or what can sometimes see this in a family dynamic so the rising power versus the ruling power and the psychological consequences of that and the ways in which that then can lead to misperceptions and miscalculations and therefore vulnerability to accidents is the court lucidity and dynamic that committee meets today to consider the nomination of General James Madison trader defense the United States I thank both senator Nunn and senator corn for being here he's probably the only one here at this table who can hear the words through Citadis trap and not have to go to Wikipedia of course secretary Cohen has insulted every member of this committee by suggesting that we don't readily understand that we're going to have to manage that competition between US and China there's another piece of wisdom from antiquity that says fear honor and interest always seem to be the root causes of why a nation chooses to go to hostilities okay so fear honor and interest as the motives for war where does that line come from lucidity so again check the book you'll see that's another one of the quotations that's quite relevant facilities has a hundred big ideas I'm only here talking about one or focused on what final question here we are so here's Jim paying at Davos in January 17 we're good as he says and I agree with this very much as long as we are sensible we can avoid too acidity strapped in his terms having mutual respect recognizing core interests building a new model of great power relations so as one Keshawn the vice president china says why do we call for a new model because we understand the old model has led typically in through Siddeley in terms to Wars that people could have avoided so the question is how to escape through Silla t-strap and that's a question I'm hoping for the conversation that we can engage so let me say just three minutes about what's happened recently on the Korean Peninsula as an example of what is at least suggestive about ways in which we can escape lucidity Strether if that's the purpose not to be fatalistic not to being pessimistic but to try to say what can we do so at the beginning of the Trump administration so when Trump became president actually in the handoff between Obama and wrong Obama said to Trump at their meeting North Korea the challenge is going to define your presidency because you're inheriting a hand in which early on North Korea is likely to acquire an ability reliably to strike the American homeland with nuclear weapons and that's going to transform everything so Trump listened to that he went out and he tweeted immediately not gonna happen not gonna happen and when he assembled the people that work for him he said to him and he said this repeatedly I heard him say this once he said I am NOT Obama I am NOT bush I am NOT Clinton I don't know how they let this happen North Korea go from nowhere to then having nuclear material and then having nuclear bombs and then having missiles that could attack South Korea and then having missiles that can attack Japan and about to have missiles that can attack San Francisco but this is crazy this little country who who's let this happen and he was equally scathing about the Chinese what have they been doing how did they let this happen so he determined no I am NOT gonna let this happen well they're seen one seen two as he talks to his advisers he says I'm telling it the first path is not acceptable but it was explained to him and I wrote a piece call that that you can read if you go just to my to the Belfort website I said there's just three rows only three rooms first road is we continue on the road that we're on North Korea conducts more ICBM tests and it becomes to have a reliable capability to strike the US and that's most likely what's could happen there's a second road which is the US attacks North Korea to prevent the first road the difficulty with that path is that it probably starts a second Korean War and a further difficulty with that is that if you go back and study what happened in the first Korean War that was ultimately a war between China and the United States so Americans in Chinese did most of the killing in the first Korean War of Americans and Chinese and Koreans so that doesn't sound a very attractive option either so the third option was what I called a minor miracle and I said I didn't know exactly the proportions of it but I was praying for a miracle even though I thought it was unlikely but a miracle would involve getting on a path to negotiations between the u.s. and North Korea that would be headed towards the denuclearization of North Korea over some period of time but in any case would not involve testing ICBMs or nuclear weapons and would involve an attack on North Korea so go back and do it again in terms of where we are now there's only three paths so we can return to the first path which we may do if things collapse North Korea goes back to testing ICBMs which they would do with the next set of tests or the one after that CIA will say they have a reliable capability to strike the u.s. we could talk about how bad that is so it's not bad simply that they can attack the u.s. so that's bad the question is what will in North Korea that can attack the US do next well that's where I think it gets very bad okay so that takes us to option two when Trump said to secretary mattis I want military options for attacking North Korea mattis said to him what the Defense Department has said regularly excuse me you're talking about starting a second Korean war they remember what happened in the first Korean War and Trump's case this required some explanation okay that this is not a history that he remembered vividly but badest explained it over and over indeed every time man has had a chance to talk about this he said he testified many times to Congress about it we can have a war but the consequences are going to be catastrophic don't think about this is some small war think about hundreds of thousands of people being killed as a result of such a war and maybe more so the defense of Martin was not enthusiastic about this but ultimately gave Trump a menu of six options that could start with something as small as a attack on missile launch pads in North Korea to disrupt them so that they couldn't test ICBMs but the danger in all of these was that the next step would be artillery raining down on Seoul and then the suppression of that and then the second Korean War so that not a very attractive option so the third option only needs to be better than the first two options to seem promising now is the start that has been made the one that I would have made if I were orchestrating it absolutely not absolutely not so I come from the expert community that's been trying to do this in other instances but Trump's argument to the experts is well I understand what you've done but look at the results that one has to say the results are not impressive North Korea has a nuclear arsenal today it has short-range missiles it has medium-range missiles so the efforts to start down a third path I think or at least imaginative and promising and slightly helpful now they're dangerous I think there's going to be a very long road I think that the expectations have been wildly exaggerated and the expectations about how quick things maybe are unreasonable all that being said if I have to choose between the three roads I think we're on the preferred Road and if we then take this back to how to escape lucidity strap if there had been an attack on North Korea or were to be and if North Korea responded by destroying large portions of Seoul and if we then had a second Korean War and if then North Korea was about to disappear because the u.s. and South Korea would basically eliminate North Korea in a second Korean War if that was the place it stopped would China enter that war and the Chinese regularly say we already demonstrated that point in 1950 when you approached our border the last time so that would have been a path that could have a triggered a war that China and the u.s. didn't want but that they got dragged into because of the sequence of events and if we could find a way to diffuse that path that would be one way to avoid Thucydides trap in that instance now that leaves us other problems Taiwan or the South China Sea or other issues but that's just an illustration so let me conclude so first we've done three things we met a great thicker lucidity Xand I hope some of you especially students will go download the Peloponnesian War you'll learn a lot okay secondly a big idea through Citadis trap as Henry Kissinger has said if you look through this lens that's what's happening in the daily noise in the relationship between the US and China you'll have the underlying driver and the third fateful question is the one we need still more imagination about is can we escape through Citadis trap in which the answer is for sure not by business as usual so this will require imagination and ingenuity and adaptability and I'd say that's the place where we all have an opportunity to exercise our imagination and I'm hoping I'm going to hear some big ideas thank you [Applause]

Channel: 한국고등교육재단(Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies)

Views: 6,195

Rating: 4.869565 out of 5

Keywords: KFAS, 한국고등교육재단, 그레이엄 앨리슨, 미·중 전쟁은 불가피한가?, 미·중 전쟁, 미국과 중국, 미중 전쟁, 트럼프, 시진핑, 투키디데스 함정, 투키디데스, ICBM, 대륙간 탄도미사일, 펠로폰네소스 전쟁, 강대국, 신흥국, 케르키라, 코린토스, Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”, America and China, Thucydides’s, Thucydides’s Trap

Id: KvyrK2ZB2f0

Length: 48min 55sec (2935 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018