The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Centers of Power, War, and History

Episode Date: August 11, 2017

with Graham Allison and Matthew Colford "When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens." It's true of people, it's true of companies, and it's even more true of countries. It's also the fundamental insight captured by ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his History of The Pelopennesian War. But where he was describing the war between Sparta and Athens, modern historian and political scientist Graham Allison describes how U.S. and China can escape this rising vs. ruling power "Thucydides trap" in his new book, Destined for War. Allison -- advisor on U.S. national security and policy to several secretaries of defense spanning decades -- was former dean of the Kennedy School and most recently Director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Based on an internal policy series lunch speaker event earlier this year (and moderated by a16z partner Matthew Colford), the conversation touches very briefly on centers of power and creativity; tech in China; North Korea; and finally, the role of applying history -- "applied history", much like the field of engineering could be considered applied physics -- to our thinking about the future. By analyzing the analogs and precedents in the historical record, what clues or insights or lessons might we draw? Because business as usual will produce history as usual argues Allison... but only those of us who fail to study history will repeat it. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and C podcast. Today's episode, based on an internal lunch series conversation, is moderated by A6 and Z policy team partner Matt Colford, and is with the author of the new book, Destined for War, Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? Their conversation also touches very briefly on centers of creativity and power, tech, North Korea, and finally, the role of applying history to our thinking about the future. But first, more about the author, Political, scientist Graham Ellison was dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and is currently the director of the Harvard Belfar Center for Science and International Affairs. He's been a mentor to innumerable senior government officials, including as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans under President Clinton and special advisor to the Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. He's also served as a member of the Defense Policy Board for seven secretaries of defense dating back to the Reagan administration. In 1971, Graham wrote this essay, which was subsequently turned into a book called Essence of Decision.

explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, which remains one of, if not the most widely read, pieces in government among senior national security leaders. So really, when you talk about people who have institutional knowledge, particularly at the Defense Department, there's really nobody who equals Graham. We're really here to talk about your new book, about the state of the U.S.-China relationship, particularly around international security issues. Thanks for the kind introduction. So who was Thucydides? Why was he important? And what is this so-called Thucydides trap? Thucydides was a chronicler of... the great conflict between Athens and Sparta in classical Greece. He wrote a spectacular book

called The History of the Peloponnesian War. Lucidides captured in this book, an insight, which is essentially as old as recorded history itself, which is that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens. So he says famously, in this quotation, It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable. I won't give you the lecture of the Pelvanician War, but just to remember, the Persians were ruling the area, though Sparta was the main power in Greece. Sparta was the ultimate martial culture. Kids at four are determined whether they're strong enough, if they're not strong enough, you kill them, okay? And if they're strong enough, they go into training.

And then they train, and then they become warriors, and they're great warriors, and they were great warriors. and they beat everybody that they fought because that was what they did. Athens and Sparta got together and fought together. And after that, you had this explosion of creativity in Athens. I mean, if you think of Silicon Valley as a place where basically everything is happening and a lot is happening and people are inventing things every day. Well, just go back and think about classical Greece. What did they invent?

Well, they invented drama. So Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides, they invented history, lucidities, erodity, Herodotus, then the philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. They invented democracy. Pericles.

Look at the Parthenon. You can find a better building in that in Silicon Valley? Every day, some new thing is happening. And the Spartans are sitting there thinking, what the hell is going on? We've been accustomed to the things being this way, and you keep making things different.

So one thing leads to the other, and this competition becomes then a vulnerable to external events. Neither the Athenians nor the Spartans wanted a war. Both of them knew that was a bad idea. But they each had allies. The allies got into a tangle, and then one thing led to the other, and that ultimately you did it a war.

So in this book, I take this insight, Thucydides Trap, to try to illuminate what's happening in the relationship between the U.S. and China by putting it on the canvas of history. So I look at the last 500 years. I find 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power. In 12 of the cases, the outcome was war. In four of the cases, the outcome was not war. Business as usual in the relationship between the U.S. and China will likely produce history as usual. But only those of us who fail to study history are condemned to repeat. I want to talk about a quick case study that doesn't come up that I think is somewhat instructive and important, though, and that's the U.S. India relationship. Yep. In both cases, we've got countries, China, India, with ascended economies, over a billion people, nuclear weapons, and a lot of kind of simmering regional conflicts.

Why is the U.S.-China relationship different than the U.S. India relationship, and say 71 or 74? How is it more fraught with risk? No one imagines India is going to displace the U.S. as the predominant power in Asia. But in the case of China, almost everybody who's examined the case notices that China. is becoming so big and so strong that it actually does imagine that it is pushing up against us everywhere. I've had the benefit of a couple of great tutors, including my old professor Henry Kissinger and Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore, the world's premier China watch. So a question that I put to him is, are China's current leaders serious about displacing the U.S. as the predominant power in Asia in the foreseeable future? And you can go to Kissinger's book, it's 750 pages. It says, on the one hand, on the other hand, it's coming.

complicated. Who could tell? And Lee Kwan News answer. Of course, why not? Who could imagine otherwise? How could they not aspire to this place to the U.S.? So you look at this picture and you say, wait a minute, how should you measure international economies? And I believe the best yardstick is purchasing para parity, which is also the yardstick that CIA and IMF think is the best yardstick. By that yardstick, China is currently the largest economy in the world. Vaklov, Havel, the former president of Czech Republic, says, this has happened so fast. we haven't yet had time to be astonished. And thinking about Silicon Valley just when I was coming here, this is not where I live or obviously where I spend most of my, you know, time thinking. But if you look in your space, if you don't see Shiner in your face, you're not looking.

So if you look at Tencent or at the Alibaba or at Baidu or at Webo, you see, I mean, actually, if you just compare in terms of market cap, What's happened in this year, Tencent and Alibaba are both up 45% just this year. You know, one of the things we think a lot about in Silicon Valley is the role of the tech sector in the so-called track-to diplomacy due to the relationships that the tech communities have established in China and the U.S. We actually have a China expert here in Adreason Horowitz,

Connie Chan, who ironically can't be with us today because she's in China. But, you know, she writes and has thought a lot about this interesting dynamic where the prevailing narrative was China was this copycat of the U.S. with regard to a lot of technology, but you look at technologies like WeChat, and increasingly you're seeing American companies actually copy Chinese companies. A student of mine is from Shanghai. She came and she said, you know, I feel like I came to a backward country.

In China, we have 10 times more apps, maybe 100 times more apps than you guys. We don't use credit cards. We don't have money. We pay on our Alibaba pay. There's a bridge that goes between the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School across the Charles River. It's called the Anderson Bridge. The reconstruction of this bridge was discussed when I was dean of the Kennedy School,

and I quit being dean in 1988. The project started in 2012. They've now given up telling when it's going to be completed. There's a bridge in China called the Sanian Bridge in Beijing. It's twice as big, almost three times as big as Anderson Bridge. So they decided to reconstruct it in 2013. How long did it take for the reconstruction of the Cheney's Bridge? A week.

43 hours. If they would come and in 43 hours fix the Anderson Bridge, I would save some time driving. So let's talk a little bit about the Obama administration's proposed pivot to Asia. And you make a great point in the book that the administration was really fully intending on re-centering Asia as a priority in their foreign policy, but that, you know, fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the rise of ISIS, and, you know, extremism and the Arab Spring just totally controlled the agenda. I think I can count, on one hand, the number of D.C.s and peace deputies committee meetings and principal community meetings that I remember that were about Asia and the majority of them

were about the Sony hack in North Korea, at least when I was there. So talk about what the center points were with respect to, you know, what role was China policy going to play in that, and then where did it go wrong? The pivot had a very right idea, which was the future is in Asia. Think about the economic balance of power just as the first approximation as a seesaw. And the pivot is really an argument about whether we put more weight on our left foot in the Middle East, where we're fighting wars and ISIS, or on our right foot in Asia, where the future is. But as we continue this conversation, we don't quite yet get it that our feet have just lifted off the ground.

And you could do the same seesaw for a principal economic relationship with every country in Asia. If you go around the ASEAN countries or you go around Northeast Asia, the principal buyer, the principal seller, the principal investor, is China. And the Chinese not only have economic power, but they exercise economic power. So when the Philippines behaves in a way they don't like, they say, I think your bananas that you're importing to China. may be suspect. So they just leave them on the doctor they rot. When the Norwegians actually gave the Nobel Peace Prize to a dissident. China had been their number one market for salmon,

and they imported therefore zero salmon. And that Norwegians have now groveled back and said, we're so sorry we gave this. It wasn't us. It was an independent committee. Now they're buying a little bit more salmon. So they're perfectly prepared not only to have economic power, but to use it to squeeze people.

Yeah. Well, it seems like the other illustrative example is the Asian Infrastructure Bank. We have the World Bank, which is this existing institution that with the IMF finances a lot of projects around the world. And China essentially said, we don't like how the World Bank allocates this money or how the decision-making process operates. So we're going to start our own infrastructure bank, essentially. You talk about this in the book. Actually, you call it transitional friction, which is when you have these rising powers that feel constrained by existing institutions, at some point they say, you know, forget the existing institutions, we're going to go create our own.

So at the end of World War II, the U.S., in a great exercise of leadership, created the international order that's accounted for the seven decades without great power war. This is very anomalous. The big part of the reason why that didn't happen was the U.S. helped create an international rule-based system, an economic order, a political order, a security order. That order included the World Bank that gives development loans for countries trying to develop, and importantly, the IMF, the international monetary system, that basically provides for financial markets. So if you didn't have these institutions, we would have what you had before,

which was the chaos that had previously both not only allowed financial crises, like the Depression to become worldwide, Great Depression. But when the U.S. set this up, we set it up with the rules. But there's one country that has a veto. That's us. We set up the system. We don't generally, we don't usually take advantage of it, but occasionally we do. So the Chinese said, we're bigger, we're stronger.

We think we should have more shares of basically in both the IMF and the World Bank, you get shares of voting. So there's 100 votes, and we should reallocate the votes a little bit. So take a few votes away from you and give them to us. The administration was actually prepared to try to find a way to accommodate them, and they could have done, the Obama administration. But we said, no, no, we're not doing that. The Chinese said, that's fine. We'll set up our own system. So now, for developing loans, the Chinese development banks, if you take the group together, including AAAAB, have four times the capital of the World Bank.

The dynamic was like two sort of competing baseball teams at a middle school. and the United States was won, and they very confidently said, come on, guys, let's get out of here. And the British and the French kind of went, well, I don't know, maybe we want to join this other baseball team. An example you give in the book of a relationship that did not escalate into a hot war was the U.S. Soviet relationship between 1945 and 1991. And there are a lot of political scientists who have argued that the Cold War in many ways was a good thing and that some of these covert actions really allowed the U.S. and the Soviet Union to kind of duke it out in covert ways and essentially release pressure from this system of competition and pressure that was

building. So I guess the question is, how are we not in sort of a covert Cold War with China already? Let me say just a word about what was the Cold War for World War II was the most devastating war ever. Fifty million people killed. In April of 1946, the number two person in the U.S. Embassy in the Soviet Union, George Kinnon, famous diplomat, wrote back something called the Long telegram. The long telegram said the Soviet Union will now pose for the U.S. a more ominous challenge to our existence and way of life than the Nazis did. So people said, the war is over. We're bringing our troops home. We're exhausted. We don't need some other dragons to be worried about. No, no. Any case, this began a conversation in Washington, which over the next four years

invented something really unbelievable, the strategy that was the Cold War strategy. And the Cold War strategy had in a half dozen different dimensions, initiatives that were so far beyond the conception of anybody in 1946 that today they would just be virtually inconceivable. In June of 1947, the Secretary of State George Marshall gave a speech, and he said, I have an idea. Why don't we take American taxpayers' money a percent and a half a year of GDP and give it to the Europeans to help rebuild the devastated Europe, including Germany and Italy, who were just killing our guys 18 months ago? You think, what? Forget about it.

I mean, imagine a president or presidential candidate. I have a good idea. You know, climate is a big deal. And if we end up despoiling the climate so that 50 or 100 years from now people can't inhabit it, that'll be a bad thing. So we're going to take a percent and a half of our GDP from your taxpayer dollars and invest in trying to make a livable climate. They would be run out of Washington in a second. In any case, this idea and five more ideas like it were constructed and concocted and it became a straitably. which we then pursued for four decades, to victory, to success in the Cold War.

What was the Cold War? It was basically competition in every dimension, except one, bombs and bullets, of direct combatants. So it was okay to kill each other's agents, but usually tit for tat. It was okay to have economic embargoes. It was okay to steal information. It was okay to put out fake news and the Soviets of disinformation. through the whole Cold War. It's called Information Warfare.

So basically, I would say, interestingly, we now virtually have a Cold War in cyber between the U.S. and China. Right. You talk in the book about some of the similarities between Xi and Trump and their aspirations for their countries. What do you view as the greatest similarities

and maybe some of the greatest differences too? So first, what is the slogan for President Trump or his campaign? America, Great Again. Well, four years before that, five years before that, Xi Jinping became president of China. And what is his banner say, if colloquially make China great again?

And in the Chinese narrative, we were great for 5,000 years. There was then this 200-year anomaly, which was caused by Westerners like you coming here and exploiting us, being imperial, occupying our territory, fighting wars, actually fighting. actually fighting the opium war. And now we are reemerging to be ourselves again, and we're going to be great, which are bases for this for support at home. Nationalism, nativist nationalism.

So Chinese are becoming proud to be Chinese again. One of Xi Jinping's biggest challenges is to how do you persuade people that you should let me and a few guys rule, and you should just be happy? He's trying to purify. as he puts it, to rectify the party, to make it virtuous.

Again, how can you do this? We build some cadre who will be so competent in performing the functions of government that citizens will say, well, they're doing a good job and we'll let them do it. In the Trump case, you see an expression of nationalism that's basically rejecting the system that was there. But the similarities between these two are striking.

Well, and the one that I found the most interesting was actually the comparison between Xi and Teddy Roosevelt. Both China and U.S. have this sense of kind of manifest destiny, and in fact, China, as you write about in the book, translates to the Middle Kingdom. Middle Kingdom is the center of the universe and everything else is lesser and in relationship to it. If you look at our maps, the U.S. is almost always in the center. So I say, what about if they were just like us when Teddy Roosevelt was basically leading the U.S. into what he was supremely confident was going to be an American situation? I take it back through the eyes of Teddy Roosevelt in 1897. He arrived in Washington to be the number two person in the Department of the Navy. First, there's a mysterious explosion on a ship the main that's in Havana Harbor, which we take as an occasion to declare war on. Spain. We defeat it quickly. We liberate Cuba. We take Puerto Rico. That's how Puerto Rico becomes

part of the U.S. And we get Guam as a spoil of war. That's how Guam becomes part of the American territory. We then threaten war, first with Germany and then with Britain, about a territorial dispute in Venezuela, where they're trying to settle the dispute. Then we sponsor a coup in Colombia and create a whole new country, Panama, which the next day gives us a contract for our canal. because Teddy Roosevelt want to build a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific, because how else will our warships, you know, be able to be on both sides? Then the one I like the best is we steal the biggest part of the fat tail of Alaska. So if you look at it, there's a big blob that's Alaska,

and then there's a 500-mile tail that runs down to Juno that cuts Canada off from the ocean. So how did this come to be American? Well, it's a long story, but the short of it is, there's this fellow John Muir. He was a big naturalist. So Muir had gotten Teddy Roosevelt to come camping with them in Yosemite, and that's how we made Yosemite to be a national park. So Muir is up in Alaska in his canoe exploring glaciers.

And he writes a letter back to Teddy Roosevelt, and he says, this is like 100 Yosemite's. And Teddy Roosevelt turns to a secretary of state, and he said, this is America. Right. And the secretary of state says, no, sir, this is Canada. And he said, look at what Mirr said. 100 Yosemites. This is America. And so we basically threatened we're with Canada unless they gave us this territory and we took it. I often wonder, so, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, avid outdoorsmen, right, love to hike and hunt. And I often wonder if, you know, Taft had been president during this

period. You know, Taft, this kind of overweight, lethargic, sedentary guy if he would have just gone, now, let the Canadians keep up. You mentioned a few different possible sparks for armed conflict between the U.S. and China, everything from trade wars to the North Korean regime? How does the North Korea situation play into this dynamic that you talk about in the book? What are the most dangerous development on the horizon today? What's happening on the North Korean Peninsula? And why is it so dangerous? Because it's an element in this Thucydidean dynamic.

So you have a rising power threatening a ruling power. It's not usually that one of the parties decides now is a good time for war. What happens is instead, I'm seeing you rising in my face. You're making me fearful, anxious, maybe even a little paranoid. Even you're trying to be helpful. I'm thinking you probably have ulterior motive. There's no trust, there's a lot of misunderstanding. And then there's vulnerability to the impact of third-party incidents or accidents,

which then can produce interactions that get you to the real. result you don't want to go. So how could the assassination of an archduke in 1914? I mean, it's a story you still can't believe. So a archduke is visiting Sarajevo, where even people told him he shouldn't go, and a Serbian terrorist who belongs to a organization called a black hand, kills him, assassinations. This strikes a match at the end of which the whole house of Europe has burned out. So wait, what does this guy in Sarajevo have to do with Britain and Germany and Russia and France going to war, which answers one thing leads to the other and that leads to something else in the case of World War I? If you jumped in 1918, what's happened to

what each of the major actors cared about most? Answer lost. So the Austro-Hungarian emperor is trying to hold together his empire. It's dissolved. He's out. The Russian Tsar is trying to back the Serbs. Of course, he's been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, the communists. His whole regime is gone. The Kaiser is trying to back his buddy in Vienna. He's gone. The French are trying to back the Russians. They're bled of their youth for a whole generation. They never recover. And Britain, which used to be a big creditor country for a hundred years, is a debtor in terminal of the climb. So if you're given these folks a chance for a do-over, nobody would have made the choices he made. But they did. One thing lead to the other. North Korea has built nuclear weapons. They have tested missiles that can deliver

these nuclear weapons. That's the train coming down track number one. This story has been going on for a long time. Clinton looked at this, Bush looked at it, Obama looked at it. Trump arrives and he says, no, no, no, no. And the reason why it's very relevant is if this was an issue and it was Britain and the U.S., the two parties would sit down and say, screw this. We're not going to let the Irish or the Canadians or somebody drag the two of us into a war. So let's just figure out what to do. And if we can't agree, we'll flip a coin. But in any case, we can solve this problem.

In a case in which you have a Thucydidean dynamic, which basically, from Beijing's point of view, they're wondering, what the hell are you even doing on this peninsula? Look at the map here. This is country right next door to us. You shouldn't even be here. And if you weren't here, we wouldn't have this problem. But we say, wait a minute. We didn't choose to be there. We only came there to try to help South Korea from being incorporated in part of this Stalinist North Korean regime.

Now South Korea has built a very successful country, the 13th largest economy in the whole world. They have a functioning democracy. They're our poster child for a success story in Asia. We're not walking away just saying because it happens to be near your territory. So it's hard to get the two parties to figure out how they would work. I'm hoping that they will. Let's go to audience questions. The Western conception of international order was like on Westphalian politics. And what differences do you see in the way China approaches international order?

I understand the Western is more about maintaining some kind of equilibrium or balance. That's a great question. And in fact, I have a chapter which has a little riff on that, class of civilization. So Chinese conception of order is extremely different than America. conceptions of order. In the Chinese conception of order, you have basically a hierarchical dominance in which somebody is at the top of the pyramid and everybody else is located in relationship to who's at the top of the pyramid. And as we said earlier, the term China even in Mandarin means center of the universe. It connects the universe to heaven. And everybody

else is subordinate to us. So that the order in the Chinese structure and the primary injunction in the Confucianism in which it's rooted is called know thy place. So you discover that you belong in the third rank and I belong in the fourth rank and he belongs in the second rank But the emperor, he's at the top. And everybody else kowtows to show that I respect you more and who kowtows more is the one that's lower than the one that's higher. So for the emperor, what you're supposed to do is go prostrate yourself on the floor because he's with a godlike level or the Khozai godlike level. In fact, there was a moment that Trump pulled off at the Mary Lagos summit where Xi Jinping and his wife arrived and the Chinese were. terrified of what was Trump going to do. They like scripted events. He likes ad lib, so they couldn't agree

at a script or anything. But so he said, well, I have a surprise for you. So he brought out his granddaughter, who's five years old. His name is Arabella. And he said, Arabella has something for you. And so she should be standing there with his wife. And Arabella sings in Mandarin. Wow. The song, Jasmine, which is the signature song that Lee Kuan Yu's wife sings, who's a famous singer. And he even asked afterwards, this really was his granddaughter? Yes, really was his granddaughter. And she really learned how to sing in Mandarin.

Well, on that beautiful and optimistic note, I want to ask one more question. In the book, you mentioned this idea that you'd been kicking around to establish the White House Council of historical advisors. which would essentially be, you know, similar to the Council of Economic Advisors, brings in economists for usually about two-year terms to kind of informally advise the president on economic issues. Where is this idea? Have you gotten much traction on it? Who are some of the other historians that you've talked to about this? Basically, here the concept is applied history should be a sub-discipline of history in the same way that, in effect, engineering is a subordinate discipline of physics.

or medicine is of biochemistry. So mainstream historians don't really like it because it seems a little too applied in the same way that theorists don't like applied and physicists look down on engineers. So applied history is the attempt to illuminate a current challenge like what's happening in the relationship

with America in China by analyzing the historical record, in particular analogs and precedents to see what clues or insights or lessons you can draw. I published two years ago an applied history manifesto. We basically said, you know, this should be a practice of activity. And there be a council of applied historians, just like the Council of Economic Advisors,

where a president could ask them, okay, here we're thinking about a problem. Is there any illumination you could provide for us from the historical record? The idea is not dead, but I think it'll be a little time before he gets to the historian. Graham, thank you so much. I think we need a lot more people like yourself who think about these. historical analogs. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.