Edit: credit LarsDu88 for correcting me on its age. I originally stated the idea was very old (2.5k years) but actually its a recent idea based on an ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta
The Spanish-American war was closer to the USA opportunistically feasting upon the remains of the fallen empire (The British already overtook the Spanish in terms of power).
It's hard to pinpoint the fall of the Spanish Empire. But it's even harder to point out military action between Spain and Britain (undoubtedly the rising star in the next centuries). There is the big war of Spanish Succession but that's more opportunistic and more like a major civil war that spilled out of Spain and across Europe.
Lots of war between Spain, HRR, France and other parties. But strangely not so much with Britain....
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In both Spanish and British cases, the real enemy the whole time was just a boatload of debt.
But quite beyond that, I'm just saying that the Thucydides trap is not an iron rule. The first place I looked was a counterexample and I'm sure there have been many more over the centuries.
No war was "needed" to settle who was #1, it was clear that we (the UK) simply couldn't maintain the empire as it was and we definitely couldn't have fought the US.
We went into WW2 the clear naval power in the world, We exited it in the #2 spot utterly broke.
In less than 4 years the US produced enough ships to eclipse our navy and did it while also producing ridiculously vast amounts of equipment for themselves and their allies across every sphere.
No one with a brain in our foreign office would have even contemplated poking that (and realistically while the US has at times been a questionable ally on the whole in that era they were a reliable ally).
In that kind of total war the side with the larger industrial base wins the war of attrition.
It doesn't matter if the enemy sinks ships if your production rate exceeds the sink rate on a sustained basis you win (somewhat related it's also why naval strategists have been sounding the clarion call about the fact that China now makes more than half of all global shipping, the US is somewhere around 1% - those peacetime yards/skilled works transfer over in a war).
The US did that, they won the war (or their part of it) in the factory lines/mines as much as they did on the actual front.
War is costly, so (in the absence of bargaining frictions) game theory suggests that an agreement can be reached that leaves both parties better off compared to going to war.
Its claimed to be an old idea, but its actually only recently become popular
It sounds plausible, but if it is this old there must be a long list of examples. What are some of them?
It is odd to see a single country being repeated at different times as the "incumbent" power.
The latest example in the list shows "UK and France" as incumbent power and Germany as rising for the 1990s - present.
The US is only listed for the 1940s - 1980s as incumbent, with Japan and Soviet Union as rising.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/i...
>Xi has referenced Allison’s term before. In a speech in Seattle in 2015, Xi said, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” And in an October 2023 meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Xi said, “The ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.
I switched the link to Harvard.
Unless you can have a super intelligence that can monitor every aspect of everything all the time to ensure optimal decisions. Hmmmm...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/business/china-youth-unem...
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01203/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pedov5/oc...
also there are salary paycuts for people who already have work, my Chinese clients tried this, but not gonna accept it, I will rather lose such client than lower my rate, I am losing money by not increasing my rates over many years already despite huge EU cummulative inflation and EU salaries growth
by my experience visiting country after almost 10 years last year just by looking at salaries, restaurant prices, real estate prices/rent their economy seems to be stagnating in last 10 years, restaurant meal cost pretty much same as 10 years ago, same goes for entry level salaries like waitress, cook and other you can see in street
they are getting stronger overall, though doesn't seem like middle class is benefiting from it, my CN family bought apartment many years ago and they would have problem to sell it for same price, let alone make any profit on it
Also 30k USD is a lot of money everywhere except for in the US
But its relative GDP growth has been higher than the US for decades, is higher stil and is probably going to stay higher for years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-growth?country=U...
If you look at absolute numbers (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...), it seems likely that China will surpass the US economy pretty soon (they're a lot more people though, so per-capita is much worse).
Personally I think its most likely that chinese GDP will be larger than US GDP within 2035, but that the median citizen is NOT going to catch up to US standards in the next 50 years.
And their whole society will run into the exact same problems that many western countries are dealing with already (increasing fraction of retirees), so I'd be very careful with extrapolating their currently superior growth rate past 2040 or so.
The USD hegemony isn’t because of oil, it’s because everyone wants dollar-denominated assets. Treasury bonds, US real estate, US equities, etc. Possibly Chinese exports could soak up some of the yuan demand?