[Daily Caller] As we head into the New Year, Chinese President Xi Jinping is weighing his options. Now that President Joe Biden has less than a year guaranteed left in the White House, Xi may be thinking this is the best opportunity China will ever get to recapture Taiwan. The complex calculations behind China’s actions and its expectations of a U.S. (under)reaction are best summed up by one academic who’s been holed up at Harvard for over half a century.
Harvard government professor Graham Allison first made his bones in the 1970s with a paper on the Cuban missile crisis, where he devised bureaucratic and organizational models for looking at foreign policy decisions. These have now become standard operating procedure for a new generation of foreign policy wonks. He went on to have an illustrious career at Harvard as a professor, founding dean and think tank director, advising both the Reagan and Clinton administrations as well as countless other agencies and task forces over the decades.
Even within Harvard’s elite pool, he ranks among the top. Perhaps only the late Henry Kissinger outpaced him in terms of government influence. But unless you went to college for political science, you’ve most likely never heard of him.
However, he’s broken through to some mainstream notoriety with his 2017 book, "Destined for War: Can America Escape Thucydides’s Trap?" The core concept references the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, whose explanation of the causes of the Peloponnesian War has been studied for thousands of years. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable," Thucydides explains. In general terms, war is likely when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. |