Graham Allison > Quotes

“Here we are on top of the world. We have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, this thing called history. But history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. —Arnold Toynbee, recalling the 1897 diamond jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria   Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the “lessons of history” are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers. —Ramachandra Guha”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“The German philosopher Nietzsche taught us that “the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“Young people learn best from personal experience. The lessons their elders have learned at great pain and expense can add to the knowledge of the young and help them to cope with problems and dangers they had not faced before; but such learning, second hand, is never as vivid, as deep, or as durable as that which was personally experienced.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“When states repeatedly fail to act in what appears to be their true national interest, it is often because their policies reflect necessary compromises among parties within their government rather than a single coherent vision.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“Two centuries ago, Napoleon warned, “Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world.” Today China has awakened, and the world is beginning to shake. Yet many Americans are still in denial about what China’s transformation from agrarian backwater to “the biggest player in the history of the world” means for the United States. What is this book’s Big Idea? In a phrase, Thucydides’s Trap. When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound: danger ahead. China and the United States are currently on a collision course for war— unless both parties take difficult and painful actions to avert it. As a rapidly ascending China challenges America’s accustomed predominance, these two nations risk falling into a deadly trap first identified by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Writing about a war that devastated the”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“To escape Thucydides’s Trap, we must be willing to think the unthinkable—and imagine the unimaginable. Avoiding Thucydides’s Trap in this case will require nothing less than bending the arc of history.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“Thucydides’s Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“When Americans complain about how long it takes to build a building or repair a road, authorities often reply that “Rome was not built in a day.” Someone clearly forgot to tell the Chinese. By 2005, the country was building the square-foot equivalent of today’s Rome every two weeks. 29 Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement than the US did in the entire twentieth century. 30 In 2011, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. 31 Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“In 1915, Japanese prime minister Okuma Shigenobu used his country’s newfound leverage to levy “Twenty-One Demands” against the Republic of China for greater Japanese economic and territorial authority over the Asia-Pacific. These demands posed a deep challenge not only to China but also to the regional order established by America’s Open Door policy of 1899. Secretary of State Henry Stimson worried that Japan’s claims threatened this order and the American way of life that depended on it.140 In pursuit of a “New Order in East Asia,” Japan launched an unprovoked campaign to seize Manchuria in 1931. This campaign extended into the heart of China, reaching its ruthless climax in the 1937 Rape of Nanking. Though the US viewed Japan’s aggression against an American ally with consternation, President Franklin Roosevelt initially refrained from acting, even as Japan bombed a US ship seeking to rescue Americans near Nanking.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“Daily media reports of China’s “aggressive” behavior and unwillingness to accept the “international rules-based order” established by the US after World War II describe incidents and accidents reminiscent of 1914. At the same time, a dose of self-awareness is due. If China were “just like us” when the US burst into the twentieth century brimming with confidence that the hundred years ahead would be an American era, the rivalry would be even more severe, and war even harder to avoid. If it actually followed in America’s footsteps, we should expect to see Chinese troops enforcing Beijing’s will from Mongolia to Australia, just as Theodore Roosevelt molded “our hemisphere” to his liking. China is following a different trajectory than did the United States during its own surge to primacy. But in many aspects of China’s rise, we can hear echoes. What does President Xi Jinping’s China want?”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“in order to benefit from globalization, countries must ensure that their laws and institutions facilitate the global flow.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“It is the will, the cohesion, the stamina, the discipline of its people, and the quality of their leaders which ensure it an honorable place in history.14”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“As befits the oldest continuous civilization on earth, the Chinese have a uniquely long sense of history. In no other country do modern leaders explain policy decisions by “invoking strategic principles from millennium-old events.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“clean, efficient, rational, and predictable government is a competitive advantage.26”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“If you want to thrive in the modern world, then you must not be afraid.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“You know as well as we do that right is a question that only has meaning in relations between equals in power. In the real world, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“What worries you about U.S. culture? I find parts of it totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public, in sum, the breakdown of civil society. The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he or she pleases has come at the expense of orderly society…It has a lot to do with the erosion of the moral underpinnings of a society and the diminution of personal responsibility.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press - all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline.”
― Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

“There are three basic essentials for [the] successful transformation of any society. First, a determined leadership…two, an administration which is efficient; and three, social discipline.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“To extend the digital metaphor, both rivals must also reconsider the fitness of their apps for the twenty-first century. In his book Civilization, Niall Ferguson identifies six 'killer apps' - ideas and institutions that drove the extraordinary divergence in prosperity between the West and the rest of the world after 1500. These are competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and work ethic. While noting China's great reconvergence with the West since 1970, Niall wonders if China can sustain its progress without killer app number three: secure private property rights. I worry that the American work ethic has lapsed into mediocrity, while its consumer society has become decadent.”
― Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

“One of the reasons why a privileged society based on the privilege of property and rank must give way to a society where people are rewarded according to their ability and their contribution to society is that it is only when people are encouraged to give their best that society progresses.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“understood Deng Xiaoping when he said: if 200,000 students have to be shot, shoot them, because the alternative is China in chaos for another 100 years…Deng understood, and he released it stage by stage. Without Deng, China would have imploded.36”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“When the cost of intervention is lowest and the effectiveness of action highest, the need to act is ambiguous and uncertain. By the time the necessity for action is obvious to all the players whose support or acquiescence is required, the cost of effective intervention has risen, sometimes to levels that make it prohibitive. For governments, especially democratic governments in which many parties have to agree before action can be taken, this conundrum tilts the scales markedly toward procrastination rather than prevention—whether in dealing with rising rivals or recurring humanitarian catastrophes.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“For at 60, more than at 50, comes the realization of the transient nature of all earthly glories and successes, and the ephemeral quality of sensory joys and pleasures, when compared to intellectual, moral, or spiritual satisfactions…I have wondered how much of what I am is nature and how much was nurture?”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“Period: Mid-twentieth century Ruling power: United States Rising power: Japan Domain: Sea power and influence in the Asia-Pacific Outcome: World War II (1941–45) Imperial Japan, bolstered by decisive victories in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars and a growing sphere of influence that included Korea and Taiwan, became aggressively hegemonic in the twentieth century. As Japanese expansion, particularly into China, threatened the American-led “Open Door” order in the Pacific, the United States became increasingly hostile toward Japan in the 1930s. After the US sought to contain Japan by embargoing its raw material imports, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the hitherto reluctant Americans into World War II.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“Misunderstandings are easy; empathy and consensus elusive.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people, plus enabling the maximum of personal freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others in society.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“One person, one vote is a most difficult form of government. From time to time, the results can be erratic. People are sometimes fickle. They get bored with stable, steady improvements in life, and in a reckless moment, they vote for a change for change’s sake.”
― Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

“Though deliberate crafting of strategy does not guarantee success, the absence of a coherent, sustainable strategy is a reliable route to failure.”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers

“In his consolidation of power, Xi has taken more than a dozen titles for himself, including chairman of a new national security council and commander in chief of the military, a title that even Mao was never given. And he has had himself anointed China’s “Core Leader”—a term symbolic of his centrality to the state that Hu had allowed to lapse. Most significant, as of this writing Xi appears to be setting the stage to defy traditional term limits and remain in power beyond 2022.27”
― Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers