horse of george

Are strategic rivalries avoidable? I dunno - I'm just curious because you hear a lot of people talking about China and the US in these terms - the thought being I suppose that strategic rivalries inevitably become contentious and hostile so if the two can avoid becoming rivals then we can all sit back and enjoy the assumed prosperity etc etc. My grasp of history is too impressionistic to offer any concrete evidence of what past actions have to say here - but if I was gonna guess I'd say strategic rivalries are the opposite of avoidable - they're inevitable. Now, hostilities are not inevitable because one of the rivals can always remove themselves from the competition though decline or preemptive surrender - but barring that, yeah, I'd say hostilities probably are inevitable when it comes to the dynamics governing strategic rivalries - what's more, I'd guess that when a systemic or ideological disagreement divides the rivals, hostilities are a virtual certainty - as opposed to when rivals who are merely economic competitors bump up against each other [although I'm not sure you could call rivalries such as that 'strategic' - probably no]. I mean, the template for what China is doing economically is post war Japan, but when land of rising sun was challenging American business interests in the 70s and 80s no one considered war a possibility - and likewise Japan did not see it necessary to dramatically ramp up military spending [well, constitutionally they couldn't, so...], as opposed to the Empire of Japan which had different ideas and is probably the example we should be comparing present day China to when talking about the dynamics of 'rivalry'.