All-In Summit: In conversation with Graham Allison

please join me in welcoming Graham Allison to the stage [Applause] [Music] [Music] really an honor uh Graham thanks for joining us and thanks for agreeing to follow that routine Graham Allison was founding dean of Harvard's John F Kennedy School of government and remains a professor of government he's a leading analyst of U.S national security and defense policy with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism he's most famous as the assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans from 1993 to 94 where he coordinated strategy and policy towards the state to the former Soviet Union Bill Clinton awarded him the Dem the

Department of Defense medal for distinguished public service for reshaping relations with Russia Ukraine Belarus Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear Arsenal and he's since become the longest serving member of the secretary of defense's defense policy board having served for eight secretaries of defense and he's the only person to receive the department of defense's highest civilian award from both Reagan and Clinton administrations Graham is one of the world's most cited experts on the bureaucratic analysis of decision making especially during crimes of Crisis I read his book destined for work in America and China escaped lucidity's trap which was published in 2018 and I think was very prescient about the moment that we're in today a couple of weeks ago Elon Musk tweeted out several

times and everyone should read this book so congrats we get a little promotion from Elon as well but thank you that must have helped sales congrats on that um the theory that when one great power threatens to displace another war is almost always the result it's at the heart of his analysis on the U.S China relationship during the Peloponnesian War the cities wrote what made War inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta and Graham says the Trap triggered nearly every war from the Peloponnesian War to World War One to the war of the Spanish succession the 30 Years War and now threatens to light the world on fire once again Graham thanks for joining us uh today um if you wouldn't mind just praying for the audience and for us here on stage the point that you make in your book

about the acidity's Trap and where we find uh the relationship between China and the US taking us and where it specifically sits in that evolution of of call it tempering temperament today yeah well thank you very much and it's a pleasure and honor to be here I'm a fan of your podcast and I think how you've made this thing work I don't quite understand but I I I appreciate it I appreciate it we have a friend in the Deep State he's sitting over there we're not going to name names but he may be introduction and and we appreciate it yeah any case it's a pleasure a pleasure to be here so in the summary you gave I think is a is

a very good place to start let me do four or five quick bottom lines so first uh as I wrote In This Book which is published just as Reagan big sorry As Trump became president uh uh in relations within us in China expect things to get worse before they get worse so that's exactly what I would say today and why what's driving that this is a classic thucydidity and rivalry so as David said thucydides taught us 2500 years ago when they rapidly Rising power seriously threatens to displace a ruling power happens that's normal and in most cases the outcome is war so what we're seeing today and what we're going to see even more intensely tomorrow and a decade from now is the fiercest rivalry history has ever seen China is not just another great power but it's going to be the biggest power in the history of the world the U.S is a colossal ruling power

which has been the architect and guardian of the international order that allows us to live today in the 78th year without great power War a pretty amazing accomplishment and so the US is not going to fade away comfortably with that confrontation occurs most often the outcome is award in the book I looked at the last 500 years there's 16 times we've seen a rapidly Rising power threaten a colossal ruling power think of Germany's rise beginning of the 20th century and the challenge to Great Britain that became World War one so most often of the 16 cases 12 ended in war for ended in nowhere so if we were just doing statistics was not inevitable it's just structurally likely and the cases in which war didn't occur were cases in which somehow the

parties managed a degree of strategic imagination that bent otherwise Trends or what you called earlier the physics of the situation so the Cold War I'm an old cold warrior in the Rivalry between the use of the Soviet Union that had dominated 40 decade for 40 years of American History the U.S and the Soviet Union came to the edge of War multiple times Cuban Missile Crisis about which I've written the book the most dangerous but there was ultimately no hot War okay well that's a big deal had there been a hot War we wouldn't be having this podcast Los Angeles wouldn't be here Boston wouldn't be here so a real war a real bloody war is catastrophic it can be in today absolutely catastrophic so when I said to David when he invited me to come was you folks are in the business of strategic imagination

I mean that's what you do that's how you've come to have a degree of confidence in what you do you imagine something that seems slightly crazy it seems almost unimaginable somehow you put pieces together uh some of the time it works and lo and behold yikes our life it's got smartphones or it has the net where it has I AI or it has vaccines or it has it has it has amazing so I'm hoping that you'll devote some of those gray cells to to the geopolitical challenge that China poses to the U.S today which will be the dominant geopolitical challenge for the rest of our lives I don't think there's anything inevitable about the outcome I think though if we settle for diplomacy

as usual or statescraft as usual or imagination as usual then we should expect history as usual but that's not that that's the trend that's not inevitable so if you ask me buy one quickly a war between us and China in the year ahead uh no I give you 99 of that one we're between us and China next four years no I'd say 90 percent uh no okay war between the US and China over the decades ahead if both stay on the current paths uh I don't like that thinking we had it seemed like three decades of incredible collaboration uh with China and the West in America specifically and just look at what happened with the iPhone and the number of people who who um rose out of poverty um in China and it seemed to be going really well and it seemed like you know

the NBA was playing games there and we were sending movies there everything seemed to be on the right track and then something has seems to have gone horribly wrong and a two-part question what has gone horribly wrong why has this happened so quickly because it seems like it's changed since covet in such a rapid fashion um that's quite us all by surprise how this has come apart and um what does China want that we don't seem to understand okay two great questions that I'll try to be brief so maybe in your world a better way to think of it is to have an established entrenched uh company and a disruptive upstart got it when the disruptive upstart is one percent of the business welcome five percent of the business welcome 10 of the business now it's moving faster

and rap more rapidly all of a sudden one begins to think wait a minute where is this going could it actually imagine it will displace me so China was at the beginning of the century 10 of the US GDP today it's three quarters of the U.S GDP so it's quite plausible that China will have a larger GDP even by market exchange rates than the US well wait a minute we're number one that's part of who we are so in a thucydidity and dynamic basically the Seesaw of power begins to shift think of a seesaw on a kid's playground like a guy with the bulk is on one end the little guys on the other end he begins bulking up all of a sudden the Seesaw began moving the Dynamics of that is Lucidity strap so

the perception changes I used to look down on you now I'm having to look you in the eye I'm looking up the psychology changes who the hell do you think you are I'd forget the environment in which you grew up you should be appreciative yeah you should take your space okay excuse me our normal place is to be running the show in your normal place is to take your seat at the table so we many many people imagine that China would just follow the paths of Germany and Japan and take their place at the american-led international order that was a pretty good idea except they hadn't thought very carefully about history Germany and Japan were defeated by the USA award and occupied by the U.S and then we wrote their constitution and then we produced as a kind of training school so China

wants to be this liquid news line China wants to be respected as China not as an honorary member of the West okay what happened in the late 90s because it started with Clinton where it seemed like a good idea to admit to the WTO and then Bush kind of just you know put the nail in the coffin and did it and actually supported it we could have not supported it um some people say it was a trade-off for China's support for the Iraq War who knows but the point is it happened but I'm sure you guys were sitting in the engine room scenario planning what happens if this happens and it's fair to say that from that context we didn't necessarily get it right great so what did you get wrong

well again it's good to go back to 2000 and just to remember in 2000 China was somewhere between five and ten percent of Us's GDP the people in 2000 eighty percent of the people in China were trying to live on two dollars a day so the place is a miserable struggling mess the U.S who's been in the business ever since World War II of trying to encourage economic development in countries so Clinton and Bush together Clinton said about the WTO it's a win-win-win situation it's going to be a win for everybody China is going to be lifted up that's what we would like to do because people's lives will be better and actually there's been on any poverty miracle in China that is human beings we have to admire people that used to get a few calories now get enough calories to

eat that's it that's got to be a good thing the idea that this might work so successfully that China could become could come and have an economy as large as ours didn't occur to anybody at the time you could see a few few people as outliers but that was just kind of not in the imagination and then secondly this was in a period of great Hubris in the U.S we had won the Cold War we were living in this a bubble which uh you know the famous the most famous thesis of the period was Frank fukuyama's end of History so everybody has become democracies and market economies and if they have McDonald's they can't have wars because people would prefer to get hamburgers and Wars okay you can hardly say that today without laughing but that was sort of well-known that was

conventional wisdom at the time so if you'd come along and said that wait a minute if China is very successful it's going to come to have a GDP about the size of the U.S and then it's going to have back to your question it's going to have its own aspirations the Chinese have a view understandably and Ray talked about this earlier today sorry for four or five thousand years they were the predominant power in all the World they knew so their story is the normal conditions of things is that we're at the their through their confusion so hierarchy Harmony and peace comes through hierarchy they're at the top of the hierarchy that's the normal place they were displaced from this by westerners with technology 150 years ago they called that the century of humiliation and their aspiration is to

go back to normal and normal so them as China is the quote center of the universe China is the sun around which the others there's you know as you remember their their thing about you know you can't have two tigers in the valley there's the big one and the other one so I have two comments the first is just a reaction to this I'm sort of on the opposite side of you which is that because of China's population was and because of I think some of these technological things that are sort of on the horizon I believe that we're sort of at the edge of an era of abundance that will create a massive peace dividend because a lot of the justifications for war go away that's my personal view but I have taken

the time to try to steal man your point of view which is we go to war and the best steel man that I can come up with is very practical so I'd like you to try to dismantle it which is you have massive youth unemployment in China and waning growth and so the simplest and most productive way for China to basically grow and to appease you know 25 of young people mostly men from not Uprising is to essentially create demand and the best way to create demand is to essentially create you know a war machine and that is why they go to war is that I would say uh I appreciate that option I've worked very hard on the 12 scenarios for getting to war if there's a war between the US and China in the

next year or four years or decade how is it going to happen in my view the most likely not this way it's going to happen the same way the less work happened now if I would take a quiz here since I know we lived in the United States of Amnesia okay but when was the last war between us and China I'm not going to give you a quiz but I'll tell you the answer was 1950. what okay and what happened in 1950 North Korea attacked South Korea almost pushed them off the whole Peninsula the U.S had just won World War II that's five years after the end of World War II MacArthur and American troops were in Japan they came to the rescue of South Korea they pushed the North Koreans right back up to Peninsula and the 38th parallel which has been the starting point they pushed right across without

even thinking and we're pushing right towards the Chinese border the yellow so you're now one year this is 1950 one year after model has just won the Chinese Civil War he hasn't even Consolidated his position the US is Superman we've just dropped two bombs next door in Japan in World War II of Monopoly nuclear power the likely the possibility that China would attack the US certainly Tim McArthur but Mao seeing the U.S coming up to his border and not knowing wherever else he might stop sent his peasant Army to war with the U.S and beat the Americans right back down the peninsula to the 38th parallel where the so wars happened often not because anybody wants a war at the beginning of 1950 if you'd gone tomorrow and said I got a good idea why

don't you go to a world with Superman you could have said you heard me out of your mind if you've gone to Truman in 1950 say how about we have a word forget about it but so you don't have to have an intention of either of the parties I think the most likely way or will happen in the U.S and China something happens in Taiwan either we're underly provocative of the Taiwanese provocative uh I'm gonna I'm gonna hand it to Saks but I want to just make one comment get your reaction if if that's the framing what about India because now India is ascendant it's got a growing population it's got huge economic growth and unlike China who's not necessarily ever been

subjugated in a war the Indians have this memory of basically having judeo-christians that dominated that region of which we all had to get Liberty which is almost even worse maybe so just frame India in that context there another great question and again nobody knows but the Indian story either Theory one India is about to become a serious rival to China that's the fashionable story today Theory two is India is the country of the future and will always be so so we've been through already five of these Cycles before where we declared India was about the rise rapidly and lo and behold and the it turns out to be India so India has a lot of internal problems itself as was mentioned earlier today about 20 percent of the population are Muslims uh Modi is basically undermining the multi-ethnic Democracy that nehru had built by getting support

from the majority by oppressing the minority so that's a complicated problem within and a lot of other components so if you look at the Rivalry between the U.S and India in the 20th century and just graph it you discover that lo and behold in every year virtually and every decade for sure the gap between them is grown in China's favor now not this year India is growing much faster than China this year and last year and maybe next year so we can look at the trajectories I think it's quite possible and I think the American strategy which I think is the right one is that this is a long run game a long game so there's going to be a long rivalry between us and China we believe that a more Liberty centered uh open uh Democratic political system will perform better over the long run than that party LED autocracy

she has a different idea he says things are too chaotic information is too uncertain uh you can't let people just my God let people vote and look and see what happens in the U.S so we need to have uh order and so our party LED autocracy we believe he's going to do well we play this out over time if the U.S had to play this game only U.S versus China I think we lose but if the U.S plays this game with a group of Allied and aligned of whom we now see in the quad India and Australia and Japan and then in August we see Britain and Australia and the US and in the trilateral that we just saw with Japan and South Korea so you're seeing a configuration I call it more guys on our side of the Seesaw and that can go over a long period of time and it may turn out that democracies fail internally I mean I think it's a

big Challenge and I think it's no certainty about that it may turn out that autocracies fail in the way autocracies have have historically failed I think it's incredible framing because you have an autocracy in China and democracy here and then somewhat Democratic is how we're I think describing India right now is India the most important relationship for America to get right at this moment in time is that the relationship we really need to be focusing on since that seems like it's the linchpin or the fulcrum well I would say that's a good question and I'm not sure I've I I am probably unduly skeptical about Israel let me show you about India because my impressions are overly shaped

by a leak on you Lee Kuan Yew was the founder and builder of Singapore and he his great hope was for India But ultimately he became to be despairing of its internal complexities Modi seems to be a different character if you look to the way you ran the province of the Iran before or the state he was very effective he's very ambitious for India so I'm hopeful about India if India emerges it has the potential alongside I don't think only India Japan South Korea Australia New Zealand and even maybe the Europeans again depending on what happens here so you could have a group of Allied and a line not all agreeing on it everything but agreeing on enough that says we're we're trying to make we're trying the complex problem of governing a society We Believe has to

start with the freedom and liberty of people that's what we think is and we think that's essential for the dynamism of innovation and invention and lo and behold there's a lot of evidence for that and if we're the freest of the most open Society low in the hole a bunch of people come from other countries where they're not so free and they do their thing here right say thank God for that okay so under those circumstances played out over a long run you can imagine imagine a story that turns out pretty well in the case of the U.S and Soviet Union just to remember it's hard to believe but if you go back and read your economic textbook that was published in the 1960s Samuelson was the you know basically for economics it says by the 70s the Soviet Union will have overtaken

the U.S economy right yeah that was kind of a well-known fact well lo and behold lo and behold it didn't Okay the reason it didn't happen is because dictatorships have a hard time in the long term versus democracies well there's about 10 reasons why there's weaknesses in an autocracy and you're now seeing a lot of evidence of it in the Chinese system particularly after she became even more autocratic and guaranteeing his lease on life with the recent coronation where he's got his third term unprecedented but without a term limit so basically if I'm the autocrat and especially if I come to think as they as he does he's got the thought of Xi Jinping they write this into the Constitution so this contains all wisdom so one of the

problems the guys are having with their AI machines is you can't ask a question that doesn't that has an answer inconsistent with the thought of XI sinping that declares what's true about this and that so he doesn't tell Pine much about mathematics or science so you can ask those questions 10 cents AI machine a pretty good competitor for gpt4 in the science or math but if you ask a question about you know how the freedom centered societies perform it can't answer that question because the foreign if you if you choose people for loyalty more than for competence look at a company and see how that works okay so seven reasons yes I think one of the points you make in

your book is that um and I think your book came out around the time that China and the US had achieved rough parity in terms of purchasing power parity their GDP roughly roughly and I remember one of the points you made is that China has four times the population of the U.S so it's per capita GDP was one quarter that of the U.S if they merely got to the the point of having half the per capita GDP of the US then their economy would be twice as big as ours right and you know China has a lot of really smart hard-working people who are studying subjects that we aren't studying as much as we should in the US like engineering like science and so forth so there are reasons I think to believe that they're you know incredible rise could derail the demographics are a problem maybe the

um if the economy becomes too centrally controlled but let's just assume that it does continue its Rise um I guess the question would be will the U.S have to effectively recognize that they have a sphere of influence in Asia in order to avoid a war I mean is that is that what we're going to have to do right I think so I appreciate your starting with the basics and structural realities are hard to deny so again the Americans don't like this but just do the arithmetic if Chinese are only if their economy is only half as productive as ours and these are pretty talented people and they work pretty hard they'll have a GDP twice hours I'll do it again wait a minute twice hours now you're on a rivalry between A and B and B has twice the GDP so we can have twice the size of the defense budget can have twice the intelligence budget right it can have twice twice twice okay

you know that's reality now can I find enough Allied and a line on my side to make up for some of that yeah that seems right uh so that's one way so you're like an alliance strategy more than they do that's right yeah okay we need it okay but if you said over time in relationships like that if you're going to avoid war will there be I mean a sphere of influence again there's a great abstract debate about this one in reality the sphere of influence is the shadow that power casts in some realm so if you're more powerful you have a you have a sphere of influence so in the South China Sea today on Chinese border they have more ships they have more missiles on the land that can so lo and behold uh we don't care call that their sphere of influence but if you look and see what happens in the area we don't operate our ships the way we did when I was in the Pentagon in the Clinton Administration so if there were

an event in Taiwan which is 90 miles off their Shore like Cuba is on our shore and halfway around the world for us the likelihood we're going to have the ships and the planes and the other excuse me you know that just doesn't work that way you can let the geography and see the tyranny of it so Will there come to be some degree of difference and accommodation if it was to be avoided aren't that the answer is yes now then we you know then it becomes ugly because you say well okay you know in what respect and I know you guys I saw earlier did the question for Robert uh Kennedy about Taiwan okay I think that's a good question not to answer not the answer yeah I mean this is where I I worry about the confidence of our foreign policy establishment because I think it only has one gear which is Ford and double down

in the United States we have a Doctrine the Monroe Doctrine which says that no distant great power can bring troops weapons or bases into our hemisphere because we do not tolerate other great Powers having security threats and Mass on our border but our foreign policy establishment cannot comprehend that other great Powers want a similar Monroe Doctrine I think that was a huge contributor to the war we have in Ukraine right now thank you so we we have this Theory and I'm part of this establishment that you're talking about and it's not so it's not Jewish did you invade Ukraine it's it's not it's not that's such a gross it's not it's not as uniform as you say and it's not as uh not always as

unsuccessful as you say but overall I think you're more right than wrong so basically the uh we say we're the exceptional Nation so what does that mean that means we make the rules and you're supposed to obey the rules but we're not invade the rules so we say we're for the rule-based order excuse me the rule-based order uh was the basis on which we invaded Iraq I don't think so that we occupied Afghanistan I don't think so so the US has made a lot of mistakes of unnecessary Wars and a lot of being a lot of a lot of the unnecessary Wars was because people with wrong ideas dominated people with right ideas but there was a debate and a discussion so we need more people with the right ideas you know getting into the conversation in an active way but let me just do one other footnote here so this is you we

have to remember this is this is 9 11. okay so this is a big day for me okay this day in which airplanes hijacked by terrorists uh kill 3 000 people at the World Trade Center in the Pentagon including the many people that I know extremely well uh what would a world be like in which that happened every day or every week or every month we'd be totally intolerable you wouldn't when we wouldn't be doing what we're doing why is that not happening some people did some right things so there's been a pretty active program by the us some of it with some mistakes but overall that's played a significant role in the fact that people who plan and

praying to conduct major terrorist attacks on the U.S are taken off the chessboard every day people go out hunting every day people find people and I would say thank goodness for this wow so I think that's an interesting point um you know certainly Al Qaeda hasn't been able to hit us again in that way um I I do wonder whether there were two tragedies on 9 11 one was the thousand people who died the other was the way that we reacted to it um like you said we went into Iraq a total nonsack stupid stupid and a non-sequitur and then we stay in Afghanistan for 20 years and again not necessary yeah on sort of the nation building grounds we then went into Syria that's still going on there was Libya so it's and there was very little debate about all of these things at the time we made these decisions it's

almost like the U.S foreign policy establishment in reaction to 911 became almost deranged um and I you know compared to say the 1990s where I think there were real foreign policy debates there was a real foreign policy debate in the 90s on NATO expansion it doesn't seem like we have that many debates not within the policy Elite maybe we're having them but it doesn't seem like the policy debates anything anymore it's just this this sort of bellicose hawkish rhetoric at all times do you agree with that from the inside I yeah I I mean again I live on the other side I live on both sides of this curtain and I would say inside there's much more debate and there was much more debate than we take credit for it George Bush made a terrible terrible

terrible mistake in invading Iraq and in 2003 who who said that to him his father's closest advisor prince goldcroft who was joined at the hip with the father said to him this is a terrible dumb mistake he even went so far as to write an op-ed about it after he had now he did not write an op-ed without talking to Bush's father would George H.W bush have done this no if Gore if the if the count had gone right in Florida and Gordon had been president would we've got to interrupt no so electing the white president and having the right so if it had been the Bush 41 team rather than the bush 43 team we would have made that mistake sir you mentioned this RFK clip one of the things that he says is that we've gotten things backwards now where there's a military industrial complex that essentially wants to maximize Revenue that's like logical in the capitalist system but then what it's

done is it's perverted the you know intelligence gathering institutions to essentially be writing the justifications for these wars before these wars happen is that conspiracy theory or is that I'd say it's complicated so but it's not enough why is it complicated uh oh we live in an extremely dangerous world but this year my brand can I ask you like to do we really though like absolutely really if had there not had thousands of people not been taken off the chessboard you would have said many repeats of 9 11. okay and if you were living in a place and it's somebody I know was trying to make a last trade in the morning of 9 11 and a plane crashes here and the building is knocked

down all of a sudden the conversation changes so there's that yeah that's a terrorist piece let's think War this is the other big event most people don't realize this year this month is the anniversary of the end of World War II and the beginning of 78 years in which there's not been another great power War right excuse me in history that's almost unheard of why is that answer well a lot of good fortune a lot of Grace but also lots of things that the US did successfully so I think that the Geo security dominates everything when you don't have security and the geopolitics to provide security

is very complicated now the structures that do that often end up making big mistakes too so I'm not trying to make excuses with the mistakes but I think the overall of it is that the the security order that's been built in the past and survived for the last 70 years had been a big deal which is um through the framing Jamal has here we have this military industrial complex we have this complicated relationship with China and then we have Taiwan and we have this incredible policy of ambiguity uh and it seemed to be working really well and now we are we having the proper debate on Taiwan what is the debate we should be having on defending Taiwan not defending Taiwan providing them with arms because you seem to believe in the book that this is going to be this is great what it's about let me add to that question and

this is going to be our last question because we do need to move um move on um in your role in defense planning and you look at the Department of Defense today in the U.S defense industrial complex are we equipped for a hot conflict with China and if we're not does that change the positioning and the strategy that China then has and how they think about what they're going to do next with the U.S so the first one is no we're not and it certainly impacts China and in fact I think if you were able to Greenfield uh the defense department today for half the money you could get twice the bang for the month yeah no so bureaucracies are complicated difficult the fact that we haven't had another great power War I'm prepared to pay a little extra for

it but if you said how efficient is it you know not not so much and into the I think the the big question you should ask ourselves is uh for rational actors in Washington or here today us and in Beijing are there more reasons more incentives to compete between the U.S and China or alternatively more incentives to cooperate right so we've been through all the ones to compete but for cooperating excuse me if we have a war we destroy ourselves so we have a pretty powerful interest in survival in not having a war and not allowing us something happening in Taiwan or this or that this one if we live in an enclosed biosphere on a small planet either parties greenhouse gas submission can make the place unlivable for both of us if we don't find a way to

cooperate in dealing with that we have a financial system that's so entangled at a financial crisis one place can become a depression everywhere so if we don't find a way to do it so I would say it's a good assignment for everybody make a make your list of the recent inflatives to compete and turn the sheet over incentives to cooperate and we did a lot more strategic imagination in that space and I'm helping some of you guys and this and the other folks will put some of their great cells under that problem instead of this de facto posturing that everyone seems to hold today that we're going to go to war this is our enemy and just be a little more thoughtful about the long-term relationship Graham Allison thank you so much

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