China war on the brink – can be pushed over by economic change
Lozada 7/18 [Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2019 and was a finalist for the award in 2018. Previously he was the Post’s Outlook editor and has overseen news coverage of economics and national security. He received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle's citation for excellence in reviewing. Previously, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a Knight-Bagehot fellow in economics and business journalism at Columbia University. 7/18/23, ‘A Look Back at Our Future War With China’, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/opinion/china-usa-relations-books-war.html, The New York Times]
As China continues amassing economic and political clout and an American-led global order appears less sustainable, it becomes “frighteningly easy to develop scenarios in which American and Chinese soldiers are killing each other,” Allison warns. When there is mistrust at the top, when worldviews are irreconcilable and when each side regards its own leadership as preordained, any nudge will do. “Could a collision between American and Chinese warships in the South China Sea, a drive toward national independence in Taiwan, jockeying between China and Japan over islands on which no one wants to live, instability in North Korea or even a spiraling economic dispute provide the spark to a war between China and the U.S. that neither wants?” he asks. (In “Destined for War,” this is a rhetorical question.)