Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

Why I Picked It Up / How It Read

I picked this up as a part of a book club, we've been exploring Oriental and Western identities and histories independently for a while, but it's time to explore and contrast them together. Also, the curiosity of exploring learned experts opinions about what everyone on the street talks about often is hard to resist, especially with the often ironic parallels.

The book was a light read, well-presented. Not entrenched too much into doomsday pessimism, nor too flowery. Some of the scenarios made me chuckle!

What I Took Away

• Reading the book a few years after its publication made some of its (cited) predictions expire and transpire to be wrong. This just enforced for me how unreliable economic projections are.
• I just can't help but remember the lessons of Nassim Taleb in his Incerto (especially Fooled by Randomness). Most scholarly explanations are post hoc!
  • It's easy now to sit back, read history books and come up with a nice deep narrative about why a certain event happened in the past.
  • Predicting the future however is only possible by suggesting too many possible alternatives that one of them becomes true
  • In ten, twenty years, if a war broke out, big or small, or no war broke out, the book could still claim it predicted what would happen!