1/ Could the Tariff War Become a Real Hot War?
Graham Allison@GrahamTAllison
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Apr 16, 2025
~1 min read
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1/ Could the Tariff War Become a Real Hot War?
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2/ Could President Trump’s unprecedented tariff war against China stumble into a hot war with bombs exploding on American and Chinese soil? The good news is that most tariff or economic wars have not become hot wars. The bad news is that some have.
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3/ As Washington Post (@wapo) columnist Max Boot’s (@MaxBoot) op-ed yesterday notes, this issue is explored at length in Destined for War: Can the US and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/…
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4/ My book was published 8 years ago in 2017 just as President Trump entered the White House for the first time. Over the weekend, Boot emailed me to ask about what I had written. In a lively back and forth, he and I agreed that we were both hearing eerie echoes of earlier cases in which economic conflict ended in bloody war.
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5/ Among the cases that I’ve studied, the most troubling analogue is the US-Japanese confrontation that began with economic sanctions targeting imports of scrap metal and aviation fuel to Japan. This then escalated to limits on raw materials including iron, brass, copper, and finally, oil. And as Boot notes: “It was the oil embargo that threatened to strangle the Japanese economy that led Japan to its desperate gambit of attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.”
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6/ For several other paths from where we are now to real war between the US and China, see Chapter 5 of Destined for War, “From Here to War.”
