Hi, Thucydides

 In 2012, Graham Allison wrote "The Thucydides Trap" based on Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, where Sparta was the hegemon of the Greek city states and Athens was a rising rival, and that led to war. Allison, studying a lot of history, concluded that, when a hegemon faces a rising rival, war results about 75% of the time. Allison and his Thucydides Trap are denigrated in Wikipedia, but, looking at history, it does seem that, more than half the time, when a hegemon faces a rising rival, war ensues.

In 1991, the US achieved Global Hegemony: the world's strongest military and no rival. This had never happened before. There had been European hegemons, Asian hegemons, South American hegemons, sometimes hegemons over a much smaller area, like the Greek islands, but never a Global hegemon. Gradually, being the only Great Power did not last, and in 2012, Allison saw the PRC as the rising rival, and predicted there was about a 75% chance of war.

But the PRC have MAD, so how?

The US, of course, saw how they destroyed the USSR by funding jihadists in Afghanistan to attack anything and everything Soviet until the USSR bankrupted themselves fighting the Afghan jihadists and the USSR collapsed completely, making the US the first ever Global Hegemon.

But the PRC were rising rapidly, building more naval ships than the US, a larger army than the US, and they had MAD, so what to do?

The US idea was to provoke the PRC to invade Taiwan, then the US would impose global sanctions and supply Taiwan with advanced weapons and the proxy war would destroy the PRC.

But the US also had their eye on Russia, another rising hegemon. John Joseph Mearsheimer says that there are now three Great Powers: the US are first, the PRC are a close second, and Russia are a distant third. And the US saw how easy it was to destroy the USSR, but Russia would never be tempted by Afghanistan, they needed a more irresistible threat, and that was the Ukraine. The US made moves to provoke the PRC over Taiwan, and in 2008 threatened to make the Ukraine and Georgia part of NATO, but not much happened.

Then, in 2014, the US engineered an overthrow of the elected Ukraine government by a group who hate everything Russian and are determined (with a lot of NATO help) to remove all ethnic Russians from the Ukraine to make Lebensraum for all the ethnic Aryans in the Ukraine. They planned to cancel the Russian leases on naval bases in the Crimea and give those naval bases to NATO. So Russia marched in and annexed the Crimea, and insisted that the Ukraine accept the Minsk Accords, that no ethnic Russian in the Donbass would be harmed. Germany and France promised to ensure that the Ukraine observed the Minsk Accords.

For the next eight years, the anti-Russian group in the Ukraine violated the Minsk Accords, and the former heads of Germany and France said they were just a ruse to buy time to reorganise the Ukrainian military, removing all ethnic Russian officers, and heavily arm that military.

The Ukraine planned a massacre of ethnic Russians in the Donbass in spring of 2022, so Russia invaded, and the US figure their trap had been sprung, and Russia will soon have a new regime that will allow Russia to be broken up just as the USSR was broken up.

But now the US want the PRC to invade Taiwan, after which the US will impose worldwide sanctions on the PRC that will destroy the PRC economy and will give advanced weapons to Taiwan that will enable them to destroy the invading PLA force.

The US has staged provocation after provocation, but the PRC have not responded.

This is because the PRC say they will not be ready to challenge the US before 2027, so they will put up with almost any provocation before then.

Meanwhile, the US have said they intend to force the PLA invasion of Taiwan before 2025.

Two for two beats 75%, so it is looking very much like Allison was right about hegemons and rising rivals.