Great Power Strategic Competition And Its Behavioral Impact Mechanism

With the vicissitude of international structure and the rise and fall of national strength,the competition between rising new countries and the original powerful countries have taken place one after another in the world history.Thucydides wrote in the History of the Peloponnesian War that the real cause of the inevitability of war was the growth of Athens' power and the resulting fear of Sparta.Graham Allison,in his book For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides' s Trap?,studied 16 cases of rising and established powers,and found that only four of them achieved power transfer without war.As a result,his "Thucydides Trap" has become a resounding question in international relations circles.Getting out of the "Thucydides Trap" is undoubtedly difficult,but it is necessary to continue to think and study in depth.A great deal of research and attention has been paid to the fact that countries with similar political system and homogenous civilizations are more likely to avoid confrontation because they are better able to understand each other,thus helping to dispel fears.In fact,before the advent of global competition era,all great power games were regional.Therefore,based on the abundant previous research results,this paper attempts to examine the question from the perspective of strategic competition:Will the ever-increasing material power and the motive of confrontation caused by fear inevitably lead to war? Is it the growing power of the emerging countries or the fear of the conservative country that makes war inevitable? If there is no fear,will conservative countries allow the power of rising countries to continue to grow?Through the study and demonstration of the strategic competition among great powers,the behavior of strategic competition among great powers and its influencing mechanism,this paper holds that the strategic competition between great powers needs to meet three hypotheses: first,there are two opposing countries or groups in the region or in the world that have the motivation to eliminate the core rights and interests of the other side or vital forces;Second,the two sides will take a series of targeted strategic resource accumulation and capacity development in accordance with the goals.The third is to allow events to develop beyond the principles of reason and basic international norms in order to seek the possibility of gaining advantage and victory in circumstances where chance factors play a role.Then through the observation of the strategic competition behavior of great powers,it is found that each kind of behavior will increase or decrease the utility of the above three conditions in different degrees.In the end,strategic competition,with negative interactions,will push the risk to a higher level until war becomes the "best" means to achieve the stated goal of interest.Finally,through the case analysis,it is found that the way to avoid strategic competition leading to war is to realize the dissipation of intention,the collapse of strength or the reconciliation of interests through active strategic competition behavior.In other words,among the three conditions that promote the evolution of strategic competition,as long as both sides have one aspect to develop in a peaceful direction,war can be avoided.Therefore,the occurrence of war does not depend on the starry sky of history,but on the moral law in the hearts of mankind.