Can the US let go its global dominance without war?

I've thought since the end of the Cold War that navigating an inevitable stormy downsizing of US ambition would be the urgent responsibility for any political leader who aspired to memorable accomplishment. (It's turned out it will be just as burdensome to mitigate climate chaos and to reduce domestic terror about demographic change. Trump's the proof.) Obama seemed to understand our need to give up on being the world's economic hegemon and biggest bully. He got damn little respect or support for his necessarily weak moves, well out ahead of elite consensus.

Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School explores whether a US war with China-on-the-rise is inevitable. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? looks at the question through a somewhat tortured historical framework. The thesis:

Thucydides went to the heart of the matter. When he turned the spotlight on "the rise of Athens and the fear this inspired in Sparta," he identified a primary driver at the root of some of history's most catastrophic and puzzling wars. Intentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress make a violent clash the rule, not the exception. ...As far ahead as the eye can see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides's Trap.

People who write within the discipline of international relations seem to feel free treat history as a handy bucket of threatening analogies, more or less applicable to whatever dynamics they want to write about. I get it; I sometimes succumb to the same temptation when trying to apply what I know of history to the present. But Allison's list of 15 analogous examples of hegemonic transitions strikes me as once-over-lightly cherry picking rather than bumpy, granular history, so I won't explore them here.

What I found more interesting was Allison's description of "what Xi's China wants." Like Trump, China's present ruler wants to make China great again; he's "driven by an indomitable determination to reclaim past greatness." After a couple of centuries of Western domination, Xi and most Chinese believe their huge, productive, inventive country is ready to resume its proper destiny leading the civilized world.

"Making China Great Again" means:

• Returning China to the predominance in Asia that it enjoyed before the West intruded.

• Reestablishing control over the territories of "greater China," including not just Xinjiang and Tibet on the mainland, but also Hong Kong and Taiwan.

• Recovering its historic sphere of influence along its borders and in the adjacent seas so that others give it the deference great nations have always demanded.

• Commanding the respect of other powers in the councils of the world.

Those ambitions hardly seem surprising for the country with the most people and the largest economy in the world. Real conflict is more likely to arise from their source:

At the core of these national goals is a civilizational creed that sees China as the center of the universe.

Allison takes his cues about Chinese ambitions from Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime, successful modernizing authoritarian ruler of Singapore, who of necessity knew a thing or two about co-existing with China. Lee helped him grasp Xi's vision of a revitalized (less corrupt) ruling Chinese Communist Party, reawakened Chinese patriotism, further exponential economic growth, and rebuilding a "fight and win" military. Though all this at once might seem like an unsustainable project, Allison concludes that Xi is well on the way to being able to tell the US to "butt out" of Asia.

So how will we react? Will we be governed by fear of China's rise? Allison sketches several terrifying scenarios that might lead -- mostly without malicious intention -- to a shooting war. He also suggests that China and a wise US might be able to redefine our relationship and achieve another long era of peace. Both parties know that war, especially with nukes, would mean Mutual Assured Destruction.

But a happy outcome is going to take wisdom -- currently lacking badly on our end. And China needs good fortune as well as ambition on theirs. It's worth remembering that China faces plenty of domestic challenges as has lately been very visible among the intelligentsia as well as in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and Taiwan.