An Historical Analogy

There is an historical analogy worth exploring when thinking about China’s rise and America as the world’s status quo nation-state. Germany in the late Nineteenth century could be considered as similar to the China of today and the United Kingdom as similar to a contemporary America. For over a thousand years, German territory was a mix of hundreds of small bickering political entities continually brought down and humiliated by their more powerful European neighbors.

However, when Prussia united these various political entities into one nation-state, and after the new Germany was victorious over the French in the Franko-Prussian War of 1870-71, Imperial Germany rose to become the dominant country on the European continent. This threatened the United Kingdom and certainly figured as one of the primary causes of the First World War.

Could China and America be headed in the same direction on a similar collision course that contains its own tragic logic?