To prevent war with China, study World War I … Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon professor of government at Harvard Kennedy School, for the WashPost:

• “The … structural cause of World War I follows a familiar historical pattern: a rapidly rising power, Germany, challenging the primacy of an established one, Great Britain, which had ruled the world for a century.”
• “In this dangerous dynamic — the Thucydides’s Trap — both rivals become extremely vulnerable to third-party provocations, or even accidents, that trigger a cascade of reactions, at the end of which they find themselves in a war neither wanted.”