My Take | The ‘Kindleberger Trap’ for China and the United States
- The real danger to the US as a hegemon is not that China will act irresponsibly, but rather responsibly as a recognised pre-eminent global power
The 2010s-20s are looking a lot like the 1930s. That’s the view of some serious Western commentators. I don’t know if they are right; I certainly hope not, given what happened after 1939 in Europe, and after 1937 in China (not counting the Manchuria invasion by imperial Japan in 1931).
Still, it’s an intriguing perspective, and it’s worth pondering. The Russian invasion of Ukraine makes it all the more pressing. One such “we’re back to the 1930s” view has been expressed as the “Kindleberger Trap”, a term, so far as I know, that was first coined by influential Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye. He was, perhaps, jealous of the success of his Harvard colleague Graham Allison with his far more popular “Thucydides Trap”.
While the latter term has to do with geopolitics, the former is economic. Some people consider China and America as being trapped in both the Kindleberger and Thucydides dilemmas. Nye thought that was the case as early as 2017, when he first proposed the term. The Ukrainian-Russian war and China’s ambiguous stance on it make Nye almost prescient.
I read in a book review that The United States vs China, by Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, presents an analysis of the current state of US-China relations based on the concepts of the two traps; I have not read the book, however.
Charles Kindleberger and his trap
Many investors would have read Charles Kindleberger’s classic Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. But he is also associated with something called “hegemonic stability theory” in international relations. A name like that has no hope of catching on with the general public; Nye made a valiant attempt with the Kindleberger Trap.
