In his highly acclaimed 2017 book Destined for War, Harvard professor Graham Allison assessed the likelihood that the United States and China would one day find themselves at war. Comparing the US-Chinese relationship to great-power rivalries all the way back to the Peloponnesian War of the 5th century BC, he concluded that the future risk of a conflagration was substantial. Like much current analysis of US-Chinese relations, however, he missed a crucial point: For all intents and purposes, the United States and China are already at war with each other. Even if their present slow-burn conflict may not produce the immediate devastation of a conventional hot war, its long-term consequences could prove no less dire.
