Graham Allison's argument in Destined for War is that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, war follows far more often than anyone intends. Of the sixteen cases he studied, twelve ended in war. Not because either side wanted it, but because a brittle system turns small incidents into large ones. Five stories from the past month show that machinery running.

Taiwan is the trigger. China's military dwarfs Taiwan's, so Taiwan bet everything on cheap, spread-out weapons — missiles, mines, drones, civilian resistance — to make any invasion painfully costly, while running short on ammunition, rifles, fuel and medical supplies, with full reserve mobilization taking sixty to ninety days. Allison's parallel is 1914. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand did not create Europe's rivalry; it detonated one already primed. A blockade, an exercise gone wrong, a collision at sea, a mobilization read as the real thing — any of these could do the same work. That is Allison's example paraphrased, not a quotation from the book.

Technology is where the rivalry is actually being fought. China is now offering AI that works nearly as well for a small fraction of the cost, as much as 7 to 12 times cheaper, and mostly giving it away, which puts pressure on the profits underpinning American tech stocks and the retirement accounts tied to them. The infrastructure follows the same pattern: one national plan that moves data centers to the empty interior where cheap hydro, wind, and solar sit unused, avoiding the grid fights slowing the United States down. Allison's case here is Britain and Germany before 1914. German gains in steel, manufacturing and naval tonnage stopped looking commercial and started looking military. The danger is not AI. It is the habit of reading every gain by the other side as a loss for your own.

Then the contest turns coercive. China's counter-punch is huge: it could cut off rare earth exports again, which would cripple US chip, defense, and AI factory plans. Allison's most uncomfortable case is the United States and Japan in 1941. American restrictions on essential supplies convinced Tokyo that waiting meant growing weaker, and Japanese leaders chose a catastrophic gamble over slow decline. Nobody should read that as predicting another Pearl Harbor. Read it as what sanctions can do once the target concludes they exist to prevent its rise.

The rivalry is already spreading past East Asia. China quietly gave Iran 300 to 400 new shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, and whether or not every operational detail holds up, the shape is familiar: raise the cost of American action by supporting a third country without ever confronting the United States directly. That is the Cold War pattern — arms, technology, alliances and proxies, held short of direct war by channels and informal rules both sides understood.

The hardest part is domestic. America gave up its factories and the kind of jobs that once let one income buy a house. The winners owned assets and got richer on paper; the losers got cheap goods and lost stable, well-paid work. That grievance is what makes compromise nearly impossible. An American president negotiating with Beijing is not only managing China's capabilities, he is answering to voters who associate China's rise with the emptying of their own towns. Allison's conclusion follows from that. Avoiding this war takes more than diplomacy. It takes domestic economic policy good enough that every Chinese success stops reading as an American failure.