The precious powerful empire (before Britain) was undoubtedly the Spanish Empire.

The Spanish-American war was closer to the USA opportunistically feasting upon the remains of the fallen empire (The British already overtook the Spanish in terms of power).

It's hard to pinpoint the fall of the Spanish Empire. But it's even harder to point out military action between Spain and Britain (undoubtedly the rising star in the next centuries). There is the big war of Spanish Succession but that's more opportunistic and more like a major civil war that spilled out of Spain and across Europe.

Lots of war between Spain, HRR, France and other parties. But strangely not so much with Britain....

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In both Spanish and British cases, the real enemy the whole time was just a boatload of debt.

The UK was a declining power that had been absolutely gutted by war and owed huge debts to the US that it had accrued to fund the war. I believe Thucydides Trap is more about the situation we have now with the US and China where both are moving from strength to strength.

> No war between the UK and the US was needed.

No war was "needed" to settle who was #1, it was clear that we (the UK) simply couldn't maintain the empire as it was and we definitely couldn't have fought the US.

We went into WW2 the clear naval power in the world, We exited it in the #2 spot utterly broke.

In less than 4 years the US produced enough ships to eclipse our navy and did it while also producing ridiculously vast amounts of equipment for themselves and their allies across every sphere.

No one with a brain in our foreign office would have even contemplated poking that (and realistically while the US has at times been a questionable ally on the whole in that era they were a reliable ally).

In that kind of total war the side with the larger industrial base wins the war of attrition.

It doesn't matter if the enemy sinks ships if your production rate exceeds the sink rate on a sustained basis you win (somewhat related it's also why naval strategists have been sounding the clarion call about the fact that China now makes more than half of all global shipping, the US is somewhere around 1% - those peacetime yards/skilled works transfer over in a war).

The US did that, they won the war (or their part of it) in the factory lines/mines as much as they did on the actual front.

You are right. Thank you for correcting me. It never ceases to amaze me just how much I can be confidently mistaken about.

If you want to be pedantic, it actually dates back to 1980, in a talk at the Naval War College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap

As LarsDu88 mentioned above, its actually not this old. The idea is recent but is based on an ancient conflict. That is my mistake. The wiki article has interesting info on the examples that the originator saw:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap

Do you think Xi's comments are specifically that war is imminent?

Yes, but I liked that the article mentioned how Xi has been saying this for a long time.

I switched the link to Harvard.

Same thing that happened to USD, right? Once the USA stopped having to actually manufacture things to get money, it stopped actually manufacturing things.

China is step by step learning that communism actually sucks and doesn't work.

Unless you can have a super intelligence that can monitor every aspect of everything all the time to ensure optimal decisions. Hmmmm...

their yough unemployment rate sure is rising, it sure ain't great to be young Chinese looking for job now

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/business/china-youth-unem...

https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01203/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pedov5/oc...

also there are salary paycuts for people who already have work, my Chinese clients tried this, but not gonna accept it, I will rather lose such client than lower my rate, I am losing money by not increasing my rates over many years already despite huge EU cummulative inflation and EU salaries growth

by my experience visiting country after almost 10 years last year just by looking at salaries, restaurant prices, real estate prices/rent their economy seems to be stagnating in last 10 years, restaurant meal cost pretty much same as 10 years ago, same goes for entry level salaries like waitress, cook and other you can see in street

they are getting stronger overall, though doesn't seem like middle class is benefiting from it, my CN family bought apartment many years ago and they would have problem to sell it for same price, let alone make any profit on it

Relative to the US or Europe? I think you know the answer to that.