In his attempt to analyse the current situation in South China Sea and East China Sea Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens argues that ‘East Asia will not stay the same [because] China’s rise has remade the landscape’. As he explains, the US cannot hold on a primacy that has been lost while China is not able to claim its own hegemony. This means that both countries need to find an efficient modus vivendi in order to create a new world order that will accommodate both. If this will not happen, Stephens argues, both Washington and Beijing will fail to learn the lesson of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war.
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