Can China and America beat the odds?

The esteemed Graham Allison asks the trillion-dollar geopolitical question: 

Simply put, can the United States and China escape Thucydides Trap? 

In 11 of 15 cases since 1500 in which a rising power rivaled a ruling power, the outcome was war. ...

More than 2,000 years ago, Thucydides, the Athenian general and historian, offered a brilliant insight about the cause of the Peloponnesian War when he identified not one but two variables in such cases. As he famously wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

Thucydides knew it was more complicated than that. But readers today should ask themselves the following: how could a peripheral clash between the cities of Corinth and Corcyra in the fifth century B.C. have triggered a cascade that ended in catastrophe for both Athenians and Spartans? It is the dynamic inherent when a rising power becomes more confident, a ruling power fears losing its edge, and entangling alliances on each side drive the parties toward war.

 Financial Times's Gideon Rachman echoes:

... by 2016, China’s economy is likely to be larger than that of the US.  This prediction – made by both the International Monetary Fund and the OECD, the club of industrialised nations – is so sensitive that simply to state it invites howls of denial in the US....

It is true that, even after China becomes the world’s largest economy, the average American will be far richer than the average Chinese. It is also true that the US military has a sophistication that China is not yet close to matching. ...

But that cannot disguise the fact that China’s rise means that America’s reign as sole superpower is coming to a close. The central geopolitical question of our time is how the two countries deal with the shift.