Cultural kinship, not merely power balance, prevents hegemonic war between great powers

Evidence

The missing hegemonic war in Western history is that between Great Britain and the United States, and presumably the peaceful shift from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana was in large part due to the close cultural kinship of the two societies. The absence of such kinship in the shifting power balance between the West and China does not make armed conflict certain but does make it more probable. The dynamism of Islam is the ongoing source of many relatively small fault line wars; the rise of China is the potential source of a big intercivilizational war of core states. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 559

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the materialist-realist view that power shifts alone explain war; pairs with Huntington’s general civilizational kinship thesis.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay comparing the Anglo-American peaceful transition with US-China relations today on cultural-distance grounds.