CONCEPT
Kindleberger Trap
Joseph Nye's formalization of Kindleberger's insight — the vacuum that emerges when a declining hegemon can no longer provide global public goods and a rising power is unwilling to, producing instability that damages all participants.
The Kindleberger Trap names the specific risk that a transition in global leadership leaves no one providing the public goods that international stability requires. Joseph Nye developed the concept from Kindleberger's analysis of the 1930s — when Britain could no longer play the hegemonic role and the United States was not yet willing to — and applied it to the twenty-first-century transition. Unlike the Thucydides Trap, which focuses on the risk of war between rising and established powers, the Kindleberger Trap focuses on the risk of collective action failure: not direct conflict but the absence of the coordination the international system requires.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The AI case exhibits Kindleberger Trap dynamics with unusual clarity. The United States, as the established technology hegemon, is simultaneously driving AI development and declining to exercise the governance leadership that historical hegemonic stability required. China, as the rising technology power, is building parallel AI infrastructure and declining to accept