Resistance is useless! The zombies are coming! About eighteen months ago, I suggested that the impact of my research into the modern reception of Thucydides might be measured by how far discussions of world affairs in the British media remained uncontaminated by the ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme that crops up whenever someone in the US talks […]
Search Results for 'Thucydides Trap'
Resisting the Thucydides Trap
Posted in Musings, tagged China, Graham Allison, Thucydides trap, zombies on March 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Thucydides Trap, China and Trump
Posted in Musings, tagged China, Graham Allison, international relations, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, USA on December 19, 2016| 10 Comments »
What more is there to say about the Thucydides Trap? The issues with this as a reading of Thucydides and as a model for current US-China relations have been quite extensively discussed (see e.g. T. Greer’s excellent contribution to the current zenpundit.com Thucydides roundtable, or Seth Jaffe’s National Interest piece last year, if you’re sick […]
The Thucydides Trap Once Again
Posted in Research in Progress, Uncategorized, tagged China, South China Sea, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, USA, war on February 20, 2016| 7 Comments »
The ‘Thucydides Trap’, having infiltrated both Australasia and China from its incubation in the USA, now appears to have turned up in the UK, with a piece in the Independent (not sure if it’s just on the webpage, or… Actually, is there anything else?) entitled ‘The Next World War Will Be In The South China […]
Who Laid the Thucydides Trap?
Posted in Musings, tagged China, international relations, Thucydides trap, USA on August 20, 2015| 12 Comments »
The idea of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ has now established itself quite firmly in the journalistic mind as the defining dynamic of relations between the USA and China; a clear example of the power of the name of ‘Thucydides’, and the ways in which a meme can be created and disseminated in the age of social […]
The Real Thucydides Trap
Posted in Musings, tagged China, cognitive bias, history, international relations, politics, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, United States on May 7, 2014| 3 Comments »
Tensions continue to rise between Russia and Nato, while Ukraine edges closer to civil war; the question of the best way for the West to deal with Iran returns after a period of relative calm and quiet; looking further into the future, the possibility of confrontation between a rising China and a declining United States […]
The Thucydides Trap
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged China, international relations, Thucydides, United States on October 30, 2012| 3 Comments »
I’ve only just come across this example of the use of Thucydides in a discussion of contemporary international relations (thanks to Ben Earley for the reference): according to an article in the Financial Times by Graham Allison, Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, relations between China and the […]
Caught in a (Thucydides) Trap
Posted in Research in Progress, tagged China, Graham Allison, international relations, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, United States on June 17, 2017| Leave a Comment »
I’ve written on a number of occasions about Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ idea and why I disagree with it – indeed, I imagine that this is why the viewing stats for this blog have risen appreciably in recent weeks – but there’s nothing like reading someone else’s critical but largely wrong-headed review to prompt a […]
Weaponising Thucydides
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged international relations, Melian Dialogue, Russia, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, Twitter, Ukraine, war on April 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »
‘Doom-scrolling’ is, I imagine, a familiar thing, that many of us have been doing far too much of lately. You may not, however, have come across ‘professional doom-scrolling’, which unfortunately does not mean you get paid for it, but rather involves justification of the activity through some sort of “but I have to do this […]
Rat Trap
Posted in Musings, tagged Boris Johnson, China, Tacitus, Tacitus trap on April 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »
No, UK universities have not been taken over and corrupted by Chinese money and persuaded to orientate their research programmes; otherwise, surely there would be more evidence of serious investigation of the Tacitus Trap, one of the three critical traps that Xi Jinping warned China against back in 2014 (together with the Thucydides Trap and […]
Why Thucydides Hated Medieval History
Posted in Musings, tagged Herodotus, historiography, Thucydides on January 28, 2018| 2 Comments »
There’s a very peculiar article in today’s Observer, picking up on the predictably gormless comments earlier this week from Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Select Committee on Education, about medieval history being fine for those who want to pay for such a luxury but undeserving of public support. To be precise, most of the […]
Sphinx 