I. The Trap Is Not a Theory of Structures. It Is a Theory of Collective Nervous Systems. Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap is usually taught as a structural claim: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, war becomes likely. The structural reading is correct as far as it goes. But it is incomplete,…
Start with the paper trail, because the paper trail doesn’t care about your politics. The people who owned plantations in Jamaica and the people who financed railways in Lancashire were often not two different groups. They were the same families, keeping two sets of books, moving capital from one to the other as the political…
The Arithmetic of National Decline Every nation runs on a demographic ledger. Births minus deaths equals natural change. Immigration minus emigration equals net migration. Add them together and you get population growth or decline. The arithmetic is simple. The politics are not. For decades, the conventional wisdom in low-fertility countries has been that immigration can…
By an observer of the long cycle There is a story the commentariat keeps telling itself, and it is wrong. The story is that the transatlantic alliance is enduring a “rough patch” — a temporary spat between allies who will, once the current occupant of the White House leaves, return to business as usual. That…