Taylor H Lunsford

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Taylor Lunsford, a writer and translator based in Washington’s Puget Sound. I’m a trained historian and political scientist with degrees from Rice University, the University of Houston, and the Defense Language Institute, and I’m also a translator of modern and ancient Chinese who cut my teeth in the military and later moved on to Chinese historical sources, literature, and film. My interests cover everything from the ancient Roman economy and early Chinese philosophy up to modern global politics and the future of democracy. I’ll be using this site to post updates on my published works, historical commentary on current events (or vice versa), reviews and summaries of interesting materials I read, and anything else that feeds into my writing and research.

My first book, The Myth of the Thucydides Trap, will be available this Summer through Kindle Direct Publishing. In this book, I take on one of the most well-known and pervasive ideas in modern US-China relations: the Thucydides Trap, a unique dynamic between ‘rising’ and ‘ruling’ great powers that makes war extremely likely, even when both sides do their best to avoid it. The notion of the Trap was first popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison and quickly became a favorite among politicians, generals, and journalists across the globe. Xi Jinping has spoken on it, and so has Barack Obama. Congress has recieved briefings on the dangers of the Thucydides Trap and respected media outlets like the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New York Times have covered it in detail.

The problem is that they’ve all been duped by clever marketing: the Thucydides Trap is not real.

As I show in The Myth of the Thucydides Trap, Professor Allison’s thesis is built on junk data and junk theory. Although conflict between the US and China is a very real possibility, there is no historical ‘trap’ at work here. And where Allison’s original motivation in advancing the Thucydides Trap theory was to shake American and Chinese leaders out of what he saw as a dangerous complacency, I argue that he overcorrected by selling them a fraudulent argument that war is basically unavoidable. The Myth of the Thucydides Trap corrects this by dismantling the flimsy arguments at the heart of the Trap theory and arguing for a new understanding based on what China and the United States are doing now, rather than what other countries have done in the past.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll stay along for future updates. As Grian Chatten once said, thank you for getting the same train as me.