Taylor H Lunsford

Election Postmortem- What’s Next for America?

Donald Trump has been elected to a second term as President of the United States, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote. A national shift towards the Right pushed Trump to victory in every swing state from the Sun Belt to the Rest Belt and drove up the Republican share of the vote Continue reading
My First Self-Published Book: Lessons Learned

Here we are one month (and one major revision) after the launch of my first book through Kindle Direct Publishing- The Myth of the Thucydides Trap. It’s been a tremendous learning experience taking my manuscript through Amazon’s KDP process on my own, and I wanted to share some of my takeaways here for the benefit Continue reading
The Myth of the Thucydides Trap is Available Now!

My first published work, The Myth of the Thucydides Trap: China, America, and Great Power Conflict is available now on Amazon.com! My first published work, The Myth of the Thucydides Trap tackles one of the most influential ideas in modern US-China relations- that like ancient Athens and Sparta, America and China are locked in a Continue reading
What Do We Mean By “Five Thousand Years of Civilization”?

There may be no bigger cliche in Chinese studies than the claim that the country has a unique claim to “five thousand years of continuous history and civilization.” Chinese politicians weave it into speeches and policy documents, Chinese academics dutifully repeat it (even if they often know better), and Western commentators happily parrot it in Continue reading
China’s Strategic Culture: Ancient Roots to Modern Branches

We Westerners tend to believe that we are utterly different from our predecessors of even a century or two ago while other cultures have hardly changed at all over millennia. We like to think of ourselves as ‘liberated’ from the constraints of history- we can do whatever we like in the present- while others are Continue reading
Alex Garland’s Civil War: Imagining America in Tatters

One of the top-grossing movies this year is a dystopian thriller about a near-future America locked in brutal civil war. Should we be worried? This post contains light spoilers for the film. This past week, Civil War crossed the $100 million gross mark, making it one of the most successful films of 2024 so far Continue reading
What is the Thucydides Trap?

In my upcoming book The Myth of the Thucydides Trap, I debunk one of the most pervasive and influential ideas in US-China relations. But what is the Thucydides Trap, and how were so many leaders, scholars, and commentators won over by it? The Thucydides Trap was first popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison in Continue reading
introductions and announcements

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 Continue reading