We are sharing with you this new post writed by our speaker Javier Solana
“Among its many other effects, the COVID-19 crisis has intensified the pre-existing geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States. This tension has led many to warn of the “Thucydides trap,” a term coined by Harvard’s Graham T. Allison to refer to the heightened risk of conflict when an emerging power threatens to displace an established one. Allison’s theory takes its name from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ chronicle of the Peloponnesian War, in which Sparta defeated the rising city-state of Athens.
One important detail of this historical touchstone has passed largely unnoticed, however, even amid the ongoing pandemic: the determining factor in Sparta’s victory was a plague that killed about one-third of Athens’s population, including Pericles, the city’s leader.