Finding Thucydides’ Trap
A Fellowship, a Coup, and the Echo of Ancient Wars
A Harvard fellowship during the Reagan years introduced me to Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” just as Fiji descended into coup politics and the Cold War itself began quietly shifting.
I like to think that I am modest about my achievements — a view happily reinforced by critics who would say I have plenty to be modest about.
I first came across the idea of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ years ago. I studied under Graham Allison, who later popularised the term that Xi Jinping referenced in discussions with Donald Trump.
Also published - Ciguatera poisoning spreads quietly across the Pacific.
The real problem is not usually death. It is a prolonged disability, in some cases years. In some Pacific island communities, sufferers are described as becoming “ghost-like”: exhausted, unable to work properly, unable to tolerate alcohol or certain foods, and vulnerable to recurring neurological symptoms long after the original poisoning.
In 1986, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Harkness Fellowship, from the Commonwealth Fund of New York. The foundation had been established in the United States by Anna Harkness in 1918, and her son Edward Stephen Harkness later created the fellowships as a kind of American counterpart to the Rhodes Scholarships, enabling Commonwealth graduates to study in the United States. The organisation was headquartered in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York.
I suspect a reference from former boss Tupua Tamasese Efi carried enormous weight in me being lucky enough to obtain a Harkness Fellowship. The support of Gerald Hensley, then head of New Zealand’s Prime Minister’s Department, probably did not hurt either.
Once awarded the fellowship, I had to decide how to use it. Harkness had strong ideas of its own, and before long I found myself at Harvard Kennedy School for a year, and then working in the United States Congress in Washington.
Harkness also had a rule requiring extensive travel in the United States, which my family and I achieved with a V8 Oldsmobile station wagon and a tent. Another story for another time. This is about the Thucydides Trap.
