Anzac Day has come and gone again...
My first memory of Anzac Day was watching my late grandfather march in my home town.
I would watch him march from one corner, and then jog to another vantage point so I could watch
him march past again.
Although he didn't talk about it, I discovered later that he fought at Villers Bretonneux...
I think he was 20 at the time...and one of the lucky ones to return home....
Whilst we remember the Anzacs we were reminded last night of the terror or war with
the movies The DamBusters and Saving Private Ryan being screened.
Another channel has regular war movies being screened every Monday night....
Which brings me to the Thucydides Trap...
"History is littered with examples of things that seemed like good ideas at the time, but that turned out to be disastrous. While we've recognized these pitfalls for a long time, we now have an official term for at least one of them. In 2015, Harvard political scientist and professor Graham Allison identified a scenario he calls the Thucydides Trap. Basically, the Thucydides Trap says that as a rising power challenges the dominance of an established power, that dominant power is likely to respond with violence. It's a model for predicting when warfare is likely between two nations, but also a way to propose alternative solutions meant to prevent warfare. After all, the whole point of identifying a trap is to avoid it.
According to Graham Allison's article, the Thucydides Trap is one of the great misjudgments of history. Nations overexert their growing influence, stronger nations see a threat to their power, and the result is warfare. When Allison presented this theory in 2015, he claimed that his research team at the Harvard-affiliated Belfer Center identified 16 cases over the last 500 years that mirrored the Sparta/Athens example of a growing power threatening a dominant one. Of those sixteen cases, twelve of them resulted in warfare.
While these cases drew from events across the last five centuries, perhaps the most notable example was the outbreak of World War I. In the early 20th century, Germany began industrializing rapidly under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Their economy skyrocketed, and they used this wealth to start building an industrial navy. The rapid and ambitious growth of Germany worried Europe's dominant power, Great Britain, and the British prime minister put more resources into their own militarization, starting an arms race. Prime Minister Eyre Crow even posed this question to the king: could German growth threaten the very existence of England?"
Etc etc....
I wonder if the Spratly Islands is the bait in the trap....
"The Spratly Islands dispute is an ongoing territorial dispute between China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, concerning "ownership" of the Spratly Islands, a group of islands and associated "maritime features" (reefs, banks, cays, etc.) located in the South China Sea. The dispute is characterised by diplomatic stalemate and the employment of military pressure techniques (such as military occupation of disputed territory) in the advancement of national territorial claims. All except Brunei occupy some of the maritime features.
There has been a sharp rise in media coverage owing mainly to China's increasingly vocal objection to the presence of American naval vessels transiting the area in order to assert the right to freedom of navigation within international waters. "
AND of course, we still have the covid 19 virus to deal with....
As they say in the classics....never underestimate the value of a red herring......
Have a super day everyone......
