Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

As the American historian Graham Allison demonstrates, the vast majority of cases in world history when a rising power displaced another that was in decline resulted in war.[7] He refers to this phenomenon as “Thucydides’ Trap,” after the historian’s suggestion that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” But the Peloponnesian War was so devastating that it wasn’t Athens or even Sparta that took over as the hegemon of Hellenic civilization. Rather, it was Macedon, a state in the far north of the Greek world that no one paid much attention to in the middle of the fifth century BCE. Who might be the twenty-first-century iterations of Philip and Alexander the Great?

This feels like a good theory as several wars have broken out since the Pandemic - the Sahel, Middle East, and Eastern Europe have fallen into violence. I feel that the Pandemic destablized already fragile countries and forcred its people to seek dramatic change to acquire the things they needed to survive. Looking forward, I believe that a larger war will erupt - in fact, I feel it has already begun. The current conflicts will likely seep into other regions and bring other factions into the fray. The alliances created to prevent the spread of communism during the Soviet Union, and the alliances created to prevent Russia from regaining power after its fall, have tethered Western nations to one another militarily. This mutual protection policy that has existed for the last 30 years has placed many countries in a predicament - to rely on NATO or diplomatic relations with Russia & China. Depending.