Beyond the Trap

How Symbolic Grammars of Power May Rewrite Thucydides

It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable

— Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

War! It threatens! It looms menacingly, upon the horizon! War! The political scientist Graham Allison called this the 'Thucydides Trap'—the dangerous tendency of a dominant power to wage war when it senses that a rising challenger threatens to displace it. This rising menace of war between the United States and China isn’t inevitable, or is it? I leave the answer to that fated question to you, to time, and to the wisdom of statesmen—so rare in our time.

But today as America and China march to the precipice of war, I will not attempt prophecy. Instead, I will excavate the hidden grammar—historic, psychological, symbolic, and political—that structures this conflict, so that you may see beyond the propaganda, media manipulation, and weaponised fear designed to manufacture war’s consent. Only by acknowledging these forces can we glimpse a path to peace... or at least, survival. We ignore them to our peril.

All conflicts are born of history, and history unfolds as drama—civilisations clash inevitably, each with their own culture, language, history, peoples and politics. Individually, rarely do two people narrate the same event identically; we are condemned to divergent stories where even the barest facts shimmer with contradiction. Civilisations operate by very different symbolic grammars and until we grasp this, we will forever misread one another—misreading difference as defiance, nuance as hostility and the questioning of our most sacred principles as belligerence.

Our western civilisation, particularly, suffers from the dangerous conceit that our values are universal, self-evident, and all deviations from them are irrational, dangerous and heretical. This essay will excavate how we arrived at our perilous arrogance—and why it may bring us doom. For as we mistake our constructed reality as ‘natural law’, we are fated to weaponise misunderstanding. In this emerging multipolar age of great power confrontation, our weaponised ignorance will not only kill ideas—it will kill people. Your children’s future hangs on recognising that our ‘rational order’ is neither inevitable, innocent or indeed rational.

As the great Muslim jurist Imam al-Shafi'i whispered in moments of self-reflection: 'Oh eyes! Others have eyes too!'. Our last hope may rest on this simple, radical act—seeing the world through eyes not our own, and even to acquire the ability to see ourselves through the eyes of others. In a multipolar age, the ability to see events through differing vantage points is indeed a superpower.

The Birth of the European Grammar of Power

The United States—global hegemon since 1945—did not stumble blindly into power; it inherited an imperial grammar centuries in the making. It is the inheritor of a 600-year-old maritime dominion, its playbook written in the ink of papal bulls, the erasure of genocided peoples and the screaming blood and misery of slave plantations.

From Portugal’s caravels, to Britain’s frigates, to Nazi U-boats and to America’s drone equipped carrier strike groups, this is no mere succession of empires. It is the metastasis of an unacknowledged sacred grammar—forged in the Western Schism’s collapse, baptised in the fires of conquest, and perfected through the fiction of terra nullius—empty land as the justification for colonial land seizures.

The familiar story of great navigators, discoveries, trade routes and colonial conquest, conceals the hidden grammar. Fabricated to heal the wound of the Western Schism, forged in the collapse of papal authority and a remnant of sacralised domination of Europe and abroad: The Pope’s fantasy of the universal right to rule souls was bound to empires’ divine right to rule bodies, both in Europe and beyond.

This seed of fantasy, planted in 1418 sprouted its imaginary architecture to secure ‘the truth’ of its claim—in the slave forts of West Africa, in the Spanish Inquisition, in the UN’s gilded chambers, whispering the coded incantations, in Gaza, and now up against China today. We are possessed by this grammar; obeying it seems natural; as we read our obedience as the natural order of things.

In our personal stories, or as the psychoanalysts state: it is what we do not say that is just as revealing as what we do say; and it is so with our collective history. Just as individuals bury traumatic memories, so too does Western civilisation. The Western Schism - that moment when Christendom fractured into three warring papal claimants - should be central to the European origin story. But it is not!

The standard narrative presents Western civilisation as an inevitable evolutionary march towards reason and freedom. Peel back this comforting fiction, and we find a troubling underbelly: that the story of our civilisation’s progress, is the story of unprocessed trauma. Like a patient who retells stories of their relapses as stories of redemption, we recode genocides as "exceptions" and colonial violence as "civilising missions." The Thirty Years' War becomes a step toward tolerance rather than what it truly was - Europe compulsively reenacting the Schism's unresolved wound.

This isn't just academic. Until we face how our civilisation was born, built and perpetuated, the traumatic rupture - until we stop mistaking our defensive fictions for historical truths - we're doomed to keep repeating its violence in new forms.

The Western Schism

To understand the impact of the Western Schism let’s perform an imagination experiment. Together we will imagine a future, which repeats the Western Schism’s dynamics in events that we can understand today.

The Imaginary Schism (2035–2048)

It’s 2035 after Trump’s second term, he amends the constitution in ’The Eternal Mandate’ granting himself indefinite rule. He narrowly loses the election to Ramón G. de Guadeloupé. Pres. Ramón's support base is made up of mainly Latino, African American and the liberal coalition. Again as after his first term Trump refuses to concede the election.

This time the United States erupts into violent civil war, for 3 years during which Ramón supporters migrate South to escape Trump’s bloody pogroms in a period known as ‘The Great Sorting’. They carve a swathe of states—The Ramón Belt—stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After a year of heavy fighting (75,000 dead) Texas’s capital falls to Ramón in The Battle of Houston and he declares Austin, Texas, The Provisional Capital of Constitutional America. The Trumpists hold the rest of America declaring it a White Covenant Republic as the ethno-theocracy envisaged by the founding fathers. They maintain their capital in Washington. There are now two racially distinct Americas.

The Succession War (2048–2063)

Trump dies in 2048 in suspicious circumstances and Trump Jr. is enthroned as Trump II, Protector of the Covenant Republic. There were no elections. War erupts in Mississippi between the two Americas known as the The War of American Succession, during which both presidents accuse the other of seceding and both insist that they haven’t, the war lasts for 15 years. Exhausted in 2063 they declare a truce.

The truce is followed by 2 years of Trans-America negotiations to hold unified elections in 2065 to reunify the USA. Maria Sontal of Wyoming wins via her pragmatic Dakota Compromise, and both Trump II and Ramón refuse to concede. President Sontal splits in 2065, declaring the Prairie Republic, taking the states West of the Dakota line including Nebraska. Her rule is marked by ruthless political pragmatism. All three presidents maintain the fiction of a united America. Alaska in disgust secedes and merges with Canada as a Canadian territory. This state of affairs would continue for thirty-nine years.

The Negotiated Lie (2063–2073)

In year 2073, to resolve the matter, the military Pentagon Remnant the last unified institution, still believing in a unified America stepped in and placed all three presidents under house arrest. They decided to select unified America's next president by General Military Council. They succeeded in 2074 and installed President Ramon II, the son of Ramón as the 52nd president of America.

The Great Restoration (2074)

Ramón II is inaugurated in a bloody Restoration Ceremony in the ruins of the Capitol. In his inauguration speech, he preaches forgiveness and reconciliation, but his first act, after promises of clemency to a prominent political dissident, is to publicly execute this leading political thinker—Marie Klontal—who has been consistently calling for an end to American partisan politics. Her death is televised in all three zones, beginning the Terrorist Purge.

Ramón launches a purge against Klontal’s followers, with death squads targeting dissidents in all three zones, whether loyal to Ramónists, the Prairie realists, and the Covenant Remnant. All are hunted by integrated death squads under the pretext of national unity. Within weeks, Ramón II issues the Edict of Forgetting, annulling public memory of the American Schism and criminalising any attempt to preserve its history. Historians are detained, archives seized, and dissent reclassified as sedition. The General Military Council, architects of his ascent, justify the purge as the tragic price of restoration—a necessary erasure, they claim, to return America to a singular, unbroken nation.

Then Ramón committed his masterstroke. He declared war on Canada, ostensibly to reclaim Alaska, which had seceded in disgust and joined the Canadian Federation decades earlier. But the objective was far greater: the annexation of Canada itself, cast as an act of national defence. State media whispered a new doctrine—Canadian intelligence, in league with foreign powers, had orchestrated the American Schism to weaken the Republic and enable Russian expansion and territorial theft. The new narrative was that the enemy was not internal, the Schism had never happened and the real threat had always come from without.

Thus the final act of American restoration would not be healing, but conquest—an imperial expansion sanctified by paranoia and the total obliteration of the past.

What, then, would a 39-years interregnum of competing sovereignties, shifting allegiances, and factional myth-making do to a nation’s belief in itself and democracy? It would shatter it. The fantasy of American unity—already strained by centuries of unacknowledged violence—would not merely be broken; it becomes re-coded as a dangerous delusion, something whispered with suspicion or wielded as propaganda. The Constitution, once considered a sacred relic of legal order, becomes a spectral document—quoted by all, upheld by none. In its place emerges fragmentary charters, regional compacts, emergency decrees, and military protocols. Law ceases to be grounded in shared authority and becomes instead a performance of jurisdictional theatre. By 2074, the legitimacy of the United States would not be remembered as a fact but rehearsed as a ritual: invoked, costumed, and enforced—yet fundamentally empty. The American ideal would survive only as a myth, and like all imperial myths, it demands blood, fantasy and terror to make it real.

The Consequences of the Western Schism

This was the Church's reality during the Western Schism (1378–1417)—thirty-nine years of rival popes in Rome, Avignon, and Pisa, each claiming divine authority, whilst fighting each other. Its 'resolution' in 1417 was no restoration, but a shifting of focus by violence. Like the installation of Ramón, Pope Martin V, was installed by kings desperate for order, he inherited a Church that had already burned Jan Hus at the stake, despite assuring him his safety, in 1415. All now knew the terrible cost of dissent. Like Ramón’s attack on Canada, Martin’s 1418 bull Sane Charissimus escalated the crisis: endorsing genocide against dissident Christians, by targeting Hussites, and it gave papal sanction to King John I of Portugal, for his African conquests, offering crusade indulgences for the subjugation of 'Saracens and infidels.’.

This was the Schism's poisoned fruit—not unity, but a license for holy violence and terror. Within decades, Nicholas V's Dum Diversas of 1452 would explicitly authorise reducing pagans—Africans—to 'perpetual slavery,' while the Spanish Inquisition perfected the art of purification through terror. The pattern was set: when legitimacy fractures, institutions rebuild themselves on the bodies of the 'other.’.

Both our imaginary and the real schism crossed a psychic line of no return: for thirty-nine years is a generation. A generation is raised in fracture and weaned on competing truths. For these children, there was no ‘before.’ No unity to mourn, only schism to survive. This was the decisive pivot. Afterward, the old fantasy—of a single Church, a single America—could not be restored, only weaponised. The past became heresy. The future, a ritual of forgetting and erasure. Yet within the body politic's deepest strata, an indelible remembering persisted - the silent syntax of self-preservation, the unconscious grammar of a rupture too profound to articulate. Like phantom pain in a severed limb, this hidden knowledge would bear strange fruit for centuries to come.

So too in our fictional America. Ramón II’s Restoration does not heal—it remembers. But what it remembers is not truth or justice, but the form of sacrifice. Like Martin V’s Rome, it demands bodies. It demands forgetting. And it demands that its violence be sanctified, not as tyranny, but like Gaza, as the price of peace.

The Western Schism did more than collapse trust in the pope—it ruptured belief in the Church, in divine order, and even in the kings who installed and reinstalled popes in pursuit of stability. Its aftermath did not merely damage ecclesiastical authority; it birthed modern national sovereignty. As papal power waned, monarchs grew stronger, consolidating their rule not by divine right, but by bureaucratic and military means. Paradoxically it was monarchy that would see its death by the logic unleashed.

But the consequences reached further. When faith in the pope collapsed, so too did the idea that God could be mediated by a single man. This fracture paved the way for the Protestant Reformation, which challenged not only papal supremacy but the coherence of the Christian cosmos itself. In time, thinkers began to doubt the very foundations of religion, replacing divine revelation with reason, and God with science. The unhealed fear of instability seeded a new epistemology: one that preferred systems over sovereigns, consensus over dogma, and mechanisms of accountability over metaphysical truth.

Out of this emerged victorious the conciliar principle—decision by council, by vote, which had solved the Western Schism. What was once a response to ecclesial chaos became the operating logic of modern governance. Parliaments, republics, transnational institutions like the United Nations—all are metastasised artefacts of the Schism, designed to prevent any one man from claiming ultimate truth. And yet, the other legacy of the Schism is darker still: war as a structural solution to internal division. It was not only theologians who learned this lesson, but kings, emperors, and presidents—too many to name. In the shadow of Schism, modern politics was born: fragile, procedural, violent, and haunted by the absence of a centre that can no longer be trusted to hold. The enlightenment wasn’t innovation but recomposition of collapsed theological coherence in new language and deferred terms.

Martin V is the unacknowledged architect of the symbolic grammar of colonial maritime expansion—its sacralised violence, its libidinal legal codes, and the traumatic core of the European psyche it both concealed and unleashed.

Modernity did not emerge from the Reformation, nor the Enlightenment—it emerged from a traumatic wound. The Schism was not healed. Its wounding was ritualised into deferral, translated, and exported. And so the world we inherit speaks its language, even if it no longer remembers its name.

The Schism’s wound festered for two centuries—until Westphalia formalised what 1417 had only begun: sovereignty severed from divine sanction. It did not invent the break; it merely acknowledged it. And in a final irony, its architecture was shaped by a churchman—Cardinal Richelieu.

The Treaty of Westphalia, in particular, can be seen as a deferred resolution to the theological wound of the Schism. When kings could influence the selection of popes, the sacred seal of divine authority was broken. If the Pope could be shaped by kings, then he was no longer the singular voice of God. Symbolically, this was the death of God within the political calculus. Once the Pope was dethroned, the King—whose legitimacy depended on the Pope—was vulnerable. And so, with the Reformation, the unthinkable became possible: to leave the Pope was to prepare the ground to leave the King. In Lacanian terms, this was the loss of the Name-of-the-Father, the foreclosure of the signifier that anchored the symbolic order. Democracy emerged not out of idealism, but from this trauma—becoming sensible only after the symbolic collapse of divine sovereignty.

This symbolic technique became the architecture of empire. Britain in particular exported this conciliar grammar to its colonies. Local parliaments, advisory councils, and representative structures were established not merely to administer, but to symbolically incorporate the periphery into the imperial core. This allowed for a modular, distributed governance system—capable of adapting to local contexts while maintaining a coherent imperial identity. The colonial Blue Book served as the binding thread: a documentary sutra that linked each colony to the metropole through reporting, metrics, and procedural accountability.

What this enabled was something extraordinary: the possibility for the colony to become a nation-state without leaving the imperial structure. So long as maritime infrastructure remained in place—shipping lanes, insurance regimes, legal codes—the newly “independent” nation remained dependent. The grammar of its sovereignty was borrowed. The law it practiced, the trade it relied on, the legitimacy it claimed—all remained inscribed within the imperial order.

This is the true mark of the American Century. The United States perfected what Britain had initiated: an empire without colonies. A symbolic system in which states could be declared free, while remaining tied to networks of legal, financial, and infrastructural dependence. It is not sovereignty that was granted, but symbolic inclusion within a system whose grammar remained controlled by the metropole. For it to continue to work the fantasy of this as the order of things, as natural is necessary. But what happens when the fantasy is challenged? What happens when alternatives appear?

What happens when it becomes clear that democracy is not necessary for markets to function? When prosperity thrives without American tutelage? When technological innovation is no longer dependent upon Silicon Valley?

What happens when a new pole emerges—one with a different grammar? Is Thucydides right?

How China Locked its Holy Fire in a Stove

This analysis is my working through the dynamics of contemporary China and it is a provisional view. I may disagree with this entirely in a decade. Please read this as an exploration and another way of seeing what is happening in our world.

For one hundred years—from 1839 to 1949—Western diplomats and strategists regarded China as a decaying civilisation: alive but ailing, vast yet vulnerable. It needed to be held together just enough to function as a market, but kept weak enough to prevent it from dictating the terms. They misunderstood the consequences of the collapse of Chinese sovereignty. They mistook opportunity for order, even as the void grew beneath their feet. They saw trade routes, not a cosmology in collapse. They framed China as a market to penetrate, a state to modernise, or a threat to contain—but never as a world unravelling from within.

They confused the absence of law with inherent Oriental corruption. They misread the death of Heaven—the principle which underpinned Chinese sovereignty— as mere bureaucratic failure. In this, they were blinded by their own salvific arrogance.

And then when Mao emerged—not as another rebel, but as the creature of civilisational reinscription—they saw only communism, never the new cosmos being forged in flame and holy fire. For in their symbolic grammar, deviation from the path of liberal salvation renders you a heretic. Mao could only be read as heretic—never as sovereign, never as the author of a new grammar. They were blind to the dynamics of Maoist destruction, blind to the reconstruction–destruction cycles through which China’s psychological landscape was being reforged.

They have failed to grasp the geopolitical implications of the project.

I am not Mao, and I am not required to apologise for him. But the Western reading of Mao demands just that—criticism as ritual allegiance to political-theological orthodoxy. And that is precisely what blinds us.

If we are to see clearly, we must learn to look without flinching—to gaze directly into the psychological bare life of the Maoist event. Because that, in truth, is what we now face.

Mao single-handedly destroyed the traditional Mandate of Heaven. Then he destroyed the revolutionary mandate that had destroyed the Mandate of Heaven. He held China within this psychological furnace for three years short of a generation. Mao was the only mandate. Heaven was Mao. Mao was China. And China was Mao.

The Chinese Communist Party was Mao—and it was cyclically purified of all that would not submit to Mao-ification. When Mao was finished, the Party was left with no option but to sacralise his flame and imprison his spirit in structure—as a resource to be extracted, managed, and performed.

Failure to grasp that the “Century of Humiliation” is China’s Western Schism—inflicted by foreign hands and closed by Mao’s terrible inscription—is geopolitical stupidity.

For the Chinese, Mao was not merely a ruler. He was their deliverance: the emergence of a locus of holy consuming fire. We do not have to agree. But it is what it is.

And now—Xi Jinping’s genius is to secure and inscribe the CCP as Mandate, as Heaven, and as China. He does not repeat Mao’s fire. He renders it coherent. In doing so, he constructs a bridge to China’s Confucian past—but one emptied of metaphysical Heaven.

What is birthed is a materialist machine of Leninist architecture, functioning simultaneously as Mandate, as Heaven, and as China itself.

This is not a cult. It is a structural totality.

This grammar is now fused: CCP = China = Heaven = Mandate. Break this grammar, and you do not merely destabilise a regime—you break China.

Xi’s libidinal impulse is not salvific. It is geopolitical. He seeks to return China to its ancient self-image: the balanced and balancing centre of the world. Not a messiah, but a centre. And in China’s cosmological vision, only China can be China.

Xi and the CCP know they cannot afford another traumatic eruption. A neo-Mao would fracture the structure. And so, in classic trauma deferral, they have enthroned Mao as a spiritual principle and built a surveillance state to contain him.

Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is not just policy—it is symbolic recoding.

It re-centres China as the axial civilisation, reconnecting its body to the world without fire, without rupture. As a land power with vast borders, China does not need subjugation to hold order. It needs seduction. And that is precisely what “win–win architecture” achieves.

Sea powers conquer by controlling trade routes. Land powers endure by drawing others into gravitational alignment.
Seduction, not domination, is the ancient language of imperial centrality. And Xi speaks it fluently.

Misreading the Other, Misreading Ourselves

We require a psychopolitics capable of breaking out of the prison of our current theological politics—one that allows us to see ourselves not as rational arbiters of global order, but as bearers of a symbolic system we rarely question, yet constantly export.

Without this reckoning, we will continue to misread the other.
We will confuse difference with defiance.

We will project our theological anxieties onto foreign sovereignty, and call it democracy.

We will condemn civilisational healing as ideological blasphemy.
And we will march, once again, into catastrophe.

This is not a call to agreement. It is a call to symbolic humility.
To recognise that our order is not natural.

That we are not free from the ruins of our own metaphysics.
That no meaningful diplomacy is possible without first learning to dwell within the ruins—together.

Without this, we are not engaging in diplomacy at all.

We are simply hallucinating with others in the room.

And in that, we are doomed.

For China is not our inherent enemy—
we are.

This work stands in conversation with the quiet murmurs and incendiary ruptures of those who taught me to see beneath the veil:
Eric Hobsbawm, Ian Dallas, Karl Marx, Giorgio Agamben, Martin Heidegger, Frantz Fanon, Sylv]ia Wynter, Jacques Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, C.L.R. James, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Lewis Mumford, Mark Fisher, Byung-Chul Han, Kang Youwei, Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, Leo Tolstoy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, James Clavell, Johan Galtung, Ibn Khaldūn, and D. H. Lawrence.

Their voices are not cited here—they are breathed through.