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- [00:01]
A
Paul Kennedy on the ChinaTalk podcast. What a profound honor. Kennedy is my favorite living historian and the person whose writing has most influenced my intellectual development and shaped what you hear on this podcast Every week. I'm just going to run through some takes on his books for 30 seconds. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers an epochal work of scholarship tracing great power transitions from 1500 to the present. And it is gripping and just sees the forest for the trees in ways few pieces of writing I've ever come across had. You know. Equally impressive in different ways is this book the Rise of Anglo German antagonism, 1860-1914. Not only is it God tier diplomacy, it also, through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political and cultural dementias of Anglo German relations, gives you a feel for the era like few books have ever know transported me. Also fascinating sort of US China analogies that we'll get into at some point in this podcast. His two most recent works are the reason you hear military coverage on China Talk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire theaters in World War II. And his latest, Victory at Sea, Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II is a sweeping history of of one of the most radical transformations of the balance of military power from the mid-1930s, where America was just kind of around, to after World War II, where all of a sudden, you know, there was no other naval competitor really to speak of. And not to be overlooked, The Parliament of Man, A History of the United nations, got me interested in international organizations in the first place, and gave me my senior thesis topic about the creation of the un. More than anything, Kennedy's work taught me the importance of reading every page, sweating the details, really caring about the individuals acting on world events, but also taking the time to step back and understand what's important and really matters over the long term for the fate of nations. Over the course of this episode, we'll pick up themes from all of this scholarship. Professor, thank you so much for coming on chinatalk.
- [02:11]
B
Thank you. Thanks for having me back again.
- [02:14]
A
What is national power and why does it matter?
- [02:18]
B
Since way back in the midst of struggle between different tribes, I suppose, and later on, larger groupings of peoples with their symbols, with their more organized armies, within particular, the emergence of the modern nation state. Round about the year 1500, as historians very roughly dated, a nation state with its own capacity to raise taxes and its own capacity to conscript and enroll men to fight for it, under the direction of Whether it was a Dutch republic or Spanish monarchy, since that time of the coming of the nation state in Western Europe and then its imitations across the globe, this thing we call sometimes the country, sometimes the nation, sometimes the state has existed in a. What political scientists would call an anarchic international system, anarchy, not necessarily meaning everybody's slaughtering everybody else, simply that there is no higher authority which controls world affairs. We list in the list of the countries which are member states of the United Nations General assembly approximately 189 or 192 nation states, large and small. We give them all a membership, a vote in that United Nations General Assembly. Almost all of them have some sort of diplomatic service as well as a domestic home service, have a government and a constitution of one form or the other, and interact with the other nation states, the other players in the system. And because the decisions which they take over time impact individuals in different sorts of ways. We pay attention to this. We pay attention to what is called international history. We pay attention to that because we know that there are stories of the coming of the First World War and the coming of the Second World War, where this great power system, in terms of a relatively harmonious relationship between the nation states, broke down into massive and expensive and bloody warfare. So it behooves us to understand this great power system and the nation states which play such a role within the system.
- [05:06]
A
I want to start with this quote from a German politician in 1903, which sort of comes back to your idea of tribes. Right. Edward Bernstein, in a debate between the left and right in the Reichstag over Anglo German trade relations, said, the entire question is this. When do we consider the position of one land to another and the manner of jealous, acquisitive tribes which, if one robs, the other is robbed? And when do we consider it from a stand. From the standpoint of a peaceful exchange of nations?
- [05:41]
B
A nice quote from Bernstein, who was one of the leaders of the left, liberal and progressive parties in Imperial Germany, which, of course, were somewhat swept away with the coming of War in 1914. But he was still optimistic then. On the other hand, you can tell from his question he poses in that Reichstag debate about essentially two big and contradictory and distinct versions of understanding international affairs. Was international affairs to be regarded as the benign relationship between these advanced states and societies in which you traded with each other? In which, as a known fact, Great Britain in 1903, when Bernstein was speaking, was the number one commercial partner of Imperial Germany. Germany relied so much upon exporting many of its manufactured goods to the UK market. The UK exported a large amount of imperial and tropical produce to the German market. So harmonious interchange of commercial goods between states as they are harmonious interchange of their ideas of university students, of travelers, of tourists. That's the benign view of international relations. And the more malign, suspicious or competitive view is that these are rival tribes. They are in some sort of inherent, some natural fighting, suspicious relationship each to the other. One is a hostile relationship as so described. The other is a benign and friendly relationship. As the years evolved towards 1914, these two interpretations of international affairs were strongly contested. Because if one won and prevailed, all would be, well, benign trade would rise. If the other was true, then you had to keep your weapons sharp. You had to keep your navies big and strong. You had to have intelligence systems gathering intelligence about what the other might be up to. You had to be suspicious rather than trusting. Those are two really different views of world affairs.
- [08:29]
A
The answer, of course, is both, right, like humanity would not have been able to reach the heights it is today if we didn't figure out how to cooperate with each other. But you know, looking over the past 500,000, 5,000 years, there's, there are moments in time that happens, particularly when it comes to great powers, where that mindset shifts. Like you raise this fascinating sort of counterfactual of, you know, England basically not being stressed out whatsoever with America's rise, even though, you know, they have a past history of fighting wars and the sort of ties that bind thing, there were plenty of those also between, between Germany and the United Kingdom. So I mean, is there a theory about when, you know, when, what's the sort of like independent variable for when the mindsets start to shift around? We can cooperate with these guys versus, you know, we can't really in the end.
- [09:34]
B
This is a question I pose to my students interested in international affairs and why systems break down. In the late 19th century, the number one industrial trading naval power, Great Britain, was finding the world less and less comfortable because its relative share was diminishing. And the two fast rising countries which were diminishing those shares were of course, Imperial Germany on the one side and the United States of America on the other side. And yet, as you allude to the story, is that the British turn in an ever more friendly, almost not quite, but almost contractual relationship to the United States and turn to a ever less friendly, ever more suspicious relationship to Imperial Germany. Now why should Great Britain, why should these relatively sane and intelligent decision makers in Whitehall turn against country C, but turn in favor of country B. And so you can toss out some of the major and obvious reasons and ask students to try to weight them or evaluate their significance. One is geography, one is sheer distance. Even if you are, if it is a rising great power, if it is 3,000 miles away, that's the less of a problem than if this rising great power is just 15 hours steaming across the North Sea in the middle of the night. If that rising great power on the other side of the Atlantic was as it threatened to be back in the 1840s and 1860s, a country which might gobble up your dominion state of Canada, that would be different. But by 1903 or so, American Canadian relations and disputes over borders and seal fisheries and other things had been resolved so it was not a hostile threat from this distant rising power across the Atlantic. Then other historians would point to the fact that there is the enormous advantage of the common language. You could speak to each other, feel part of a long standing English cultural world, which despite the fact that the United States was such a mix, a polyglot nation of all sorts of cultural inputs, the predominance around the turn of a century among the American elites was an Anglo predominance. That helped. It's helped that there was a whole number of American politicians from Teddy Roosevelt onwards who grew up very much in this Anglo historical tradition and that there were people on the UK side once the elderly, suspicious Lord Salisbury had passed on, who were rather firm Americanophile. Then there is the issue of ideology. An autocratic nation on one side, that is imperial Germany, a democratic parliamentary or congressional nation on the other side. So you can start listing a whole number of the reasons why it was relatively easy for the British to see the rise of the United States as not a threat, and a whole bunch of reasons why they were much more cautious and suspicious about the relative rise of, of imperial Germany's power.
- [13:24]
A
I think regardless of whether you know, what direction England would have gone, it's. It seems to make sense that they would pick one or the other to try to be friends with. And I want to sort of zoom out from that to this like broader balancing function that happens throughout history. You know what strikes me over the course of reading rereading the rise and fall of Anglo German antagonism is just all of the sort of like. It almost feels mechanical, like balancing functions that are happening at any moment in time, you know. Can you talk a little bit about that in the context of moments of great power transitions?
- [14:03]
B
Yes, again, I think I would start with ideology. And cultural assumptions about whether the rise, whether the existence of another larger great number one great power was something from the German side to be regarded as potential threat because it could hold you back or restrain you. And cultural assumption that a rise of another great nation and its economy was or was not a challenge to yourself and your status quo. I say that because we know that in, say, Levi Coin and Edwardian Britain, there existed a very, very strong liberal internationalist set of assumptions not shared by them all, but strong enough to be pretty dominant in much of Parliament. But the rise and success of another nation's economy was to be applauded, was a good thing that they, too, as they. As their standard of living grew, then that was ever more a good market for certain types of British and imperial wares. And there was nothing to be frightened about it, as opposed to a different mentality, which was to say that any rise which shifted the relative position, the relative power share of us, is to be regarded with some distaste and concern. Jordan, you may or may not know that many years ago, when I was induced or inducted into the Royal Historical Society, you are allowed to present a scholarly article to the Proceedings of a Royal Historical Society. And I chose then a piece called Idealists and Realists in British foreign policy from 1865 to 1939, which is essentially the years in which we're talking about here. And, okay, I set them up as two almost contradictory stereotypes, but in some ways they were always contradicting each other. The rise of German trade is a good thing, the liberal internationalists would say, because it enhances the overall prosperity and commerce of the globe. The rise of German industry is a bad thing because it's potentially a threat to us. I cited a visit by the British newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, where he has his driver take him on a tour of the great Ruhr Gobit and the Rhineland to see all of the German massive iron and steel and coal facilities around 1908. And he comes back and he writes to a colleague, every one of those great chimneys pointing up into the sky is essentially great gun barrels pointing at England, right? So that's an extraordinary quotation, if you think about it. He instantly turns the industrial prowess of a new factory nation into something which is potentially going to challenge the British Empire.
- [17:38]
A
So I think the sort of, you know, there's two pieces of causation here. First is like you have, you know, it's all fine and good when other people are growing until it hits a certain threshold where they have enough kind of like latent Juice to really start to get in your way. But at the other side, right, you know, we have Germany that was content to like do land stuff in Europe. And then at a certain point you get this real politic, you decide that, you know, for whatever reason, domestic political, foreign policy, national power, greatness or otherwise, they decide that both colonies are a thing that they need and a giant navy is a thing that they need. And sort of once you and, and I guess, like I'm curious sort of how you think about those two sides of the picture. Like, is it almost inevitable for that liberal internationalism to start to fall away once someone else starts growing enough? And is it also inevitable once kind of powers reach that, you know, number three, number two, trending upward place on the global stage, do they just start to feel their oats and decide that national aggrandizement from a sort of territorial growth and you know, military power perspective is something that it's in their birthright to pursue? And you know, obviously folks, we're talking both about Germany, UK and you know, I think the China echoes of today are evident, though maybe we'll get to them more explicitly later in the conversation.
- [19:17]
B
The China echoes are certainly around and we should come back to that. There is the issue though, which I want people to think about, of proximity, geography, as I used the word a few minutes ago. Even today, with the rise of say a much larger Chinese navy, there is a wide pacific to like temper down or relativize the size and the nature of that threat. A large growing industrial and big navy Germany under an erratic Kaiser Wilhelm. And then I think that means we have to bring in the personal idiosyncratic aspect of history. But even if there had been a truly benign democratic Germany under a constitutional monarch like George V, rather than the Kaiser with his power to be giving directions to armies and navies, even if that happened, was it just going to be the fact that a very, very large German navy coming in and out of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel and Hamburg was just a bit too close? I scratched my head about that. Is there ever a time, is there ever a place where two very large powers with two very, very large armies or navies or air forces have felt comfortable with another power so very close. There's another comparator here for people to think about. Around about 1902, in order to get some relief from imperial pressures on their interests in the Far east, the British came into what was going to be a long standing alliance relationship with the rising country of Japan, Japan itself, which was going to be building a modern outward looking navy. Japan itself, which was to be moving into parts of the Asian mainland. And that didn't seem so threatening at 8,000 miles away. So I do wonder, you know, whether distance in the first place, then cultural ideological similarity or antagonism and then trade rivalries and other things put together. Bom a complex explanation as to why Britain found it so much more difficult to deal with and be reconciled to a rising Germany than to a rising United States.
- [22:05]
A
So you close this book by saying that unless the Germans surrendered their desire and inherent capacity to alter the existing order in Europe and overseas, or unless the British were prepared to voluntarily accept a great change in that order, then their vital interests remain diametrically opposed. And you know, this is sort of rhymes with something that Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger said, you know, in their foreign policy article of their vision of victory with China is basically like we have to compete with them until they sort of give up on military modernization and you know, decide that they want to be friends with everyone in a way that's like convincing and verifiable. And you know, I guess it's a question of like, is that ever a reasonable expectation for a country that has enough productive energy to get to the number two slot in the first place for, you know, a society to have as much enlightenment to, you know, to, to dial back? I mean, you know, the fascinating thing about Germany in that era, right, was like all the traditional trend lines were pointing in their direction. They had the best, you know, they had the best technology, they were growing the fastest, the largest productive forces. And had they, you know, triggered this like antibody, global antibody Mechanism, you know, 10 or 20 years late after 1914, we may be looking at a very different world today. But you know, obviously that wasn't the case. And that's a sort of similar story that you can point to with, you know, with China and she over the past ten years as well.
- [23:43]
B
It would take a big concession, an act of inordinate political wisdom for the rising successful number two to say, okay, I just am going to try to understand the neuralgia of that number one, as we become more and more a success story. So I am going to be superbly clever here and I'm going to tamper down the shape and the size of the Imperial German Navy. So it would be overseas cruiser fleet Navy, it would be a defensive in home orders Navy. It would not be a large, powerful, fast battlefleet navy put into German ports which are only, as I say, 20 hours steaming from the east coast of England. We get that. So we are going to invest our energies ever more into more successful industrial production, science, technology, innovation, overseas commerce. But we're not going to hit the neuralgic point of a navy and we're going to take a risk. The risk would be that this dominant imperial number one would kind of in some contestations in the future over Samoa or southwest Africa, kick us around. And here is Tirpitz saying once we have a big navy we will never be kicked around again. So we're going to go for a very bold strategy of reducing our naval overseas power. Because in the largest sense of the word of prudent advancement, Bismarck was right. Keep emphasizing that Germany is a land power without colonial much in the way of colonial ambitions and no naval ambitions. And you're likely to have the British on your side or at the very least they're not going to come on the side of France and Germany, France and Russia in any future war. That is asking an incredible amount of concession on the part of Berlin and inordinate intelligence which only I think Bismarck could have or show.
- [26:08]
A
Can you talk about some of the sort of red herring causation in that time period like you know, when you wrote about like the popular media or nationalism and basically the argument was that like that was actually downstream of the changing powers, not like a original cause.
- [26:28]
B
There's some things we look at and can see that they play a role, but did they have an original causation role? And I think the answer is not. Even in the age of nationalistic jingoistic newspaper writings and excited columnists of the late 19th century world and nasty cartoonists. The fact is that if you looked at the spread of newspapers and opinions and cartoonists in say the beginning of this story, 1890s, you would see as many of them hostile derisory, critical of France or in particular of Russia than they were of Germany. In this age of chauvinism and jingoism, there's a tendency to pretty much insult every other nation on the globe. Every other country and its people were caricatured. Cartoonists had caricatures for Germany, but almost probably a larger number of caricatures of France of Johnny Crapo, which goes all the way back to the Napoleonic times. Francophobia and derisory comments on France run entirely through the 19th century. If they fall away after about 1906 or so, it's relative. It's relative to the fact that you're more apprehensive about Germany and beginning to appreciate that a good friendship with France is Not a bad idea.
- [28:14]
A
One of the fascinating transitions which we also have an echo with today is this transition from liberal economics to not liberal economics, where all of a sudden people start thinking about, you know, self sufficiency and supply chains and access to critical resources. You know, that's also another one that I think is kind of downstream of the original neuralgia and anxiety. Curious for your reflections on on. On that moment. Both guess Pre World War I and pre World War II.
- [28:44]
B
More detectable, more interesting to look at in terms of the rapid transition before 1914. It is quite striking that how many observers and commentators move from a position that international trade dependency is a good thing. There's this very, very strong from 1860s onward articulation by Cobden and Mill and others, that the more interdependent we are in our products chains between each other, then the less likelihood there is for war. And therefore that's not only probably leads to a more prosperous world. Since we produce, we send the coal to Portugal and Portugal sends the port wine to us. We don't try to grow wine in Lancashire and they don't try to look for coal in Portugal. And it's not just that economically it makes much more sense the closer we are tied together in our dependency economically upon the other and therefore get rid of those tariff barriers in the way of it, then the better the world will be. Not only the more prosperous will the world be, but the more harmonious it will be because we all recognize our reliance upon each other. Once you begin to say, oh well, I don't like the idea of being reliant upon those German magnetos or I don't want to be reliant upon those German steel turbines, I'd rather produce them myself. Just in case the world turns different and hostile, then psychologically your attitudes change. I want to be self reliant. And the word itself, you know, is it's got a very strong Edwardian schoolboy tone to it. Something is big and strong and self reliant. I'm sure that Teddy Roosevelt felt the same about a rising America. We will not be dependent upon anybody else. And that's totally different contestable viewpoint from Cobden's view that the more dependent you are upon others and the more dependent they are upon you, the more likely you are going to sit down and resolve any quarrels you have around a table in an amicable fashion. This is why Jordan I got very interested in the way in which the planners for the new United nations system after the Second World War was over. But the planners were already drafting around 1943, 44. They were trying to create in the future when they had won the war against the fascist states. They were trying to create a, not just a security system but, you know, a World bank and an IMF and a global trading system in which you would have open ground rules because you wanted to articulate the fact that you had to have this economic interdependence that was going to be a core to future world peace. It's, it seemed to make sense to that, that that mental world of their made sense that interdependency was a good thing.
- [32:27]
A
Cordell Hole, of course, sort of screaming from the rafters about this, while at the same time, you know, you had the, the sort of oil embargo and the, and the, you know, aluminum embargo and what have you on, on Japan. But it's, it's a, it's a very tricky thing to have both of them, both of these ideas in your head at the same time, which is sort of where we are as a country today.
- [32:53]
B
Yes. So when Coral Hull and others call for economic embargoes upon Japan as a warning or as a punishment, then the total free traders, the hundred percent open market people are bound to be upset. You're starting to use economic weapons as opposed to seeing economies as being totally interaction, being totally peaceful thing. There are some critics of the Cordell Hull position or indeed the John Stuart Mill position in the 1840s and 1850s, which was to say it's all very well for you guys to plead for getting away, getting rid of all protective tariffs, having a totally open playing field, cricket field. But aren't you just saying that because you Americans have so much wheat in your wheat fields that when you have a free market everywhere, you will, your wheat will be much more competitive than French wheat, therefore this is a threat to the French farmer's livelihood. French farmers therefore need protection and tariffs against American wheat and don't. And you are being hypocritical when you say, oh, let's pull down all of the barriers because your competitive advantage we all can see is so strong and so big. Yeah, that was my thought.
- [34:26]
A
Well, I mean it's, it's interesting because it's, it's, it's downstream of our first conversation. Right? Is like when you're scared, this is what you start, these are the sorts of move you, moves you start to make. And like what makes you scared, what the other guy is doing with the leverage they have over you or just the abstract fact of that is like a thing that is even possible to be done.
- [34:50]
B
There are some interesting Edwardian cartoonists of cartoons. Jordan of the cartoon figure of the British national type, John Bull lying there in bed at night fully dressed of course with his little pork pie hat on. And he's having alarmist bubble dreams of a German Germany coming across the North Sea with all sorts of imported goods and cases and stuff coming made in Germany on the outside coming to invade the British home market.
- [35:30]
A
You know, once that like the sort of open intern, the open and positive international vision of world cooperation. You know, once you start to get questions about that, is it like a one way ratchet or are there any examples in history where you know, the, the sort of liberal internationalists like beat back a, a sort of intellectual insurgency from, from folks on the other side.
- [35:58]
B
They found it pretty well impossible. They were swimming against the tide in the period from 1900 all to 1914, even though they tried on a number of occasions around 1912 to damper down Anglo German suspicions. But it's interesting to see that when the internationalist among especially the British planners in 1918, 1919, come along with their memoranda about the post First World War global order, that they're really concerned and driven, put that clock back to say let's reassert once again the significance of the open world order and tradie trade and understanding and commercial interchange. And what's more, they have the argument that why did this war come about? It wasn't just Admiral Tirpitz's navy. It was the rising suspicions and animosities over things like trade and commerce and tariffs. The mentality of the people who want to put tariffs up is a mentality of those who are suspicious of other nations. And if we can get rid of tariffs and have free interchange, then we are hopefully going to go back to Cobden's world of interdependent economic relationships. It's hard to do, but this time we're going to almost force it through with the League of Nations system and the attempt to renegotiate and reduce trade tensions in the 1920s. And it too of course is going to be rejected when Adolf Hitler comes in because German National Socialism, just a bit like Italian Fascism, is going to say no, we want to be totally in control of the resources of trade. We don't want to be dependent upon any other nation. Hence then you have a tumbling towards the Second World War.
- [38:17]
A
I guess what's scary is, you know, the reset buttons only manifested themselves after, after world wars.
- [38:26]
B
Yes.
- [38:27]
A
Right.
- [38:27]
B
So I can see the way you're going. The reset buttons are there even more emphatically in 1943-44. Like, look, we know that this reset position is the correct one. We didn't do it sufficiently well or cleverly in 1919. We have to come again with this. And therefore, it's kind of interesting to me, at least, to see that the emphasis which a number of the policymakers, especially the American policymakers, are having towards the creation of the Bretton woods institutions, World bank and imf, you cannot just create a new security framework in the United nations with the Security Council, et cetera, unless you have the other dimension to it, which is some sort of structures for encouraging world prosperity and open markets. And that's got to be these new instrumentalities of the World bank and the International Monetary Fund. It's also interesting to me, the British, who are wanting to encourage American internationalism and America to step up to the plate, are really insistent. It's not well covered in the historical literature, but they're really insistent that the Bretton woods institutions, the World bank and the imf, are going to be headquartered in downtown Washington. There they are on 14th Street. They're going to be very close to the US Congress, and the. The United nations headquarters is going to be in New York, because you need New York as the center of essentially internationalist propaganda. You need New York as a center of ideas and discourse and encouragement. So you put the United nations in New York and you put the Bretton woods institutions in Washington. It all fits together. You're going to need an American Congress to support the financial rebuilding of the world, and you're going to need a New York center as the media center of the world to see the way in which the world can come towards the General assembly and get its activities covered so much by world media. Again, it clicks together. Makes sense. Don't let's have the world international financial institutions in Vienna or in Paris or something. That just wouldn't work.
- [41:07]
A
So let's talk about the third reset button of the 20th century, which, I mean, it's an open question just to. To what extent it really was a potential reset button. But do you think like, we, America blew it with the fall of the Soviet Union? How. How are you kind of reflecting on that 35 years down the road?
- [41:28]
B
Our conversation causes me to reflect and shake my head upon it, because, as you know from reading a bit of what I was up to in the long term, it was sought by a number of people who studied the international system under the United nations and reached out to grab the chance of the fall of the Soviet Union that we could try. There would be another reset button in the 1990s. So whether it was our own relatively small Ford Foundation, Yale University attempt to write a report on the long term future of the United nations, or whether it was some other larger commissions which were set up to look at rebuilding and re empowering the international order, or other ones which were more looking at can we do something better than a World bank and an imf? Can we have other instrumentalities to help us? There was a lot of hope and optimism around 1991 when the clearly the attempt to push back on the fall of the Communist Party in Russia had failed and Gorbachev and Yeltsin had triumphed to the idea that we could, we had a chance to reset and rebuild and it didn't last too long. And American nationalists didn't like it because it would mean concessions from the American side. And it was difficult to think of how to bring China into this system. And now I find very little argument or very few voices that somehow in a complicated world we have, we can use the United Nations Organization in a large creative way. I think that when our attempt to write a new reform plan for the United nations with additional members of a Security Council like India had kind of fallen away, this is already by 1995, that great United nations man, Brian Urquhart, Sir Brian Urquhart, who had been there at the foundation of the UN in 45, he said that the best, the only thing we can think of now, Paul, are incremental and one on one efforts by United nations bodies to try to do something to help. So a United nations peacekeeping venture in like Namibia or West Africa, which works and which suppresses the civil war and which later on leads to for the first time parliamentary elections, you can chalk that up as an individual victory for the United nations organization and its institutions. But it's not the same as anything big and transformative. Incidental, one on one, episodic improvements are just about the only thing we can hope for until there is, Brian would say, an alteration in the minds of men. He was always a bit hopeful about that, but he didn't think it was going to come soon. And this gets back to your cunning and clearly very true, but also somewhat alarming thought that you only get major institutional transformation of the world relationships after a big war. And if you don't want a big war, you have to be just content with small scale and incremental improvements.
- [45:24]
A
Let's talk about Big wars and maybe preparing for them. So I guess like one of the interesting questions with Trump and also sort of looking back in history and you know, coming all the way back to Spain and its navy is like this idea of countries sort of like just deciding to rest on their laurels and not taking seriously what everyone should have learned in rise and fall of the great powers, which is that sort of productivity growth and like overall national sort of industrial and economic capacity is what gives you the latent like ability to do things and affect how the world operates. And I'm curious for any thoughts you have on like, you know, remarkable examples in history where Nate, where number ones just like, you know, blew it.
- [46:23]
B
The number one example of where number one blows it is Imperial Spain. All of the studies show it just ends up because its leaders are driven by this religious and religious determination that you have to somehow carry out the will of God and by either the force of persuasion or force of the sword, eradicate the Protestant thread. Once you have that intense ideological drive brought to bear on a country which had many resources but clearly didn't have enough to be the arbiter of Europe, Spain is in a problematic state. Napoleon himself falls for the same hubris. If I can conquer everywhere from the Spanish border to Moscow, then anything which is a challenge has to be eradicated and my Napoleonic vision has to be asserted. I was talking to somebody the other day, Jordan, about the many good reforms which Napoleon brought to France and Europe in his period of political domination and you know, reform of the civil service, reform of a tax code, the liberation of the Jews, the ending of all sorts of restrictions upon the Jews in France. But then it's blown by the over the excessive imperial ambition of marching to Moscow and then trying to fight Wellington and the Spanish guerrillas in central Spain. I also think of the countries who have that display of wanting to be a number one contestant fighter, an imperial hubris, and then decide just to amicably almost step down to a non combative but economically prosperous position. When the Dutch give up their claims to want to be a fighter and just decide to be more of a trading nation. When in particular Sweden, after the end of, you know, Gustavus Adolphus and his son just decides that they're going to go for internal economic growth and development, but not overseas conquest and not building up a very big navy to try to fight off in the fight in the Atlantic. It may be kind of boring way of life, but it made a lot of sense to them. Japan, of course, it's enforced upon them after 1949 with a constitution which says you shall have no imperial army or navy. But look at the way the Japanese turn their creative talents into manufacturing, production, organization of wealth creation, rebuilding of their cities in a remarkably clean and civilized way. There's some benefits to the post imperial condition. The post number one condition will be incredibly difficult to persuade many Americans that there are benefits to the post number one condition. I'm sure. Will it come in 100 years time?
- [49:51]
A
Lord knows, coming back to sort of like Napoleon and Spain, this, this idea of like if you're trying to like maximize long term national power, you want to run kind of hot, right. But you don't want to run too hot because then you get into your imperial overreach and like just things end up turning out badly for you. But you know, if you run too cold then you know, you're, you're sort of, I don't know, quote unquote stuck as like a 19th century Sweden or a, you know, 2000s Japan and sort of modulating just like how you know, rabid you are about your, your national mission or dreams of grandeur or like religious devotion is a, is, is a fascinating dial of like where exactly you'd want to, you'd really want to set it.
- [50:41]
B
Yep. There's some interesting memoranda by the young Winston Churchill when he is for wild trade secretary in Asquith's cabinet and then even when he become first Sea Lord where he looks at Germany's rise and he says this is perfectly understandable. When nations have a surge of economic productivity and creativity and they grow bigger than they were before, it's understandable. So how do we, instead of an overly neuralgic reaction to it, how do we seek to try to accommodate them and allow them to allow them some place in the international system. And I think if you're wanting to begin to drift towards thinking about our contemporary and future world, that sentence that I've just used gives one food for thought. How do you want to allow a rising China and India for that matter, a place in the international system?
- [51:47]
A
Let's stay a little bit on the so engineers of victory. You sort of assign the, the Allied victory to productive capacity, geography, both relatively self explanatory, but also, you know this, this wonderful sentence that I'd love to explore with you. The creation of war making systems that contained impressive feedback loops, flexibility, a capacity from, to learn from mistakes and a culture of encouragement that permitted the middlemen in this grinding conflict the freedom to experiment, offer ideas and opinions and to cross traditional institutional boundaries. What does that look?
- [52:31]
B
Wow. I've always been interested in cultures which allow for and encourage experimentation which are not to top heavy on the one hand, or Bolshevik revolution on the other hand. The role of a creative artist or engineer or as I rephrase it, the term I got very interested in and started looking for historical examples. Jordan problem solvers, problem solvers in world history and problem solvers themselves don't get anywhere unless there is this encouraging ambiance somewhere around them which allows them experimentation, food for thought. And again, I'd just like to use a Churchillian example. When I was working on Engineers of Victory, I was interested in occasions when the capacious, excited brain of Winston would see that people were working on an idea and had to be encouraged. The story of that U boat destroying weapon of the forward firing squid as we call it, system which was a forward firing depth charge wouldn't have got anywhere had it not, because the inventors were there and they had created this thing. But they were begging for a way in which to persuade the admiralty powers that be to accept this new weapon. And they were meeting with some suspicion and some irritation that you needed to be concentrating on what was already being built. And they get a chance on one occasion when Churchill is testing out some new machine guns to ask a Prime minister if he would just come around the hedge and look at their new forward firing squid which you could pull a lever to and it threw forward a depth charge into the hedge 100 yards away. And when Churchill saw this, he was absolutely delighted and wanted to encourage it. So I'm interested in systems which allow the encouragement of new ideas and are going to put at least a number of resources available to let the experimenters and the problem solvers have a chance.
- [55:03]
A
You know, Hitler also enjoyed his gadgets. Have you spent any time thinking about how the Nazis tried to like build in this technological innovation into their war fighting machine?
- [55:17]
B
It's clear that Hitler does also have a fascination with dazzling what he hopes will be war winning weapon systems. His fascination with the rockets near the end of the war and the fact that he has these examples of German scientists, German creators, and the idea that he can get a, maybe a decisive blow against Churchill's London by firing these weapons against London in the course of which they allocate significant amount of rare, you know, aluminum and petroleum resources for the experimentation. So it's not just a, you know, democratic society's encouragement of innovation as compared with the totally stupid and unrelenting dictatorial view. We know that a number of Stalin's scientific advisors do manage to get, trembling as they are to manage to get the go ahead from a big man to create improved weapon systems there. I don't know the Japanese story very much. I have a feeling that the big Japanese advantages in weapon systems come from developments in the 1930s. And there's very much, very little sign, Jordan, that wartime itself produces any new innovations from Japanese military industrial complex more of the same. Whereas in the case of Americans and Brits, the scientific innovations which flow out of the system by 1943, 44 are really quite amazing.
- [57:11]
A
So there's this, you know, this concept of, of wartime innovation and peacetime innovation, right? And you know, you had in the 30s and in the, you know, early 1900s, people who understood that machine guns were going to matter, people who started to understand what carrier groups were going to do. And then you had enormous bureaucracies kind of not really being able to, to process that. And you know, analogous to what's happening in, in Ukraine today, where it seems like there are a lot of things that are going to be really changing about the future of, you know, high intensity conflict with, with, with drones and you know, electronic warfare and this, that and the other thing, you know, thinking about the sort of the larger institutions beyond just, you know, the top leaders giving thumbs up or thumbs down to like cool things that come across their transom, you know, what about the, you know, the navies and the armies gave them the sort of ability to do all this smart adaptation and not just like be big hulking organizations that say no to new things.
- [58:26]
B
There's two or three things to unwrap here. Sometimes the bureaucrats who are opposing investment in newer technologies or newer production are doing so because they're saying, look, we're fighting a war and we have to win day by day. So we cannot divert resources now to some interesting project of yours which won't come into flow, which won't come into usefulness for another two years. We just literally have to keep producing maybe these second rate two engine bombers because we need at least some bombers for the fight across the English Channel, right? So there's a justification for saying this is all very well and good, Mr. Barnes, Wallace, but we cannot give you resources for skipping bombs or whatever just right now because we need those resources for bombs which drop on German factories just right now. Then this is a truism. If you have a certain array of elastic resources so you can devote just a little bit, maybe 10% of your scientists or 20% of your innovative capital to the new stuff While you're using 80% to produce the standard stuff, that really helps. Let me think of one example, and I wish I'd read more about it to pursue it, but somewhere around 1942, 43, somebody who allocated resources for aircraft development must have said, okay, let's give some resources to this guy, Mr. Frank Whittle, who says he's invented something called a jet engine. Right now we're in the middle of fighting the battle of the Atlantic. Right now we're in the beginnings of the strategic bombing offensive of Germany. We need every pilot and every aircraft propeller and every bit of aluminum possible to build the aircraft. And now we have this inventor who comes along and I says I need these resources and some trained test pilots to help me with this idea of an ever faster engine which wouldn't, doesn't have propellers, which sounds absurd at the time. Somebody around 1943 must have said, let's give this guy a chance. I like that culture that it needs some spare resources, but it needs a kind of open mindedness. I wonder if there is a big lesson of history there.
- [61:27]
A
This comes back to a big theme in all your books is to what extent is it really just a math equation and like does the country that is bigger and richer has more scientists and then has that extra 10% lying around in the bank to invest in these flyers that are going to give you, you know, something 10x better 5 or 10 years down the road. And you know, you end a number of these books with a sort of like lyrical ending of like the, you know, the balance of productive forces doesn't, doesn't matter for the person, you know, on the cruiser trying to blow up a U boat and scared that they're going to be sent to the bottom of the sea. But you know, when thinking about something like innovative capacity or you know, a flexible organizations, is it not just that like because you are the bigger country that's growing faster then like you're going to have better, you know, human capital, like better institutions or what have you. Or are there times where you actually can get really dramatic disconnects that don't, that you can't just, you know, derive back from how, you know, how advanced your economy is?
- [62:40]
B
I know, I know that's a big, big question. And it's true that I grapple with that in most of my books and sometimes more successfully than others. And in some cases there, I think the, the big book Verizon fall for great powers is deterministic because it doesn't have time for the looking at the individual and the creative spark and the creative moment, which is why I got such an enormous amount of enjoyment in reading and writing and investigating, are the engineers of Victory. There is one particular part of the engineers of Victory, and I try to put it, I think, in Appendix A or Appendix B, which is where, having told a story of how those two young physicists get the step ahead in miniaturized radar by the experiments they're doing on the side of a Bristol Channel so they can pick up something on their little television screen and radar screen which is some metal thing moving a mile away. And then when I fast forward to looking at the accounts in the admiralty summaries of the commanders of the escort vessels running a hard fought convoy across the Atlantic, and the command of the escort vessels actually details at a particular time in the middle of the night, like 12:30am HMS VDET, that's an old World War I destroyer, HMS VDET detects a U boat on the surface 4,000 meters away and goes to turn and sink it. And I feel like shouting eureka. Because there's your moment. The individual creation of the miniaturized radar by the two young scientists is put on board a small escort vessel and in the middle of the night it detects a submarine in the dark 4,000 meters away. And the Battle of the Atlantic turns. There's something for a historian which is really deeply satisfying in that.
- [65:13]
A
Let's come back to accommodating rising powers. So, you know, the question, right, is whether accommodating even makes sense. We, we had this, this conversation about the, I, the, the sort of ideal, you know, the ideology dialogue. And if it's turned too hot, then, you know, everyone else kind of has to respond to that because, you know, it might not end where your bottom line is. Thoughts?
- [65:51]
B
I cannot but do anything other than admit that ideology counts. Whether people are pessimistic and suspicious about the other side's intentions and growth, or more open or welcoming is really critical. If we were perhaps rightly suspicious of Stalin's Russia and what it was doing to its neighbors and the long range rocketry and other things it was building and even a Red Navy coming out into the North Atlantic, we were entitled to be suspicious there. Whether we need to be so neuralgic about a rising China or whether we can try to accommodate it because its leadership, I think, is a pretty cautious and conservative leadership. But here's a maybe this is for a later discussion between us because it's a sort of big, big thing in the US China relationship. Problematic that I've only just now started to chew over, which is. And I come back to geography. I mean, you may say Kennedy's kind of obsessed by geography, but it's another thing that I've never really thought too much about before. You have. If you just looked at your map of the entire Pacific Ocean, Jordan was looking at your map of, I suppose, a China on the left hand side of a map, the left hand side of a Pacific. 3,000, you know, 3 million square miles of China and the United States. 3 million square miles of the United States and something like seven to eight or nine time zones between them. What would it be like if by some lash of a magician's wand, the geographic space offshore of China was not occupied by an array of small American allies? You know, think about it. All the way down the California, Oregon, California coast, there's nothing offshore, which is like the Philippines or Taiwan or South Korea. There's nothing there. If there was nothing there on the other side, if there was just a. If from the Chinese ports, you looked out and you looked all the way to Hawaii. So here's the big problem. Offshore of China, we have or have decided that there will be and we will support a number of geographically very close to China allies. There's this thing called Taiwan, there's this thing called South Korea, there's this cluster of islands called the Philippines. Wow. Supposing the roles and the geography was reversed, supposing by some magic, Taiwan was 6,000 miles further to the east, west. Supposing all of this, all of these big things were offshore of America and there was a kind of naked Chinese coastline, China wouldn't be a perceived threat. And yet geography is there and you have to make of it like this. So in a way, both we in the one hand directly and China in another hand indirectly, are prisoners of geography. And unless one can have some sort of amicable American China understanding about how to regard the big offshore territories of China, then we have this massive geopolitical conundrum. I want to think about that a bit more,
- [69:52]
A
you know, on that. We had about a month ago some reporting for the Financial Times that Xi Jinping told Ursula van der Leyen that Washington was trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan. And you know, the scary thing with the ideology, right, is it works both ways. And the worry I have with your thesis is that we're not dealing with the most rational actors we may be dealing with actually particularly conspiratorial ones who've sort of already convinced them themselves. Right. That there's no other way out. And it's, that's a very scary thing to be in. And you know, it reminds me a lot of, of the way you ended the Anglo German Antagonism book where you're like, look, it could have been an Archduke, it could have been this, it could have been that. But like you had these trains which were running in very, you know, on very scary directions.
- [70:50]
B
Yes. So going back to that Anglo German piece, but the Germans do feel trapped by geography. Why aren't we allowed to expand? Some other countries are allowed to expand, but you were saying, no, you can't expand because you are too close. I found this and I quoted in the Anglo German Antagonism. I found this wonderful quotation by the Imperial German Chancellor and Foreign Minister Bulow where, you know, it's under section about the inevitability of German growth. And Bulow's writing in some exasperation in 1903 and he's saying it's like the father turning around and looking, looking at his fast growing son. And the father is saying, hans, you stupid boy, you are growing out of your trousers. We will have to get you larger trousers. Right? And Bueller says, well, what happens if we can't stop growing out of our trousers? You know, every year our steel production grows up and up and up. Every year our trade with the overseas world expands. We are, every year the German population adds 1 million more people which needs to be fed, etc. We can't help it because we're growing. Wow. I shake my head at that and saying, yeah, what if we tell the Chinese, you know, Han Jung, you are not allowed to expand, you're not allowed to grow. And the Chinese say, well, you know, we're growing naturally. We're growing at so many percent a year.
- [72:48]
A
There is a sort of under another underlying assumption of this conversation we've been having about China, which is that the relative, you know, national power weight is going to keep improving for China. And I think that's, you know, that's still, you know, to be, to be put under advisement, I guess.
- [73:10]
B
Yes, I would like to, as we, as we wind down, at least for this session, I would like to put it under advisement. The rising China doesn't have as many internal natural resources relevant to the number of population that the United States possesses. So here is further food for thought. Both of them, as I say, are about 3 million square miles in size. Both of them have a access to the Pacific Ocean. Both of them have very significant advanced technology and production. Both of Them are modern industrial societies, China with a much lesser per capita gdp, but it's increasing all the time. But as I read some of the reports upon the limited water supplies of China and the running out of certain natural resources of mineral wealth, et cetera, maybe newer technologies will compensate China for that. But I think it's less well structured in certain ways to be a clear winner in a long term competition with the United States. And I say that even though I've written about becoming of China to it's overtaking the US in so many ways like the obvious visual things like automobile production and yet in other ways in resources per capita there are limitations there. And environmental stress. There are limitations there despite our environmental stresses. So I would flag that this is an open question which is a way we should end conversations about great power politics and rise and fall of things. The future is not preordained. There's so many interesting things going on and I almost can hear the patter of feet on my front door as a couple of my colleagues are going to take me off to lunch.
- [75:19]
A
Is there anything in particular that's on your mind nowadays? I don't know if you want to talk about any of the news.
- [75:25]
B
What would I like to talk about? It seems to me Jordan, that great power relations, leaving aside Putin's agitated and mistaken attack on Ukraine, have a kind of muted condition to them. That there's a number of things which it seems to me are nascent, possibly going to develop more clearly in the next 10, 15 years. Let me list two or three. There's a so called swing to Asia in international power balances. There is the rise of India. But even as I scratch my head in drafting this next book of mine on towards the tripolar world of three large powers, China, US and India in it, in their large GDP standing a considerable way above everybody else. The rise of India is coming slowly and at the moment in a in a non aggressive way and in a not too obvious way. Modi goes to see Putin perks up people's attention but it's difficult to know what to make of that. And I don't know what you think of it. A Russian speaking colleague here said that when she heard the translation of Modi speaking one or two Putin, it was kind of a much stronger reprimand to him about nations should not aggress other nations. Going to Moscow was not to be seen therefore as some significant tilt and the great power balances. It was just Mr. Modi playing all directions, which he's rather good at. But we're in a. I don't know what you think. We're in a relatively quiet time in international and big power relations. Will it change to being a much more decisive and turbulent and disturbing time if Mr. Trump comes into office and tries to pull the US out of NATO or do something like that? I hope this was okay.
- [77:58]
A
Oh my God, this was such a treat. I mean, if we want to find another hour in the next few weeks, I would. That would be great. If not this, this was really, really fairly fun.
- [78:11]
C
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- [78:42]
B
Some follow the Noise Bloomberg Follows the money.
- [78:46]
A
Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story.
- [78:52]
B
Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.