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We have now had peace among great powers. We haven't had general peace, but we haven't had a great power war for a very, very long time. That seems to me to be a little bit similar to the situation of people in the early 20th century who also didn't have a great power war for a very, very long time. We fail in our ability to imagine the consequences. I use the example that in the summer of 1916, in the battle of the Somme, just in the first two weeks, more soldiers were killed in battle than during all of the 19th century, all from the Napoleonic wars and up to 1914. Those are the kinds of things that we need to think about in terms of differentiating what could happen in terms of great power war from other kinds of conflict.
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Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast.
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I'm Galen Drude. Depending on who you ask, we're either living through a moment that feels totally unprecedented or alarmingly familiar. Today's guest argues it's alarmingly familiar. Great powers jostling for influence, nationalism on the rise, trade and technology turning into weapons and festering conflicts with the potential to spiral. In his new book, the Coming Power Conflict and Warnings From History, Yale historian Odd Arne Westad compares today's geopolitical landscape to the decades leading up to World War I. One hundred plus years ago, the world looked modern, interconnected and at least to many people, too prosperous and rational for major war. Then, in a matter of weeks, a localized conflict became a continent wide crisis that ended in 40 million casualties. The percentage of people alive today who have experienced great power conflict is vanishingly small. And after 80 years of great power peace, it can be easy to think
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of the prospect as far fetched.
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Westott argues that too may be a similarity to the early 20th century. So today we're going to talk about those similarities and differences and what lessons we can learn Here with me to do that is Arnie Westad. Arnie, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you very much, Galen. It's great to be with you.
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It's great to have you.
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So I think in the high school
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version of World War I history, you learn that a lot of what happened was the result of a big accident. Nobody actually wanted the war. Everyone blundered into it after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But it seems like you're saying that actually larger forces at play pointed towards war, and those are some of the parallels that we should be concerned about.
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That's right. Both parts of that are actually correct. There was a lead up to that conflict with things going wrong, or at least changing very, very dramatically. And then there was a short crisis in the summer of 1914 that no one was really prepared to handle. So my argument in the book is that if we had been better at handling some of these tremendous changes that took place in the generation or so before, we could have avoided that crisis leading to a global war. That's basically the argument in the book. So what are those similarities in terms of change? The late 19th century was a period of tremendous globalization, as we would call it today. I mean, of economic interaction on a scale that the world had never seen before. By the end of the century, beginning of the 20th century, a lot of people in different countries, first and foremost the wealthier countries, and maybe especially in Great Britain, which was the most power powerful country at the time, had started to query whether that globalization actually worked for them. And the arguments are very similar to what you see in the United States today. Loss of jobs in manufacturing, being out competed by new industrial powers, et cetera, et cetera. So instead of that period of economic integration, you got a new period moving towards tariffs and trade, wars and that kind of stuff. And this happened at the same time that in geopolitical terms, the world was becoming much more multipolar. So during most of the 19th century, Britain hadn't been predominant in the way that the United States has been, you know, since 1945, but it was the most important power by far. By the early 20th century, that was no longer true. I mean, there were other powers that had built both their economic power and their military power up to a point that you can really talk about multipolarity a little bit similar to what we have seen now with the rise of China and the rise of other great powers alongside the United States. And then in addition to that, also quite parallel to our own time, you had issues of immigration, issues of terrorism, and also a terrorist act that led to the crisis in the summer of 1914 that took us to global war. There were issues connected to various domestic political crises within the major powers. So there are lots of similarities, maybe especially in terms of these processes of change that led in the direction of a crisis that leaders in 1914 couldn't handle. And that's where I see the parallel with Rontan.
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I want to flesh out a lot of this and then maybe stress test some of it. But let's start with geopolitics. In laying out the comparison, you say that China today is comparable to, say, Germany in the early 20th century. The United States, you can make a comparison to Great Britain and Russia, you could compare to Austria, Hungary, and I think you fleshed that out a little bit. China is a rising power, the United States is a plateauing power, and Russia is a sort of empire in decline. Can we start a little bit by talking about China in particular? As Germany had a growing sense of nationalism and was on the rise as a power in the early 20th century, it was very much preparing for war. Is China today also preparing for war in the way that we think about Germany in the early 20th century?
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I think there are some striking parallels. Not because either of the two countries are particularly warlike. I mean, it's very important for your listeners to remember that Germany of the late 19th century is not like Nazi Germany in the mid 20th century. I mean, it is an empire along the lines of the other empires that existed at the time. But the problem I think both of those two countries face is that they grow up very rapidly as new powers within established systems that have existed for a long time that they have had very little influence on within what are and where the most important regions in the world. Europe in the early 20th century, Eastern Asia, increasingly in our own time. So the question is not so much about their military warlike intentions. It is the complexities of having a totally new power growing very rapidly at the center of what are the most important regions in the world. I think that's what leads to tension first and foremost and accommodating that is very difficult under any circumstance. Even if leaders in Germany then and leaders in China today had been much more oriented towards accommodation than what they actually are, this would have been difficult. And that's one of the main premises in the book.
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Another main premise is that in comparing the United States to Britain, we're talking about a sort of stagnant empire, as you frame it, experiencing fatigue. But that with that fatigue comes a lot of ambiguity about foreign commitments and alliances abroad. And that ambiguity, like in some sense, you could say that there's a strategic ambiguity, like the United States policy on Taiwan, or that different actors might see Trump as maybe chaotic or irrational enough that it creates a sense of fear so they don't want to test the United States. But you say that there's also significant risk that comes with the ambiguity of empire fatigue.
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It is a change that is really difficult to handle. I mean, it's difficult to handle in terms of a country's domestic politics, and it's difficult to handle in terms of, as you say, outward friendships and alliances. I mean, if you use the United States as an example Here, I mean, it's not surprising, given how the global economic system has developed over the past generation, that many Americans, just like Brits in the early 20th century, feel that globalization hasn't really worked for them. Right. I mean, that it puts being a systemic power within a system that today the United States to quite some extent has created, means that there are compromises that one has to make with regard to what happens domestically. So I think that part of it is really, really important. And I think this would be difficult again under any circumstance. The problem right now, and the problem in the early 20th century was the rapidity of that change. I mean, how quickly it actually took place. And I think that's the reason why there was a sense of withdrawal, retrenchment as well as chaos in domestic politics that you found and which was part of the crisis that came about in the early 20th century. A little bit like what you see in the relationship between the United States and its primary allies today. So the key here is not just about what happens with the rising powers within this international system. It's probably as much what happens on the side of the leading power or predominant power in terms of the leading power deciding for itself that it needs to get more out of the system that it has created for itself than what had been the case earlier on. And there I see very clear perils.
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But what is what risk accompanies that? Like you say that in particular ambiguity on Taiwan, which is the United States long standing policy is actually creates more risk than being explicit saying, no, we would actually protect Taiwan if China were to invade, or being more explicit about perhaps protecting NATO allies or something like that. Like on one hand, you look at that and you'd say, well, that creates a bunch of tripwires that could force the United States into war, similar to what happened in the early 20th century where these different alliances caused a very regionalized conflict to become a continental tragedy. So why would being more explicit about the tripwires be beneficial in the system today as opposed to creating more risk?
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I think one has to differentiate in this case between the different kinds of regions and scenarios. I think with regard to Taiwan, what I'm calling for in the book is not so much giving up on the policy that the United States has had in terms of strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan, as making it clear that the United States is trying to avoid some kind of crisis happening over the island. So what I'm calling for when it comes to Taiwan, in order to avoid the kind of scenario that we found in the beginning of the 20th century is more understanding of each other's motiv strategic motivations. On the US And China side, moving in the direction of what I sometimes refer to as a Shanghai plus understanding. Going back to the understanding between the United States and China in the early 1970s, whether you actually agreed to some point about what the future status of Taiwan was going to be today, that plus version would entail something along the lines of the United States saying that it would under no circumstances support Taiwan independence, or while China, in parallel or a little bit later on, declaring that it would not use force against the island unless it declared independence. These are the kinds of stability moves that I think we need with regard to Eastern Asia. With regard to Europe, the situation is a little bit different. I mean, there it is a question of an established alliance within NATO, which I think it's absolutely necessary that both the United States and the European partners uphold in order not to create increased instability. So going back to what we talked about, history lessons, right. So what a lot of people think is my sense going back to the First World War, was that the First World War was somehow created by the plurality of alliances that existed in Europe. I think that's wrong. I think it was created first and foremost as a crisis in 1914 by alliances that really did not work, or at least didn't work the way they were intended to, meaning as a deterrent against war. It is when countries on both sides, but especially Germany, start to wonder whether these alliances would actually work, that they are tempted to do things that would be profoundly destabilizing to the system. And here I think there is a very clear line to Russia today. I mean, if there is a sense that NATO cohesion is somehow in doubt, that would be tremendously destabilizing far beyond the Ukraine conflict in terms of Russia's intentions towards Europe.
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I want to flesh out the rest of the geopolitical analogies before we get into some of the technological and economic change that was afoot at the turn of the 20th century. So you compare Russia to Austria, Hungary in the World War I scenario. A declining empire that chooses war rather than managed retreat. Austria, Hungary ultimately collapsed as a result of a war that it initiated. Do you think that's a possibility with Russia in modern times?
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For Austria, the big problem was that it felt that it had German backing to a very high extent in terms of the very adventurous policies that it had with regard to its many conflicts on its. On its borders. And that probably led it to push further than what it would have done under other circumstances. Germany wasn't the original source, as you will know, of the conflict that broke out in 1914. It was Austria. And that is the warning, in a way, for our own time. I think, with regard to Russia today, the ever closer relationship with China, it's something that gives Russia's leaders, President Putin first and foremost, a sense that they would be backed up, at least to a point in terms of other conflicts with countries in Europe beyond what happens in Ukraine. And this is the danger that I see in the situation that exists now, not just in terms of Russia being continuously weakened, as it certainly is, but also that it is pushed further in the direction of believing that it's capable of doing things that it's clearly cannot do, that it's not capable of doing because of this belief that it will be backed up by a much stronger power that serves as a kind of pseudo ally. So, I mean, the longer term outcome of this is uncertain. I think Russia today is tremendously weak domestically. I think the Russian economy, a little bit like the Austrian economy before 1914, is much weaker than what you can generally get the impression of from the outside. And. And China increasingly predominant within that relationship. So in case of conflict, it's anyone's guess where that would lead. But I do think that the parallel is actually strikingly similar in terms of one up and coming power back then Germany, now China, having this very close relationship to an older empire that is in real trouble right next to it. It's not a good strategic situation to be in.
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Yeah. So I myself studied international relations in college. It's not necessarily what I focus on today, but I remember back in the day, there's three lenses that you're supposed to look at big global historical events through. One is geopolitics, the next is domestic politics, and the last is individual actors. So we've talked a little bit about geopolitics. I want to talk about domestic politics, which you mentioned in was a significant source of tension in 1914 and is also a significant source of tension now. You mentioned the displacement and frustration that globalization and an industrializing economy can create. What are we talking about here? Are we talking about, you know, the new wave of globalization in the 90s and 2000s? Are we talking about AI? Like, can you just flesh out those comparisons a little bit more for me in terms of how, you know, rising nationalism, how you see the domestic political tensions being similar to what we saw in the early 20th century?
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Sure. And this is where a lot of things come together roughly at the same time.
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And that is the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the full hour long episode. It was a pretty fascinating conversation. We talked about domestic tensions in the US and China and the complex politics of globalization. We also talked about which particular conflicts have the potential to spiral into global war, why nuclear deterrence might not work, and lastly, some positive lessons to be drawn tense geopolitical moments when great power war was avoided. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly ensure that we can keep making this independent podcast. When you become a subscriber you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining how to do that. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com see you there.