Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:02]
A
If a world class crisis of the 1914 kind, black swan event were to come along today, with tensions already running high, I really worry about that aspect of personalized predominance or rule. I think that was one of the things that really did go wrong in December of 1914 was that a number of these people, because of the personalities, were not able to pull back when they should have seen that it was in their interest to pull back.
- [00:32]
B
It's the lawfare podcast. I'm senior editor at lawfare, Michael Feinberg, and with me today is Professor Arne Westad of Yale University to talk about his book the Coming Storm.
- [00:44]
A
The important thing, I think today is to try to get some more stability into the international system in general. This is true for the ongoing wars at the moment with regard to Ukraine, with the war in Iran. It's also true for what probably in terms of the overall picture, is even more dangerous for great power confrontation, which is the situation with regard to Taiwan or the situation on the Korean peninsula.
- [01:10]
B
Today we will be discussing China's rise, the West's response to it, and what we can learn from prior eras of history about this potential conflict. You raise very interesting parallels between the era where the world was just on the cusp of what eventually became known as World War I and our contemporary times with a variety of hotspots, mainly in East Asia, that you argue could very well, without amelioration, turn into a similar global conflagration. But what I'd like to do is start actually a little bit before you begin in both eras and examine how our respective societies at those times got to where we are. And I know you think there are a lot of similarities between sort of 1913-1914-2025-2026. But I'm curious if we could examine the eras that led up to those inflection points. So I was wondering if you could sort of give an overview of how you see international relations in the period from, let's say, the wars of German unification in the mid-1860s up through 1914 might compare to, let's say, 1989 and the end of the Cold War up until today.
- [02:37]
A
Well, thanks, Michael. It's great to be with you for this conversation. This is one of the podcasts I most admire and listen to often myself. So that makes it a double pleasure on your question, I think. First of all, there are some really striking parallels as I try to bring out in the book, both in terms of the immediate consequences of what happens, but also in terms of these longer term developments in the late 19th century, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So the key is, of course, as you already alluded to, the rise of new powers. So the whole international system starting to become more unstable in the late 19th century. We head towards 1900 and saw the same thing happening in the 1990s and early 2000s because of China's tremendous growth and the challenge of other great powers to the established international system. So that's sort of the core of this. But if we look at it more in depth, I would say that even though what happens from the 1870s on is very much connected to the rise of new powers, first and foremost Germany, and then of course, the United States. But the United States was in a different kind of position because it was an ocean away from what was then the most important continent in the world, namely Europe, just like East Asia is the most important part of the world in my view today. So it was Germany that much of this centered on, but within a context of the leading power of the time, Great Britain, gradually starting to retreat from the international system that it itself had created. Which of course is another similarity. It's not a complete parallel, but it's a similarity with our own time. Britain had been spending much of the 19th century running around the world telling everyone that free trade was, was in their own best interest. It's in the interest of the world at large. Of course, at the core of this was that it was very much in Britain's self interest because of its economic status. And then gradually towards the end of this globalization, the 19th century globalization that Britain had been at the core of, Britain itself starts to withdraw from that system. It finds that its own interests are not served well enough by what takes place, that other countries are catching up with it, not just within the system, but because of the system of globalization. And that's of course, I parallel to what you have seen with the United States, certainly from the early 21st century on. So it's not just a story of what happens in terms of rising power. So that is a very important part of the story. It's also, perhaps more importantly to me in the book, a story about how international systems decay and how they are changed very often because of actions taken by the predominant powers within those systems.
- [05:42]
B
Let's for now focus on the latter part of the chronology and China's rise, and I'm sure we'll illustrate our conversation with more historically focused incidents. But during the first George Bush administration, there was a very widespread belief that getting China to liberalize on the economic front would inexorably somehow lead to political and maybe even socio cultural liberalization. And I mean it was incredibly widespread. The only international relations scholar I'm aware of who really expressed skepticism at the time was John Mearsheimer. I think there is now a growing consensus, at least in the American political class, if not the academic one, that that view of where things would proceed would, was mistaken. And I was just wondering, as somebody who has studied how China interacts with the world, your book on the subject I think started in 1700 or 1750. What's your take on China's rise vis a vis actions the west may have taken? And before you answer, I know this question is posed from a very Orientalist point of view. I'm going to get to the other side next, so please don't assume I'm a ignoring that. But what do you think we can say about how the west hindered or inculcated and reacted to the rise of China?
- [07:30]
A
So I was not among those who believed that China's opening to the international system, first and foremost in economic terms, would by itself lead to political or more basic fundamental constitutional changes within China itself. My view has always been that as long as the Communist Party stays in power in China, it will put its own interest first and it will put the main interest that any political party of that kind has, namely staying in power above everything else. So in that sense, the direction, the overall direction is not a surprise to me. I think in terms of what the United States and its Western allies could and could not have done, I think it is relatively limited. I mean, I think the possibility even back in the 1990s of putting some kind of conditionalities in terms of political change to China's integration into the international economic system would not have been on anyone's mind. It was more about what one expected, I think wrongly expected, than about anything that could be done about this. And the main reason for that is of course, that that integration of China was undertaken not primarily for China's own sake. It was undertaken in search of the building post Cold War of a global economic system that served American and Western interests and were built on the values and ideals that had been developed in economic and social terms by those countries over a long period of time, with the United States heading up the general direction. So that's the reason for my sort of lack of surprise. I think if we take this all the way up to today, I think the surprise is rather in how quickly some of those very limited freedoms that had been taken by the Chinese people after the start of the reform process back in the late 1970s could be rolled back by the Xi Jinping regime. And I think that's. That has in many ways been surprising to me in terms of the speed, not so much the direction. I think when Xi came to power in the early 2010s, there were quite a number of problems that China was facing that I think most people on the Chinese side, even people who didn't particularly care for the Communist Party, thought had to be resolved. I mean, the power of big companies, the moral dissolution as they would see it, particularly in the cities among young people, the new power that provinces had taken for themselves, all of this stuff that a lot of people didn't particularly like. What he then was able to do was to take these concerns legitimate, I think one could possibly call them, in the direction of a new form of authoritarianism. And the speed with which that had happened has surprised me, but not the overall direction that this has taken. That was. I mean, it was never part of the bargain, as seen from the CCP side, that China would liberalize as a consequence of moving in the. In the direction of a more open international economy.
- [10:43]
B
I didn't plan to make this comparison, but in your answer just now, do you think Xi then was less guiding and dictating policy than he was simply following the natural current of history and taking advantage of it to bring it back to the 19th century in the way Otto von Bismarck famously said successful statesmen do. I forget his exact quotes, but I think there's one about grabbing onto the coattails of history as it passes by,
- [11:18]
A
listen to the footsteps of God as he passes by and latching onto his coat. I think that's more or less what Bismarck said.
- [11:28]
B
Yeah. So, you know, there is a lot of armchair psychologizing in the Western press that she can be explained out of a rapacious thirst to see China more powerful on the world stage, or that we can trace his political beliefs back to the sort of ostracization and persecution of his father in the Maoist era. But it sounds like what you're arguing has considerably more nuance than that more popularized view.
- [12:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, nuance in the sense that he, as everyone else, reacted to problems that were visible to large segments of the party elite and even, as I said, beyond the people who had their immediate connection to the party in the early 2000 and tens. But the way he responded to those challenges, particularly when he had been in power for a few years, I think was beyond what the people who had put him into that position actually expected. So I think the sort of hyper centralization of power, the preoccupation with his own personal status, the relentless attempts at trying to undermine potential rivals and opponents, even people who would never have identified themselves as such, that is going much further than anyone that I know expected when he became general secretary of the party. So I think we have to think about those two things at the same time. He got to where he is and he was confirmed in that position by the party elites, particularly by the party elders, because he was seen as offering solutions to problems that they also recognized. But then after a few years in power, this took off, maybe not even in a direction, but with a degree of interest, intensity and personalization that these people did not expect, or very few people expected, including observers like myself. So I think those are the two things that we have to be able to think about.
- [13:38]
B
We've been talking about China's rise and its leadership from the Western perspective. Let's turn the telescope around. What is the narrative in China, in Chinese public opinion, both among political elites and sort of the general populace, about what China's rise signifies and how the west has reacted to it? Because the narrative, at least when I was in government, was one where China was somewhere between 90% and 100% to blame for any burgeoning conflict or deterioration in relations. I'll confess I still hold that view somewhat, but I'm willing to entertain other points of view and, you know, be open to changing my mind if that's not the case.
- [14:38]
A
So I think I see a lot of similarities, again, a lot of parallels with what happened with regard to Germany's rise in Europe in the late 19th century. So it wasn't that Germany wasn't throwing its weight around in economic terms or in political or even military terms, unsettling all of its neighbors, just like China in terms of its race, has unsettled many, certainly most of its Asian neighbors. But it was on the other hand also the inability back then of the establishment powers to try to figure out what would a sensible role for Germany actually be at the core of this most important continent in the world back then. And they were never able to resolve that problem until it was too late. I think we have faced a little bit of the same situation with China. So China's foreign policy as it moved out of the early and mid reform era, if we now are in the late, late reform era, we possibly are, was that many of its leaders, all the Xi Jinping generation, concluded that China had already risen to a point of great influence within its own region and aiming, just like Germany did back in the late 19th century, for becoming the predominant power within that region. Now there is nothing wrong in that aspiration. I mean, China has been the predominant country in Eastern Asia for a very, very long time. The question is how it happens and the trajectory through which it happens and of course equally important, how it then interacts with what is today the predominant power in East Asia, which is the United States of America. So that is the transition with regard to it. If we turn this to the Chinese side today. I mean, what I sense that I was in Beijing last week, what I very often sense is that we are now at the point when there is coming together among Chinese CCP elites and ordinary Chinese, that United States is somehow out to contain, constrain China in terms of its natural growth. And that of course comes in addition to those, in my view, mainly self imposed constrictions that China has with regard to its neighbors. But of course the CCP view, the Chinese government's view is that all of these are in a way created by the United States, China's bad relations with Japan, with South Korea, etc. Etc. Just like German leaders before World War I believe that it somehow was all perfidious Albion, it was all the British fault that other countries objected to the, to the manner in which German power rose. But of course this also matters in the broader sense. So the one thing that we have to avoid, in my view, certainly slightly more long term, and there are people on this side, as you know, I mean, even within the current administration who are thinking seriously about this is that we move from a series of conflicts between the United States and China coming out of the kind of developments that we have already talked about to a situation where ordinary Chinese believe that the United States forever will be out to prevent them from the kind of growth within their own country that they expect that they would be able to foresee. It is particularly important when you think about the average income in China per family still being somewhere between 1/7 and 1/6 of that of the United States. China has a lot of growing yet do just like Germany had in the early 20th century. And it's when you get to this situation that ordinary Chinese, ordinary Germans back then believe that someone is out to prevent them from doing so, that you're in real trouble. I think my Yale colleague Paul Kennedy puts this really well in his book about the rise of Anglo German antagonism when he says that, you know, what Britain back then was telling the Germans basically was, you know, Little hunts. If you could just stop growing, then everything would be fine. If you went back to your lederhorsen and behaved as you have before, there wouldn't be a problem. And I feel to some extent, particularly in the period between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, that that's what we were telling Shana, instead of creating some kind of formula by which Shauna's aspirations as it grew could be incorporated in a better form within an East Asian framework.
- [19:29]
B
The German parallel really intrigues me because I'm actually torn personally whether I see more of Wilhelmine Germany in China's rise or in what I will just bluntly call America's newfound antagonistic attitude to the rest of the world, including some of our oldest and closest allies. And I'm going to make another comparison of personalities so you don't have to. But if you want to respond, I will more than welcome it. Wilhelm the Second was very famous for a mercurial personality based transactional foreign policy. He had this weird love hate relationship with his various cousins, including the Tsar and some of the leadership of Great Britain. I think there was a period where Wilhelm insisted on sending paintings he made to the Tsar on a regular basis that were very. They looked like something out of one of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian novels where like the two of them are on a cliff with soaring eagles or what. And frankly I see a lot of that sort of attitude in how the United States is approaching the globe. And it gives me some. Some basis for amusement just because we all need that. But it also worries me that we could have two countries that are taking on different aspects of Prussia and then Germany's rise at odds with each other. That is a very volatile combination.
- [21:19]
A
That's a really good point. I mean, I have never thought of Kaiser Wilhelm and Xi Jinping as being identical or even similar in terms of the personal qualities or even personal behavior. One of the fun things about this is that when I did an article in Foreign affairs that was in many ways the basis for this book about a year and a half ago, and they had an illustration to that article of President Xi gradually morphing into Wilhelm ii, which as you can imagine went down like a ton of lead in China, didn't make me the man of the day in Beijing. And it's in a way doubly unfortunate when I discuss this with people in Beijing because I do not actually make that specific comparison. I mean, I think they are very different in terms of personalities. But going to your point I think personality matters to a great deal. And I think one should look at this in terms of the combination of what you could call Strongman rule that we had a tendency to move towards before 1914 with what is happening today.
- [22:33]
B
So I have to apologize, I may not have fully articulated my point. My concern was that I see Xi as a sort of Bismarckian figure, whereas I see Trump as a sort of Wilhelmid figure.
- [22:45]
A
No, I got that. And I think that's to some extent true. I wouldn't quite. I mean, I think if we want to stay in the world of comparisons, and my students, of course, love this. Charles Bismarck, in many ways is Deng Xiaoping. I mean, he's the one who was able to plan for the future, thinking strategically about where China's interests were. Xi Jinping is not like that. I mean, his approaches remind me much, much more of some of those, not necessarily just in Germany, but political leaders that came after the Bismarckian era who were trying to deal with, as we already talked about, conflicts and issues that were real and were there, but couldn't quite find a way of doing so. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has some, you know, he certainly has some of the impulsiveness. He also, in my view, has some of the striking lack of thinking strategically over the long term that Wilhelm II also had. I mean, and this is part of what worries me so. I mean, if a world class crisis of the 1914 kind of black Swan event were to come along today, with tensions already running high, I really worry about that aspect of personalized predominance or rule. I think that was one of the things that really did go wrong in December of 1914 was that a number of these people, because of the personalities, were not able to pull back when they should have seen that it was in their interest to pull back.
- [24:20]
B
If you look back at some of the more robust in depth treatments of that summer, whether we're talking popular history like Barbara Tuchman or some of Christopher Clark's later work, that is, I would argue, a bit more academic and rigorous. But that's very much an ongoing theme, is how personality driven a lot of this was, and an inability for the leaders to step out of themselves and even attempt to see things from another person's point of view, not as a matter of empathy or grace, but simply as a means of coming up with a better strategy for themselves. It seems to have never occurred. And I very much worry that that could lead to a Black Swan event. So I want to address something in a region that you deal with in your book, but not as in depth with China. I was hoping I could pull some more out of you about it. And, you know, shortly after your book came out, the United States launched a war against Iran. And I can very well see a world in which a distant war in a faraway land, as one of the less illustrious British prime ministers would say, become something considerably more. In the same manner that the assassination of a single Habsburgian official led to a conflagration that utterly unmade the world as it was then known. And I was just wondering, should we be concerned about this conflict in Iran, a country which in many sense is integrated into the sort of international ecosystem that Russia and China also belong to, expanding into something that does resemble eras in history we would prefer not to go back to?
- [26:23]
A
There is certainly a risk of that. I mean, clearly, in my view, particularly with how the war has developed over the last couple of weeks, I think there is a definite possibility, not that this in itself, I think, could lead immediately to a greater conflagration, but that it could come together with other issues. Right. In creating a kind of situation that it would be really, really hard to get out of. And this was, of course, the problem in the summer of 1914 was that Kaiser Wilhelm had been on his annual sailing vacation in the Norwegian fjords and was called back to potsdam in. In July 1914. And when told that this was because of a Balkan crisis, he exploded, as he often did, and said, you know, why did you call me back here for other Balkan Crisis? I've had 13 of these in my reign, and we always been able to contain them. And then there are those terrifying 36 hours after that. But it dawns on him and everyone else that this time is different, that this time it might be much more difficult to pull back. I worry about that with regard to the current war in Iran, because usually through the Cold War, even before the Cold War, we had plenty of conflict in the Middle East. And to use that term, usually the conclusion among great power leaders was, what happens in the Middle east stays in the Middle East. But that's become less and less true since the Iraq War, especially, or since 9 11. Right. I think we are now in territory where, because of the nature of this US war against Iran, the chances for an international spillover are far greater than we ever seen with any kind of US involvement in the Middle East. And that's one of the reasons why I think it is so important to pull back, because we do not know in which direction this is heading. And I think the Consequences could be very severe.
- [28:22]
B
So let's get to sort of the latter third of your book then. How do we effectively walk ourselves back from that cliff's edge? And I'll speak from the American's perspective, like how do you walk back from that precipice that could lead to horrible conflict? And I don't think there is anybody who has ever studied, for example, the PLA and the US Military and the buildup in the South China Seas or goings on in the Taiwan Straits who would argue that war would not be horrific. Even a short war would have unimaginable casualties that have been unseen for almost a century. How does a nation, whether the United States or China, walk back from that edge and do so in a manner that doesn't look like self humiliation to their constituencies?
- [29:20]
A
Look, the important thing I think today is to try to get some more stability into the international system in general. This is true for the ongoing wars at the moment with regard to Ukraine, the war in Iran. It's also true for what probably in terms of the overall picture is even more dangerous for, for great power confrontation, which is the situation with regard to Taiwan or the situation on the Korean Peninsula. And I think we are still in territory where it's quite possible to move back from the level of confrontation that we can see now with regard to these regional conflicts. We have a summit between President Xi and Trump coming up in Beijing now, we are told in May, almost certainly, if that goes reasonably well, further meetings between the two during the course of the year. This provides an opportunity, at least on those kinds of issues, to try to find ways in which you can infuse a little bit more stability into the situation. So I think it has to be thought of in two parts. The first part is what is ongoing already. I mean, there's a desperate need to end the military phase of the conflicts in Ukraine and in Iran. You know, we need to do much more than what we're doing at present to try to find some kind of stability in those kinds of situations. But in addition to that, we also have situations such as the ones with regard to Taiwan. I'm of the view that I'm pretty sure that President Xi and President Trump are going to start in their conversations dealing with economic and technology and narcotics issues. This piece that just came out a couple of days ago in Foreign affairs where I argue along those lines, but I also think it's incredibly important to make use of this opportunity then to move on to these other territorially based strategic issues. And this is the Reason why I'm a limited optimist. I mean, I think there is room at least for temporary compromise on some of these issues. I mean, if you take Taiwan, I think the problem is that both sides, it's as if you pull on a string from two ends and you just make the knot harder and harder and tougher and tougher to resolve. Everyone with any sense knows that the best that can be achieved from either side at the moment with regard to Taiwan is status quo. And yet we moved ourselves into a situation where, where both sides behave as that is not the case. Right. That they could achieve in some undefined way something more. I think one of the. And I've said this in other contexts as well, and I go into it in the book to some extent, I think if the United States were to declare that it would under no circumstance support Taiwan independence, which is not a departure from what American policy has been in the past, but needs desperately needs to be restated by the president under the current conditions, that could go a long way in terms of dealing with some of the aspects of the situation, particularly if it's followed up, which it's much harder but not unthinkable, by a PRC statement in some form or another that they regard it as unthinkable that they would take military action against the island unless it declares independence. So if you look at the. The secession law on the Chinese side, they have this very unhealthy lack of clarity between de facto and the jure independence for Taiwan. It's in China's own interest to be very clear about this and that it is the jure. And it wouldn't cost very much politically for Xi Jinping to move in that direction. So there is room for compromise here. The question is whether people are actually going to seek it and make use of it, because if they don't believe me, this is going to get much worse. It's problematic at the moment, but it could get much worse than what it is today.
- [33:31]
B
So what worries me about that, and I don't have a better answer, let me be very clear about that to begin with, but the world in which you're describing, in which we seek consensus on the things that we can seek consensus for, whether because they're easier problems or because there is a domestic constituency for them in both countries, I don't know. It doesn't solve the problem. It moves it down the road. And what it puts me in the mind of to bring it back to the other part of your book, is the concert of Europe. This Sort of post Congress of Vienna consensus. It worked for a bit, but it didn't stop the Revolutions of 1848. It did not stop the wars of German unification. There were countless other smaller conflicts. It definitely postponed things. And I guess this makes me, in contrast to you, a limited pessimist. You used the analogy of a knot before, and I will use another trope. And what worries me is that so many people in power in both countries see the only way to untie that knot as to cut it with a sword. I don't want that to happen. Obviously, it would be immensely destructive, not just for the United States and China, but for the entire world, from an economic and trade perspective, to say the least. So I'm going to sort of peel back the curtain on something I noticed when I was still in government working on PRC matters, and ask you a question that I hope you have not been asked before. And one thing I noticed always when I was representing the country was this horrible tendency among people in charge of policy to buy important, rigorously analytic books and draw entirely the wrong conclusion from them. So I'm thinking in particular of when Graham Allison came out with his book, which was an expansion on an earlier Atlantic article. And the book was actually a fairly quantitative, nuanced discussion of what happens when a rising power confronts a declining one on the global stage. And he went through close to two dozen examples throughout history and offered a prescription, very close to yours, about seeking consensus where we can in the recognitions that some things are intractable now, but the consequence of trying to resolve them militaristically is so huge that punting them is a good idea, even if all it does is move it down the road. And what everybody in government took from that was, well, conflict between China and the United States is inevitable. There's this old Greek guy, Thucydides, who talked about it, and we just need to prepare for war, which I think is precisely the opposite point of Alison's book. So the last question I really have for you is, what is the main point you hope practitioners of diplomacy and military policy can draw from your work, and what is the biggest fear you have that they may draw from it mistakenly?
- [37:12]
A
Really good set of questions. And I would respond as almost anyone I think of my age would. What is most important in life is time to have enough time available to do the things that you think you would want to do. Not just in terms of the specifics of the conflicts that we've been talking about, but in general. I mean, world leaders have a lot of issues on their agenda in terms of things they want to achieve. And the only thing we know for sure is that great power war would do away with all of those. So playing for time, going back to, as you said, that 19th century president which wasn't perfect but was good enough for almost 100 years to avoid cataclysmic great power war, that is, I think, in our own time, also the best we can hope for. Because with that long postponement, let's call it that, there is a chance for other developments, other changes like the ones you alluded to, to take place, if not peacefully, but without a world conflagration. That's the key. I mean, we must not have an order. And I think that's the 19th century lesson from this. One of those who point that out better than anyone else is Henry Kissinger. That couldn't stand in the way of economic and social change, but allow that change to play out over time and therefore reduce the risk of great power war. That is the situation I think that we are, we are facing at the moment. So the recommendations that come out of my book are all in that direction, that we really need to think about our own situation today as a situation in which tensions are already running very, very high, in many ways higher among great powers than what they were in the spring of 1914, where the risk of conflicts, if a world class crisis, kind of black swan event that we can't even imagine at the moment, could be a terrorist act, could be a lot of things comes along, we are not in a position to handle it. So that's why we have to start now. And I echo much of what my friend and colleague Graham Ellison has said in his book. But I emphasize probably more how Thucydides ends his great book. He ends it and Prisurdius was a military man for most of his life. And he ends it by saying, why did war come? War came because everyone thought that war could solve their problems. And it turned out to be exactly the wrong conclusion, that what war did was to undo the world that they lived in totally, not just with regard to military affairs, but also with regard to social and economic affairs. And, you know, destroyed the Greek world just like we destroyed the European world in 1914 and set up for almost a century of conflicts coming out of that disaster of 1914. There is another point in this, which I want to get across to our listeners, and that is, and you alluded to that quite rightly, is that great power war is different from other kinds of wars. I mean, we've seen a lot of war and conflicts and killing and dying in their own time. And all of that is terrible, sometimes for reasons, sometimes not. Great power war is of a different dimension with regard to this, as many soldiers were killed in the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. As in all great power wars combined between 1815 and 1914, so throughout the 19th century. And of course, the suffering didn't stop when that war ended. It went on for another generation through the disasters of the interwar years, the Second World War and to some extent the Cold War. This is what people have to think about, right? And that, I think, is the message of the book. I'm not a pacifist. I don't believe that we can abolish war. I don't even think we should attempt to abolish war. But we have to think about what the consequences of great power war would be. And the only way we can do that meaningfully is by starting now to look at the individual conflicts that already exist and see how we can reduce the tension in them so that we get enough time to move in these kinds of directions, thinking about how we cannot, we can't, resolve over these conflicts. My guess is that the Taiwan conflict is going to be unresolved for a very, very long time. What we can do is to move it away from the brink of war. And that is what is needed and that is what the book is calling for.
- [41:51]
B
I agree with almost everything you said. I just have a concern that when we talk about time, at least with respect to the Chinese government and the United States government, their domestic political systems are set up to deal with different lengths of time. It is very difficult for the United States to form in this partisan era a foreign policy that lasts for more than two to four years, years. Whereas China, with a lack of concern about domestic elections, can do 5, 10, 15 year plans. And yeah, it seems to me thinking while you were talking, it's almost like the last great power war provides a momentary, by which I mean decades long, if not a century, inoculation against the next one. But like many vaccines, it eventually loses its efficacy. And I very much fear that we are hurtling to that point without thinking about it.
- [43:00]
A
I worry about that too. I mean, when I was writing this book, I was acutely aware that there is only about 0.01% of the world's population today who actually experience quit power war. I mean, that was the situation in the early 20th century as well. And there are all of these people on all sides. I mean, not just in the United States and in China, but everywhere who are actually thinking, mad as it may seem, that war might be part of resolving their problems. So, I mean, much of that comes out of the lack of understanding, experience with great power. I don't think China in many ways is better placed for this than what the United States is. I mean, there are so many weaknesses within the Chinese decision making system because of the way that it is set up. Especially at the moment. There is so little continuity in terms of many aspects of Chinese policymaking. Think about what has been happening within the PLA of late, that this idea that China really would be able to plan for the long term, at least at the moment, I don't see very much of that. And that's not a good thing. I mean, I would like China, as I would like the United States to be able to plan better for the future in the United States, as you say, under the worst circumstances, which of course haven't always been the case in the 20th century and up to now it makes it harder to plan. But on the Chinese side as well, I mean, I do think that if you think about planning, I mean, if you compare the kind of planning, planning in terms of international affairs that the current Chinese government is able to do, compared to, for instance, Deng Xiaoping, China's Bismarck, how he was able to think about these things in terms of generations, you know, there's a huge difference. So short termism you find everywhere and it is scary and we have to try to find our way out of it. But we also have to recognize, like you said, that it exists and it's there and it's something we have to deal with.
- [45:01]
B
Well, on that note, which is I will take an implicit argument for policymakers to study more history and I would expand that to the general population of both countries as well. I think we will leave it and I will thank you for joining us today and wholeheartedly recommend your book the Coming Storm to our audience. I think it is probably the next best thing those of us who did not go to school in New Haven can get to taking the famous Grand Strategy seminar. So thank you again.
- [45:33]
A
It has been a great pleasure. Wonderful conversation. Thank you.
- [45:39]
B
The Lawfare podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter@lawfaremedia.org support supporters also get access to special events and other bonuses, bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath and Escalation. Our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work@lawfaremedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Pacha with audio engineering by Kara Shillin of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music, and as always, thanks for listening.