The (False) Triggers of Great Power War

An IR professor at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, contends that war and peace are today’s most critical political issues. For the last two decades, environmental and sexual identity questions have dominated headlines. In those years, however, global affairs transformed. The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History observes that “there are enough structural and political conflicts between the Great Powers today to make major war a likely scenario.” Worse, the distribution of power looks very much like that before World War I, and just like people then, few alive have experienced a great war. The Coming Storm wants to concentrate minds and offer a route away from catastrophe.  

Current leaders grew up in the stability of the bipolar Cold War, where two ideological behemoths contained each other. Those aspiring to power came of age during the unipolar post-Soviet period, when America gained hegemony. However, we are now firmly in a multipolar world of great powers with nationalism, protectionism, conspiracy thinking, and security flashpoints, all the ingredients that sparked WWI.   

Written in a direct style with a popular audience in mind, The Coming Storm is a quick read – a very quick read for those who know about WWI. The volume's interest lies in its historical analogy, but the sales concept behind the book hampers its effectiveness. Keeping the book lean means that the analogy, as presented, is rough and ready, and, most importantly, its historical method lacks a framing theory.  

Robert Kaplan argues that Weimar is the best analogy for us whilst Rana Dasgupta contends it is Britain’s `long eighteenth century’. To make his case, Westad gives short profiles of the great powers in the system, comparing them with the players in WWI.     

The U.S., like Britain in 1914, has “a deep fear of decline,” and planning is dogged by a Washington elite that thinks “giving up on absolute and global US supremacy is almost akin to treason.” Also, like Edwardian England, the U.S. is beset by conspiracy thinking. 

Smarting from its “Century of Humiliation,” a Han nationalist China, like 1914 Germany, fears encirclement. To the west is India, and to the east are U.S. forces stationed in Korea and Japan. To the south is America’s firm ally, the Philippines, and in the offing, Australia, with its long and proud military history. With its large and growing English-speaking educated middle class, Westad is bullish on India: it has Pakistan in its crosshairs, a country critical to China’s food security.    

As in 1914, Putin’s “Russian World” fears the West’s expansion in the Balkans. Westad has no confidence in Putin’s strategic “acuity,” nor Mother Russia’s dynamism. Despite best efforts, Russia’s imperial reach is anemic. However, Westad grants the legitimacy of Russian fears. Not only is NATO running a proxy war in Ukraine, but the EU increasingly acts like an empire, its center “imposing limits on what its member states can do and forcing them to behave in certain ways.” It also has form. Not only did it reject Russia’s outreach to join in the early 2000s, but NATO’s self-image as a defensive alliance is belied by “NATO’s own curious afterlife, “engaging in out-of-area operations in Bosnia, Libya, and Serbia. With the U.S. at its core, NATO participated in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, an ally of Russia that helps secure Russia’s southern border.  

In addition, the Western alliance has wild cards. Though sympathetic to the West and proximate to Western countries, the rapidly emerging powers of Brazil and Turkey have striking alignments with Russia and China. With large populations, these technologically and militarily sophisticated countries have expressed dismay at the West’s foreign policy in recent years. Summarizing the distribution of power, Westad discerns “a world that looks increasingly like that of the late nineteenth century: imperial wars, unsettled alliances, revanchist powers, and territorial expansionism.”  

To settle the waters, Westad reaffirms liberal order. To curb conspiracy thinking, he recommends restoring multilateral institutions. Additionally, he urges a return to international law, arguing that recent cavalier actions by Russia and the U.S. mean that “sooner or later such blatant disregard for international law will also cause a Great Power crisis of massive dimensions.” Further, he recommends compromise since crises “such as in Ukraine and Palestine” could trigger broader war. Westad points to significant issues on which all great powers could likely agree on common action, such as trade, pandemics, climate, and space. Cooperation is more likely to forestall war, he thinks, than the current path of nationalism and protectionism. A last point, and one I wish he had developed more, Westad wants to see a return to virtue, since it is all too common for national administrations to be staffed with careerists who shy away from speaking plainly to leadership.  

Westad’s proposals assume an attractive politics of rational liberal humanism, and here is where we start to see that the analogy is a bit rough and ready. The analogy goes further than he suggests, for despite the militarism, this political ethos was present in 1914. Westad does not mention that there were many sophisticated cool heads in the highest ranks of the contending parties in WWI. One example is the British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey. He was a thoughtful, dedicated, and liberal man. Another is Bethmann Hollweg, the German Chancellor, who loved nothing more than reading Plato in Greek. The German High Command was full of thoughtful men, and it was the rationality of the Schlieffen Plan to solve Germany’s encirclement that drove the war. In fact, the buffoonish Kaiser was mostly bluster, and the aged Franz Joseph of Austria was a restrainer. It is worth recalling that the European establishment had resolved prior crises, all of which could have triggered general war. In 1914, skillful management ran out of track. Some contingencies cannot be accounted for: the Kaiser regarded Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a dear friend and thought kindly of his murdered wife. As much as anything, grief is why he gave Austria the “blank cheque” that triggered events.  

The history is integrated well, though not always. For example, 20 pages are spent on the weeks from the time of Sarajevo to the war’s start. To many, this history is well known and adds little analytical value unless keyed to character portraits that reveal underlying causes. This brings us to a core problem – lack of theory.  

Geopolitical writers, such as Robert Kaplan and Bruno Maçães, produce popular works that make substantial use of theory. Germany’s encirclement plays a big role in Westad’s story, and rightly so. However, as pointed out by Samuel Huntington, China and Russia are not parvenues but ancient civilizations. They are survivors because they have seen it all before and, as anchors of civilizations, they are well-resourced. Huntington is right that the premier nations in civilizations are not under the same strategic strain as mere countries, and this disanalogy plays havoc with the argument. Germany was a Europe-wide tinderbox because it had united in living memory and it was reasonable for Germans to be anxious about collapse.  

The shelf life of books like The Coming Storm can be short, and this is not helped by the lack of theory. Reading it, you sense the Iran War has made it dated. For example, there is a lengthy excursus on U.S. naval strategy for a war with China over Taiwan. However, the Iran War has shown that any nation that retains second-strike missile capability can annihilate carrier groups. Better these pages address Thucydides’ distinction between land and sea.   

Hopefully not Pollyannish, but there is a serious question about whether the populations of the great powers can wage a great-power war. Russia seems incapable, and the US has a health problem. Whilst there is something like five percent of the US population that has a dedicated fitness lifestyle, nearly 80 percent of Americans 18-24 cannot pass the military’s fitness exam. To this, add the first page of Gallic Wars, where Caesar speculates that the toughest German tribes were those who refused all trade, lest their peoples be enervated by luxury. Given the popular image of the horror of WWI, it is uncomfortable to learn that many soldiers preferred the front to their industrial lives back home. R&R was frequent, food and drink plentiful, and killing rates at 1 in 10 meant survival chances were not bad. Attrition rates in the Crimean War and US Civil War were worse. The Somme was ghastly in scale, but the long battle had highs and lows in intensity, and attrition was little different than at Waterloo. The same was true for the Duke of Marlborough’s blood fest at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709. One of WWI’s most highly decorated regiments, the Lancashire Fusiliers – Tolkien’s regiment – was comprised of miners and factory hands. These hard men had their reasons for going to war. What reasons do today’s youth have?   

The Coming Storm is a useful thought experiment, and its urging of peace is welcome. I personally like the historical method, but it works best when guided by theory.  

Graham McAleer is a lay member of the Judicial Ethics Committee of the State of Maryland and author, most recently, of Tolkien, Philosopher of War (CUA Press, 2024).