Making the unthinkable thinkable

How do dangerous great-power competitions arise?

I’ve been on holiday these past two weeks. Catching up on the post-hols inbox is often no fun, but there are little treats along the way, like Adam Tooze’s Substack newsletter. I had to stop and reflect for a bit on this one, which considers why the Nazis lost the Second World War but which also lingers thoughtfully on the differences in economic strategies between Germany and the Soviet Union—and their consequences. Quoting himself, Tooze writes:

What Germany encountered in Soviet Russia in 1941 was not 'Slavic primitivism', but the first and most dramatic example of a successful developmental dictatorship, and what was revealed in the Wehrmacht's floundering advance towards Moscow was not the backwardness of Russia, but Germany's own partial modernization…

He then adds that it might have been better to frame the matter by…

[...treating] the Nazi regime and the Soviet Union in parallel as rival responses to World War I and its aftermath. Both were trying to snap the bounds defined by the dominant powers after World War I.

Snap the bounds defined by the dominant powers. Here in America there is a folk historical narrative of sorts through which we explain the explosively violent challenge to the prevailing world order, dominated and secured by the economic and political might of Imperial Britain and the United States of America, which launched the Second World War. In that narrative, the actions of Germany and Japan—the massive military buildups and reckless initiation of the war—are seen as obviously foolhardy and doomed. They represent a nonsensical rejection of the reality that the more economically powerful nations of America and Britain would of course win any military conflict, and furthermore of the truth that long-lasting security and prosperity could only be achieved by becoming open, democratic, capitalist societies in the Anglo-American mold. This narrative has been extended to incorporate the outcome of the Cold War, as well. The Soviets, too, should have known that there was no beating us, only joining us and being thankful for having done so, sooner or later. 

This narrative flatters the victors. Not only did we win; we won because we were on the right side of history. It also looks reasonable only in the hindsight we enjoy in this particular instantiation of the multiverse; we can’t know in how many counterfactual worlds the Allies did not pull out a victory, and neither were the Allies as serenely confident of victory at the war’s outset as the folk narrative suggests they ought to have been. 

What we can know, and what the folk narrative fails to convey, is how profoundly uncertain the world felt at that moment. At the time, powers other than America, Britain and their close partners felt themselves constrained and endangered by the prewar state of the world in a wholly unacceptable way. America and Britain were pioneering industrializers. They were rich and powerful countries which wielded enormous influence over both the underlying structure of the global economy and the particular settlement which prevailed after the First World War. One might have thought that the wealth and power wielded by America and Britain should have served as an encouragement to other countries, to mimic and ally with the Anglo-American titans. But while most everyone wished to be rich and powerful, it was not clear in the first half of the 20th century how easily the paths that America and Britain had trod could be followed by others, or whether the leaders would allow others to follow, or whether the Anglo-American way was in the end likely to prove the most stable and enduring means of becoming rich and powerful. 

At any rate, other countries hoping to become both rich and secure did not enjoy the liberty to go about things in their own unbothered way. They were at the mercy of the international gold standard, of sophisticated industrial exporters in more advanced economies, of imperialistically minded governments, of the rules of the Treaty of Versailles. They faced the difficult question of how to develop while maintaining some semblance of autonomy: some ability, on the part of the ruling elites, to run a country the way they preferred it to be run.

Of course, America and Britain had their own reasons for imposing these constraints (or for supporting the institutions, like the gold standard, which embodied them). They also wished to enjoy a prosperity untroubled by foreign security threats. But the institutions and actions through which they sought to achieve this prosperity and security presented other countries with a menu of options which must have struck many governments, of all different kinds, as unappetizing. They could remain poor and weak and thus subject to dominance. They could participate in the prevailing order on the terms set by the most powerful nations: which necessarily implied a loss of autonomy and an acceptance of certain vulnerabilities. Or they could challenge the prevailing order and accept the diplomatic and military hostility which potentially followed.

From an American perspective, the right option of those three seems perfectly obvious and the choice of any other completely absurd. But again, it was not obvious at the time that challenging the prevailing order was a doomed enterprise. Neither was it obvious that participating in the prevailing order on terms set by America and Britain should yield benefits in terms of peace and prosperity great enough to justify the loss of political autonomy. The political and economic model championed by America and Britain did not look especially appealing in the 1930s, and many of the revisions to the model which subsequently made it more attractive (like the construction of generous welfare states, for instance) may not have unfolded as they did without the impetus of the Second World War.

All of which is to say that while the German and Soviet and Japanese challenges faced long odds, there was an underlying logic to the geopolitical tension between America and Britain on the one hand and rivals like Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union on the other. The governments of each wished to be rich and secure and autonomous enough to do things the way they wished to do them, and there was a genuine uncertainty regarding the payoffs of the strategies available to them. But such was the course of the war and the history which followed that Americans could feel that Germany and Japan, and then subsequently the Soviet Union, had been mad to try to defeat America, but also foolish for wanting to be something other than America in the first place. 

That, at least, was how Americans could feel circa 2000. But what about today? America and its allies built a new geopolitical order in the aftermath of the Second World War. It has been revised and extended in the decades since, and ever more of the world’s population and economic output has come to dwell in the shade it casts. When the Soviet Union fell, there was no longer any other beacon toward which one might navigate in pursuit of security and a measure of prosperity.

Until, suddenly, there was. For a long time it has been easy to see China as something other than the sort of fundamental rival to the dominant system and its architects that Germany or the Soviet Union once represented. Its explosive development has been enabled by market reforms; it has adopted many of the trappings of a capitalist economy; it owes its economic success to engagement with the world’s dominant economies, not to rejection of them; its leaders show up to big diplomatic set pieces and negotiate treaties. The temptation has long been to see China as a country whose capitalism is an odd variety, whose maturation into an open and democratic society has been stuck in a long adolescence, and which by dint of its enormous size has caused unintentional discomfort in other parts of the world, but which does not at base threaten to upend the prevailing order. 

Yet that assessment now seems wrong. China is really very different. Its capitalism is different not only in kind but in purpose; the economy is carefully managed by an authoritarian state, in order to achieve the ends of the state. It seeks to demonstrate that an autocracy can remain viable and preside over a powerful economy for an extended period. That aim isn’t really compatible with the global economic and diplomatic order as currently constituted. It is a problem for China’s leaders to allow themselves to be constrained by too many global economic rules or to permit too much of an exchange of ideas with other, freer places. It is just as big a problem for rich and open societies to leave themselves too exposed to money and firms which answer to an autocratic state. Exchange between China and the liberal world necessarily entails an intermingling of and a competition between values. When we decide that it is ok to purchase goods produced by unfree labor in Xinjiang, or when we buy the services of tech firms which enable censorship and oppression, we communicate something to the world at large about what sorts of things we feel are important.

More broadly, two fundamentally different political systems cannot help but be in competition with each other. It would not be good news for the CCP if Chinese incomes failed to catch American ones while America’s democracy demonstrated that it could effectively tackle big problems, from inequality to climate change. In the same way, American economic and social crises have contributed to a loss of faith in American democracy, in a way that provides support to China’s autocrats. Market exchange may often be a positive-sum affair, but competition between rival forms of government is not. The dominant powers bet that economic engagement with China would lead to political liberalization. It did not. Now there is a problem. 

China’s leaders would like the country to be rich and powerful and also to be able to do things in their own particular way. Instead they face a familiar menu: give up on being rich and powerful, engage with liberal democracies on terms set by governments which have no long-run interest in a thriving CCP, or have a go at snapping the bounds defined by the dominant powers. 

To people living a century from now, the payoffs to each of these choices may seem obvious in hindsight. For now they most certainly are not. That makes this a dangerous moment. And the rose-tinted folk narrative of America’s triumph over the Axis powers and the Soviet Union has likely made the moment more dangerous than it ought to have been. America has been complacent: in looking after the health of its own economy and democracy, in maintaining its bonds with allies, in demonstrating its commitment to liberal values. We could have made the payoffs to the strategies available to China’s leaders different—perhaps no more to their liking, but less likely to lead to a dangerous conflict. But we didn’t, and now that Washington is beginning to see the nature of the Sino-American rivalry, leaders of both parties are in something of a panic. That’s no good; a panicky overreaction could easily make the situation more dangerous still.

It would be nice to say that something like war is unthinkable. But then that’s part of the problem: that we indulged in a false triumphalism and forgot that the virtues—of an open society, of democracy, of a market economy—need to be demonstrated, not once but on an ongoing basis, not only to others but also to ourselves. Because war all too easily can become thinkable—to those, at least, with the capacity to start one.

In his dispatch, Tooze riffs on the 18th Brumaire, and I’ll close by quoting him.

If it is true that people make history they do not do so in isolation. And their rival projects of history-making condition each other.

War is the paradigmatic case of history-making in collision. One power's history-making defines the conditions for another's. In war, as Clausewitz remarked, the opponent dictates the “law to me, as I do to him”. The question at stake is stark: Will I make history, or will you?

[ENDS]