One of my favorite lines in literature is from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
I think this is one of the basic insights of any solid study of human psychology, of moral phenomenology, and of large-scale political change. The idea of "norm cascades" at the cultural level is at least an aggregated analogy to the individual case, and may be more intimately related than that.
Anyway, that's a general point. The example I want to talk about today is about the rise of "Great power rivalry" in US public discussion. It's not that long ago that a President--Obama, in a 2012 debate--could ridicule his opponent, Mitt Romney, at leat plausibly if not universally convincingly, when the opponent said the greatest foreign policy challenge of the day was "Russia." I am not sure that Romney was entirely right, but he certainly had a plausible case to make, and it's had evidence on its side since then.
The opinion in DC seems to have shifted in Romney's direction, not so much about Russia but about China, and even moreso, about the idea that we are entering an age of "great power competition." This discussion, from the Atlantic, is interesting:
The term great-power competition appeared in 141 news articles in the Nexis database during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, and 1,021 times during the eight years of the Obama administration, largely during Obama’s second term. In the Trump administration’s first two and a half years alone, it has surfaced in more than 6,500 articles, soaring after the rollout of the NSS and NDS.
The phrase is invoked from Aspen to Israel to South Korea, and by U.S. officials making the case for all sorts of policies. (“China and Russia seek to dominate and influence not just their own geographic regions,” but also the Middle East, Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the region, recently noted.) It has gained traction across otherwise-unbridgeable partisan divisions. Most Americans now view Russia as an adversary and China as a rival. Joe Biden, who a decade ago acknowledged the coming competition with China but rejected the idea that “the great struggle of our time will be between liberal democracies like the United States and autocracies like China and Russia,” now argues precisely that as a Democratic presidential candidate. The “new conventional wisdom if you’re a bright, young” Republican or Democratic staffer in Washington is that “the more anti-Chinese you can be, the better your future career,” the international-relations scholar Joseph Nye recently observed.
The piece links to a warning not to let this get out of control, but it seems that the cow's left the barn on this one. The worry is that the community can imagine itself into an enmity that wasn't there. Similar worries existed all through the Cold War--perhaps best expressed by the "revisionist" school of Cold War historians--and they have emerged whenever anyone has a lens through which they invite us all to see the world. Happened with Fukuyama and Huntington in the 90s, with the whole "Radical Islamic Terror" in the early 2000s, and is happening now. These kinds of dissent look to be part of the ecology of ideas. That doesn't mean they're wrong or right--just means we can expect proposals, and challenges to those proposals, to take certain shapes as time goes on.
Margaret MacMillan's essay explores another, and to my mind more troubling, analogy. She points out that the pre-World War I era saw unprecedented connectivity, rising economic integration and efficiency, and dramatic (and turbulent) social movements agitating for change, both in egalitarian directions and in ethno-nationalist directions, and both signalling a newfound feeling on the part of ordinary people that they had power to do something. She also points out that Europe had lived in relative peace for about a century, and that multiple generations had passed without massive mobilization for great-power war; the two truly large great power wars in the 19th century, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 and the Crimean War of 1853-56, had been relatively confined events, partly because of the nature of the war and partly because of the intent of the leaders controlling the war. No one had seen a truly total war, engulfing the whole continent, since Napoleon.
Both of these things are true about our world as well, she notes. We assume international peace is a basic condition, and we assume international economic and cultural integration is simply a fact that cannot be repealed. But both assumptions are mistaken. Integration happens because of will, and will hardened into habit can still be disrupted; and peace is a basic condition, until the day, or the night, when it is not. We still live in a world full of weapons and warriors. There are plenty of reasons for war. And the economic system would be devastated, but the nations would learn how to live without globalization again, as they learned in the past. None of these are good things. But they are possible.
Are they likely? Is MacMillan's prognostication right? I hope not. I think there are countervailing forces--China's and Russia's strength is not as menacing to the US as Germany's was to France and Russia and the UK in the 1910s. I do think that Xi is a Kaiser Willy sort of leader, not in terms of his impetuosity, but in terms of how he is unaccountable to anyone outside of himself, and is perhaps not getting the best advice. (The same is true of Trump, but he seems so erratic as to inherited only Willy's id, not his intelligence.) Putin is wily, but actually quite weak--effectively more like the Ottoman Empire than pre-1914 Russia. The disanalogies are strong, that is to say.
But who can know? Sometimes I have some kind of pre-cognitive sense that we do live in an era remarkably like that of pre-1914 Europe. Culture, intelligence, wealth, power; great inequality, struggles for agency and voice, reactionary struggles against agency and voice; and behind all, an ominous growth of power among states. The problem may be not that there are no analogies, but that there are too many to choose between.