Norwegian-born Odd Arne Westad, a professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, with a long history of writing focused on the Cold War and China, is sounding the alarm about the possibility of a new world war.
“What I fear, is that if a crisis that we cannot at the moment fully foresee were to come along, we will not, under current circumstances, have the ability to take the necessary step back which would prevent the outbreak of a great power war,” he tells Kathimerini, comparing current developments with the period before World War I. He notes that it is “wrong” to downgrade the current crises as “isolated” or “detached,” and proposes a series of “lessons learned.”
In your last book you talk about “a coming storm.” What form could this storm take and who will be the main protagonists?
I think we are approaching a very significant storm in terms of international affairs that could easily lead to global war. We are not there yet but I see a lot of signs in our own time – the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Iran, the tension that is rising in East Asia – as having some of the same hallmarks as what happened a hundred years ago when the First World War broke out. The rivalries that you see increasingly among great powers in military terms, in strategic and technological terms, in trade terms will not by themselves create another world war. What I fear is that if a crisis that we cannot at the moment fully foresee were to come along – something unexpected – we will not, under current circumstances, have the ability to take the necessary step back which would prevent the outbreak of a great power war.
In your view, what is it that is more alarming at the moment? Is it the leaders’ personalities, is it the emerging technologies or the incoherence of what we are experiencing?
I think it’s all of this coming together and that is what makes it into an almost perfect storm in the making. That we have leaders who do not seem to understand, at least in the great powers, the significance of this general race intention that we have seen over the past decade or so. We then have a lot of change that is happening in ways that are strikingly similar to what happened in the early 20th century. The collapse of a globalization process in economic terms that had been going on for some time back then and has now been going on for almost two generations. The increasing emphasis on technological competition within a technological revolution that is changing the lives of a lot of people that are involved in it. Back then it was telephone and telegraph and steamships and railways and the first aircraft. Today it’s AI and cyber. It’s quantum computing, which will be coming very soon. It’s space and hypersonic weapons. All of these kinds of things create a high degree of uncertainty. So, I think personality matters with regard to this. I also do believe that in a way we get – or the great powers get – the leaders they deserve.
So, in the United States, the election of Donald Trump has been now seen as not accidental. We know it because they have now elected him twice. And it comes out of a deep-seated fear in the United States that America is falling behind, that it’s no longer the center of international activities the way it used to be for almost a century. And that it has to take very dramatic action to uphold its own interests. It cannot think of itself anymore just as the center of an ever-expanding global system. It has to put its own very restrictively, narrowly defined national interests first.
Since you mentioned the United States, do you see patterns or specific goals in what the current American administration is trying to achieve in the global scene?
I think the election of Donald Trump was a symptom of a lot of Americans feeling that the globalization process that the United States in many ways has been at the core of when it started, no longer worked for the common American. That there is this sense not only of the country falling behind, but – the way it’s often portrayed in the United States – that other countries are stealing our jobs, that they are making use of US technology against the United States, and so on and so forth. So, it is a series of complaints more than a very specific strategy. And what it leads to is this centering on, as Trump likes to call it, America First kind of approach, which basically says to hell with established alliances and friendships. Now it’s every country for itself and the United States is going to put its own national interests at the core.
The problem is defining what those national interests actually are. And that’s what we see, I think, at the moment. For instance, with regard to the war in Iran, which to me serves no major American strategic interests whatsoever, but is undertaken, I think, by the Trump administration and by Trump himself, as a kind of way of saying that the United States is still capable of acting against its international enemies without taking any kind of advice from others. I have a suspicion that that action, just like British actions in the 1890s and early 1900s, will end in tears from the American side, because it’s very hard to achieve what they want to achieve. And even if they achieve it, it will have very little impact on the overall strategic rivalry between the United States and its main great power opponents, such as China or Russia. It will not put the United States in a better strategic position. But you can understand where it comes from. It is in many ways incoherent, but incoherent by political design coming out of the United States.
Some claim that the Iran conflict has entered a Cold War-like phase. Do you feel that this is the case?
I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about the situation we are in now as a Cold War, because it doesn’t bear any of the hallmarks, it seems to me, of the Cold War as the great international conflict of the late 20th century. It’s not primarily bipolar, it is multipolar. There are many great powers that act independently of each other. It’s all happening within the same economic system, where all of these powers are wiped for advantage. And it doesn’t have this very distinct ideological character that the Cold War had, between liberal, market-oriented societies on the one hand, and communist societies and groups on the other; ideologies that were taken very seriously by the protagonists. Today, I think it’s much more narrowly centered at how the main powers see their national interests. That’s the reason why I think it’s much more meaningful, if one wants to use an analogy, to use the analogy with the late 19th century and early 20th century, which had many of the same characteristics as the time that we live in today.
So, if there is a specific historical period that we should go back to in order to draw lessons, is this the period before the First World War?
Yes. I think that is the best. It’s not a perfect parallel, but it’s the best parallel.
If you could underline some of these lessons, what would they be?
I think the most important lesson is that we need to bring ongoing regional wars to an end, before they come together in the kind of cataclysm that produced disaster in 1914. It’s easy to say, a lot of people are saying even today, that wars in Ukraine, wars in Iran, the tension over Taiwan, South China Sea, all of this can be kept isolated, [that] there is little reason to believe that these conflicts would spread beyond their relative regions. I think that’s wrong today. It certainly was entirely wrong in the world before 1914. It contributed to the difficulties of pulling back when an unexpected global crisis came along, as was what happened in the summer of 1914. I think, is very important, to get these wars, the active phase of which, the shooting phase of which, stopped through ceasefires.
The second, I think, is that we need to think about how we use alliances and friendships in terms of international affairs. And this is, I think, what the Trump administration, among others, gets so terribly wrong. The problem in 1914 was not the existence of alliances. It was that a lot of people had started to doubt the integration and the power of these alliances. And that made people take chances, take risks, especially the rising state of that time, Germany, that they probably would not have taken if they believed that the alliances on the other side would actually hold. I think, therefore, the hollowing out of NATO that we are seeing at the moment is not only terrible in terms of general stability, it’s also outright dangerous, because it could easily tempt other countries, first and foremost Russia, to take risks in the relationship with Europe that they otherwise would not have taken. And then, finally, you know, before 1914, like today, there was a lot of talking going on between the leaders of the various great powers. Some of them, before 1914, were closely related.
The German kaiser, the Russian tsar, the British king were all cousins. They knew each other intimately and interacted very often. But they did so without any real understanding of the strategic aims and the strategic framework on the other side. And I think we are almost in exactly the same kind of situation today, that there is no sense of what kind of compromises might be necessary in order to avoid a global conflagration. Those are my main concerns in terms of similarities. And then, of course, we also have the technological revolution that I talked about, the high incidence of terrorism. And it was, of course, one of those terrorist acts in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 that unleashed the march toward a great power war. And we have similar phenomena in our own time. So it’s a coming together of these various factors where I think we must draw the most important lessons and then try to act on them.