Will Morrisey Reviews

Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014. Chapters 1-4.

 

The statesmen who maneuvered their peoples into the First World War did so with eyes open. “The story this book tells,” Clark writes, “is saturated with agency.” Its “central argument” is that “the events of July 1914 make sense only when we illuminate the journeys traveled by the key decision-makers.” Leaving primary emphasis on accounts of large and impersonal forces—such “large and categorical causes” as “imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honor, the mechanics of mobilization”—to the social scientists, he does what historians do best: uncovering the motives of the men who ruled, determining the actions of their countries. “The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors with conscious objectives, who were capable of a degree of self-reflection, acknowledged a range of options and formed the best judgments they could ion the basis of the best information they had to hand.” This is not to dismiss “forces long established and beyond their control” but rather to regard them as circumstances which “shaped the decisions” the statesmen made, rather than determining them. Clark is especially careful to assess the importance of regimes and geopolitics, which did indeed shape, without determining, those decisions.

Why “sleepwalkers,” then? Because although the statesmen knew what they were doing in the immediate sense, few if any anticipated the dimensions of the cataclysm they triggered: 65 million troops; 20 million military and civilian deaths; 21 million wounded, many grievously.

The event acknowledged as the war’s efficient cause, the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austria-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, invites Clark to consider the two rival countries. Serbia had been a principality within the Ottoman Empire since the 16th century (with some interruptions by the Hapsburgs), rebelling twice against the Turks in the early years of the 19th century, eventually asserting its independence in the 1830s—very much to the displeasure of both the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs. Officially, Serbia remained an Ottoman principality until the Empire withdrew its troops in 1867; the country was recognized as an independent kingdom at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Two rival groups vied for rule: the Obrenovic clan and the Karadjordjevic clan, with the Obrenovics prevailing within “a markedly undeferential political culture dominated by peasant smallholders.” Undeferential to the point of assassination: “few of the nineteenth-century Serbian regents died on the throne of natural causes.” Perhaps as a counterweight to the Ottomans, the Obrenovics leaned on Austria-Hungary for international support. In 1900, the reigning King Alexandar married a notoriously promiscuous society lady, angering the Crown Council and his father, Milan, the former king. Alexander “launched a propaganda cult around his queen” and cracked down on civil-social liberties, including freedom of the press. These acts “united most of Serbian society” against the royal couple, including the Radical Party, which consisted of merchant and banking families who not only resented the increasingly unconstitutional rule of the monarch but its pro-Hapsburg foreign policy, which “lock[ed] the Serbian economy into an Austrian monopoly and deprived the country’s capitalists of access to world markets.” That economy channeled ambitious young men not into commerce but into the army. By summer 1901, a young military officer named Dragutin Dimitrijevic, “later known as ‘Apis’ because his heavy build reminded his admirers of the broad-shouldered bull-god of ancient Egypt,” gathered followers around him, intent on removing the king. This they did, two years later, very much in the Serbian manner, by murdering Alexander and his family.

“The citizens of Belgrade had good reason to welcome the assassinations,” as the conspirators didn’t take power but handed it over to the parliament, which installed Peter Karadjorjevic, exiled head of the rival clan and reader of John Stuart Mill, as the new constitutional monarch. Ominously, however, Apis and his allies didn’t retire; “the regicide network was especially influential at court,” to the extent that King Peter chose Apis, now a “national hero,” as the Crown Prince’s companion on journey through Europe. A few years later, the young man “disqualified himself from the Serbian succession” by “kicking his valet to death.” Apis and his allies were more discreet than that, preferring to “secure for themselves the most desirable military and government posts,” including key military positions, thereby “exercis[ing] an influence over political questions of national importance.”

The Radical Party in the parliament was led by Nikola Pašic, “the kingdom’s dominant statesman after the regicide,” heading ten cabinets during the years 1904-1918. Pašic was a nationalist who longed for the unification of all Serbs in the Balkans, animated by nostalgia for the short-lived Serbian Empire, which had flourished some nine centuries earlier, and inclined them to alliance with pan-Slavist elements in Russia. Pašic had in fact served as King Alexander’s ambassador to Russia in the 1890s, before falling out of favor in the aftermath of an unsuccessful assassination attempt against the king at the end of the decade. The Radicals distrusted the professional army, preferring the “the peasant militia as the best and most natural form of armed organization.” Pašic declined to have the regicides prosecuted while moving to limit “their presence in public life,” pensioning off several of them. But Apis remained, honored by Serbians as a national hero.

“Pašic understood that his success would depend upon securing his own and the government’s independence, while at the same time establishing a stable and durable relationship with the army and the regicide network within it.” He faced opposition within the parliament itself from the breakaway Independent Radicals, who also sought alliance with the regicides in their attempts to undermine the several Pašic governments. He endorsed the notion of ‘Greater Serbia,’ whose envisioned borders would correspond roughly with those of the medieval empire as a matter of “historical right.” With English understatement, Clark observes that this ambition exhibited “that dramatic foreshortening of historical time that can sometimes be observed in the discourses of integral nationalism,” to which the fiction that the “sprawling, multi-ethnic, composite, medieval polity could be conflated with the modern idea of a culturally and linguistically homogeneous nation-state.” No matter: all of these peoples were said to be “essentially Serbs,” rather in the manner that all Kurds are essentially Turks in the eyes of the Turks and all Ukrainians are essentially Russians in the eyes of the Russians. Such ambitions put the Serbs in conflict with, well, everyone in the region, including the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and the several nationalities under and outside the rule of those empires. Clark notes that the memory of the Serbian Empire had remained alive “within the extraordinarily vivid traditions of Serbian popular epic songs,” chronicles of Serbs’ “struggle against alien rule,” most especially the Turks. “Assassination, martyrdom, victimhood and the thirst for revenge on behalf of the dead were central themes,” one highly being the story of a “celebrated assassin” who “infiltrated Turkish headquarters” on the day of a June 1389 battle and “cut the Sultan’s throat.” (The Turks won the battle, but the legend shone on.)

The realities of the 20th century were less promising, as the Balkans featured Muslim Albanians, Croats “who had no wish to join a greater Serbian state,” Bosnians who had never been part of Serbia but included many ethnic Serbs, along with Croats and Muslims, and Macedonians—the borders of whose homeland “remain controversial today.” “This mismatch between national visions and ethnic realities made it highly likely that the realization of Serbian objectives would be a violent process, not only at the regional level, where the interests of greater and lesser powers were engaged, but also in the towns and villages of the contested areas.” Pašic and his allies attempted to moderate one source of these tensions by claiming that a “Serbo-Croat” coalition could be formed—this, on the basis “that Serbs and Croats were in essence the same people, and second, that the Serbs would have to lead this process because they were a more authentically Slavic people than the Catholic Croats.” Since such nonsense could hardly withstand the scrutiny of other Europeans, first and foremost the Croats, the Serbs needed to pursue their aims with militia and guerrilla activity, which the rulers in Belgrade could disavow, as needed. 

In the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, Russia had emphasized its support of Bulgaria, not of Serbia which “pushed Serbia into the arms of Vienna.” In exchange for support of Serbian claims to portion of Macedonia, the Serbs agreed to leave Austro-Hungarian territories alone and to enter no treaties without Viennese concurrence. The problem was that most Serbs still detested Austria-Hungary, one its longtime imperial oppressors. And the 1903 coup brought in a regime that aligned itself with this popular sentiment, beginning with refusals to sign a commercial treaty, to continue arms purchases, or to borrow money from Vienna. Instead, Serbians turned to the French. The problem there was that the French of the early 1900s acted very much like the Communist Chinese of today, offering loans “on reasonable terms only if” the debtor “agreed to concessions of fiscal control” that compromised state sovereignty. “The French came to own more than three quarters of all Serbian debt,” even as the Austrians, offended at being jilted, imposed heavy tariffs. Serbians were not necessarily in any condition to repay, given the agrarian character of their political economy. Nor was an educated middle class likely to arise; in 1905, “pressed to ratify a new revenue source, the peasant-dominated assembly…chose to tax school books rather than home distillation.” Serbian civil society did not conduce to the literacy and entrepreneurial characteristics of a modern republic, even as it contracted debts to such a republic. Its one source of national pride (aside from its long-lost empire) was its “increasingly arrogant military culture,” imagined as an instrument for the satisfaction of “the land-hunger of a peasantry whose plots were growing smaller and less productive.” 

In 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the indignation of the Serbs, who regarded Bosnia as “geographically and ethnographically the heart of Great Serbia.” For the moment, however, Serbia’s Slavic big brothers, the Russians, did nothing to aid them. Serbia was forced to renounce its claims, formally if not emotionally. Indeed, the nationalist groups radicalized, now with a grievance against the government compromisers. This led to the formation of the organization called the Black Hand, a semi-secret society which included Apis among its seven founding members. “In their work for the ‘national cause,’ these men increasingly saw themselves as enemies of the democratic parliamentary system in Serbia and especially of the Radical Party, whose leaders they denounced as traitors to the nation.” Not even a regime change would suffice, however; there must be “a thoroughgoing renovation of Serbian politics and society, a ‘regeneration of our degenerate race,'” as one pronunciamiento put it. The Black Hand infiltrated the border guards and customs officers along the border with Bosnia. 

Pašic and his Radical Party might have been able to contain them, but the continued weakening of the Ottoman Empire brought disorder to the Balkans, disorder made to order for Apis and his followers. Italy invaded the Ottoman province of Libya in 1911, “trigger[ing] a cascade of opportunist attacks on Ottoman-controlled territory” in the Balkans by Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Montenegro in the First Balkan War. This coalition drove the Ottomans out of Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace. Almost immediately, the Second Balkan War saw a falling-out among the victors, as Servia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania fought Bulgaria for territories in Macedonia and Thrace. Almost overnight, Serbia had become “a major regional power,” as the various Serbian factions temporarily worked together. The Black Hand not only participated in the wars but were tasked by the government with pacifying non-Serbs in the newly conquered territories. As might have been expected, the pacifiers were reluctant to cede authority over those territories to the government, once the pacification had been completed. “The hardliners took the view that only a firm and illiberal administration would be suited to the consolidation of Serbian control in areas of mixed ethnicity.” 

Pašic’s only recourse was to appeal to a foreign power. This could only be the French, in collaboration with their allies (against Germany), the Russians. By June 1914, shortly before the ‘guns of August,’ Apis had gone back underground and Pašic was ready to consolidate his power in an election. But both of the important Serbian factions—the Radicals and the Black-Hand influenced military—keened for “the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the succession of Serbia to the vast lands of the empire that still awaited pan-Serbian redemption.” This is why the assassination of the Austrian Archduke appealed to the Black Hand, including Apis, “the principal architect behind the plot.” Moreover, precisely because Franz Ferdinand was a moderate, a man who might offer the Slavic nations under his rule some concessions in exchange for peace, Apis regarded him as more dangerous to Serbian interests than the sterner elements in the Austrian government. For his part, Pašic knew that there was a plot to murder the Archduke. He may have warned Vienna but if so, his information was too vague to be helpful. And he may have feared for his own life, if word of any communication to the Austrians had gotten out. He “could not openly disavow” the nationalist networks, which would be necessary “to redeem Bosnia and Herzegovina for Serbdom.” “Pašic wanted peace, but he also believed—he never concealed it—that the final historical phase of Serbian expansion would in all probability not be achieved” without “a major European conflict in which the great powers were engaged,” a war that would “dislodge the formidable obstacles that stood in the way of Serbian ‘reunification.'” He probably didn’t want such a war right now, however, since Serbia was still recovering from the two Balkan wars. Caught between long-term ambition and short-term caution, he took no adequate action against the conspirators.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire had its own problems. “Two military disasters defined the trajectory of the Hapsburg Empire in the last half-century of its existence”: its defeat by the French at Solferino in 1859; and its defeat by the Prussians at Königgrätz in 1866. With their victory, the French expelled the Austrians from Italy; with their victory, the Prussians “ejected the empire from the emergent German nation-state,” the Bismarck-Hohenzollern unification of some three dozen sovereign German states—the most important geopolitical achievement in nineteenth-century Europe. Britain’s prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, immediately saw the implications: “The war represents the German revolution as a political event greater than the French Revolution of the last century” because “the balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers more and feels the effects of this change most, is England.” This last was a bit exaggerated, as the French and the defeated Austrians would have noted, but Disraeli’s long-range vision was clear enough; he saw that British statesmen now needed to worry about Russia, again—a rivalry that had been settled for a generation by Britain’s victory in the Crimean War, which had led to a settlement that demilitarized the Black Sea.

The Prussians fought the Austrians because wanted no polyglot entity in their midst, even (indeed especially) one ruled by a German dynasty that might rival the Hohenzollerns. In answer to these debacles, the Austrian Empire embraced its diversity, becoming the bicephalous Austro-Hungarian Empire, wherein “power was shared out between the two dominant nationalities”—there were eleven in all—the “Germans in the west and the Hungarians in the east,” each with its own parliament governing domestic matters, with military rule shared by joint ministers “answerable directly to the Emperor,” Franz Josef. Domestic matters encompassing the empire as a single entity were addressed by delegations of thirty deputies from each parliament. The Hungarians designed the franchise so that they, comprising slightly less than half the population of their region, held more than ninety percent of the seats in their parliament; this enabled them to pursue a policy of ‘Magyarization,’ whereby education was conducted in the Magyar language from kindergarten on. The Austrians, by contrast, attempted to appease their minorities with democratizing franchise reforms, although these “merely heightened the potential for national conflict.”

Unlike the Ottoman Empire, however, Austro-Hungary enjoyed prosperity. It had a customs union. It also had a substantial bureaucracy controlled by the emperor and his immediate subordinates, which served as “a broker among manifold social, economic and cultural interests,” causing most of its subjects to enjoy “the benefits of orderly government.” Even the minority activists appreciated the security the administrative state provided, recognizing that “the creation of new and separate national entities might cause more problems than it resolved.” Crises arose, then found resolution thanks to this “relatively well administered” set of ruling institutions, symbolized by their beloved, aged emperor.

Could it have rested peacefully, tending to its domestic troubles as they arose, the Austro-Hungarian Empire might have lasted a long time. Unfortunately for it, the Ottomans were losing their grip in southeastern Europe. “Both Russia and Austria-Hungary felt historically entitled to exercise hegemony in those areas from which the Ottomans withdrew,” the Hapsburgs traditionally guarding Europe’s borders against the Turks, the Russians animated by pan-Slavism and by their perennial interest in the Turkish Straits, linking Russia’s Black Sea ports to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas via the Sea of Marmara. When the new regime in Serbia expressed its hostility to the Hapsburgs, “the Russians moved in,” recommending that the Serbs refuse to renew their commercial treaty with Austria-Hungary. The Serbs added to the tension by encouraging the Serbs living in Bosnia and Herzegovina to agitate against Austro-Hungarian occupation; the empire responded by annexing it, with the concurrence of the Russians, whom the Austrian foreign minister, Count Alois Aehrenthal, bought off with a secret guarantee of better access to the Turkish Straits. This dampened the prospects for an effective collaboration of the Bosnian Serbs with the Young Turk movement, which aimed at revivifying the Ottoman Empire under their modernizing rule. But it also angered Russian pan-Slavists, who “interpreted the annexation as a brutal betrayal.” In response, the Czarist regime appointed Nikolai Hartwig, an ardent pan-Slavist, as ambassador to Serbia—mirroring the Serbian monarch’s appointment of Pašic as ambassador to Russia, more two decades earlier. In fact, Hartwig quickly “established relations of extraordinary intimacy” with Pašic, who was now prime minister. This left the Hapsburg empire in a bind, since it couldn’t strengthen relations with newly independent Bulgaria without offending Romania, two countries then engaged in a border dispute. Serbia backed off for a time, even agreeing to a commercial treaty with Austria-Hungary in 1910; despite this, “a deep awkwardness had settled over the two states’ relations that seemed impossible to dispel.” Serbia moved closer to France, “the work to redeem Bosnia-Herzegovina for Serbia continued,” and the Hapsburg regime became aware of Apis and his Black Hand, with its ambitions for a ‘Greater Serbia’—ambitions evidently shared by Serbian officials, who were hesitant to bring the terrorists to heel and stayed in close communication with the Russian ambassador. 

After the Balkan Wars, Serbian territory was eighty percent larger than it had been at the start. What should the Hapsburg regime do? Accommodation with Serbia or containment? An effort towards rapprochement with Russia or continued tension, perhaps leading to war? Here, the structure of the Austro-Hungarian state prevented a coherent policy from being enunciated and enacted. That state consisted of “an archipelago of power-centers whose relationships with each other were partly informal and in constant flux.” They included the General Staff, the Military Chancellery (attached to the emperor), the Foreign Office, all under the bicephalous structure of the state itself, wherein the Austrians might want one thing, the Hungarians another. To be sure, the emperor presided over all of this, but that was what he did: presided, approving or vetoing measures brought to him by others, playing no “proactive role.” This “strikingly polycratic system” enabled decisive men to vie for power. Such men emerged in the persons of the chief of the Austrian General Staff, Field Marshal Lieutenants Franz Baron Conrad von Hötzendorf, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Imperial Foreign Minister Count Leopold von Berchtold, who had succeeded the late Aehrenthal in 1912. Conrad was a hawk, “relentlessly aggressive,” having advocated the conquest of Serbia since 1907. “Underlying this single-minded pursuit of conflict was a social Darwinist philosophy in which struggle and the competition for primacy were seen as unavoidable and necessary facts of the political life between states.” Heir to the imperial throne (a nephew of Franz Josef, he became first in line after the emperor’s son committed suicide in 1889), the Archduke opposed Conrad’s militancy. Uncle Franz rather disliked him, but he managed to assemble his own independent network of allies at court “within the rickety structure of the double monarchy” through his Military Chancellery and friends in the press. With regard to the structure of the imperial state and its regime, he detested the dual system, which in his view “concentrated power in the hands of an arrogant and politically disloyal Magyar elite” which alienated the other nationalities and thus hazarded disunion. By the time of his assassination, he was advocating a “United States of Great Austria,” which would consist of fifteen member states, of which Serbia would be only one, not even dominant among the Slavs. The emperor himself wanted no part of such a scheme and of course the Serbians detested it. As for the Joint Foreign Minister, he was both loyal to the emperor and friendly with the Archduke, a sort of dual monarchy within his soul, one made possible by his pursuit of “his true passions”—the arts, literature, and horse racing—downplaying any political ambitions that might have threatened either side. Von Berchtold hoped, vainly, for Austro-Russian entente; hoped, somewhat less vainly, that the Germans could be brought to understand the dangers the empire faced in the Balkans; tried to get Romania to declare whether it preferred Austria to Russia as an ally; and offered Serbia economic concessions in exchange for reduced hostility. 

At the beginning of 1914, none of these statesmen expected a major war. Prosperity seemed likely to endure and with it, peace.

But Europe as a whole had become less amenable to peace, without anyone knowing it. Clark contrasts the alliance structure of Europe in 1887 with the alliance structure as it existed twenty years later. In 1887, “a plurality of forces and interests balance[d] each other in precarious equilibrium.” The famous ‘scramble for empire’ was on, outside the continent, with Britain rivaling France in Africa and South Asia, Russia in Persia, Central Asia, and China. France wanted to recover Alsace and Lorraine. Austria-Hungary and Russia had clashing interests in the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Italy clashing interests in the Adriatic. Britain wanted to limit French ambitions in the Mediterranean and Russian ambitions in the Balkans and the Turkish Straits. In 1907, however, “you see a bipolar Europe organized around two alliance systems”: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy opposing the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 and Britain’s separate deals with both countries, solemnized in the first decade of the new century. By 1907, “the profiles of two armed camps are already clearly visible,” “a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914.” True, the two alliance blocs “did not cause the war,” and to some degree deterred it, but “the war could not have broken out in the way it did,” as a Europe-wide war, without those blocs. 

How did they come about? The first element was the tension between republican France and newly consolidated, not-so-republican Germany. Having learned that they no longer had the human or material resources to defeat their rival, the French needed an ally. Russia made sense, inasmuch as its interests didn’t contradict French interests, it had reason to worry about Germany, and an alliance opened the possibility of a two-front war that Germany might lose. The Germans, guided by their great statesman Otto von Bismarck, saw this and moved to form the Three Emperors’ League in 1873: Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary united against the dangerous virus of republicanism in western Europe and the still more dangerous virus of nationalism in the Balkans. But this alliance was unstable, given the Balkan rivalry between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The alliance lasted as long as Bismarck did; his death in 1890 left matters to less prudent heads, notably the “excitable Kaiser Wilhelm II,” whom Czar Alexander called a “rascally young fop,” not without reason. Germany began to worry the Russians again, although not as much as Britain, which was making overtures to the Germans and threatening Russian interests in Afghanistan, Persia, China, and the Turkish Straits. “To balance against this perceived threat, the Russians put aside their reservations and openly pursued an arrangement with France,” perhaps hoping to pit one commercial republican regime against another but surely to pit one imperial rival against another. The instability of this new alliance derived from the very different purposes of the two states in forming it. France targeted Germany, Russia the Balkans. For the Russians, Germany was a matter of containment; for the French, Germany was a matter of revenge. By 1900, France was committed to mobilizing 100,000 troops to the edge of the Channel in the event of an Anglo-Russian war, whereas Russia was committed to move troops to the border of India, the jewel in the crown of the British empire. All of this changed the geopolitical map of Europe. Earlier, alliances had been structured to manage tensions between the alliance partners, but now the strategy was “to meet and balance the threat from a competing coalition.” The first type of alliance aims at peace, the second potentially to wage war.

Britain moved to form new alliances. Japan was a natural ally in Asia, with its newly powerful fleet and its troops on the ground in Manchuria. With France, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 was intended to open better relations with Russia, too. Neither pact was aimed at Germany, which hadn’t pushed very hard for its own overseas empire when Bismarck was in office. Unfortunately, “the idea of colonial possessions—imagined as eldorados with cheap labor and raw materials and burgeoning native or settler populations to buy national exports—was as bewitching to the German middle classes as to those of the established European empires.” Having read the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan on the importance of sea power, the young Kaiser was ready to lead the charge, to the best of his limited abilities. The Boer War saw the retreat of Germany and the consequent inflammation of German nationalism, making the aggressive shipbuilding proposals of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz all the more attractive. Clark judges this as “neither an outrageous nor an unwarranted move,” since “the Germans had ample reason to believe that they would not be taken seriously unless they acquired a credible naval weapon.” And for all the talk of Weltpolitik and “a place in the sun,” the Germans didn’t really do all that much in the years before the world war. War had become possible but not yet likely, and British statesmen judged Russia the greater concern than Germany. 

In December 1905, Liberal Party Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman appointed Sir Edward Grey as his foreign secretary. Unlike Campbell-Bannerman, and also mostly unknown to the prime minister, Grey was anti-German, suspecting the Germans “of seeking to establish a dictatorship over the continent.” The “Germanophobes” (as Clark calls them) in the British government never identified “actual German offenses against good international practice,” preferring to point at “the unpredictability of the Kaiser” and to German ambition. Clark inclines to deprecate the importance of the regime difference that such animadversions might have fostered. As Eyre Crowe, senior Clerk in the Western Department at the British Foreign Office wrote in 1907, Germany aimed at “German hegemony, at first in Europe and eventually in the world,” a hegemony that would bring “political dictatorship” and “the wreckage of liberties of Europe,” very much in contrast to what Crowe described as the welcome British hegemony, politically and commercially liberal. Clark dismisses this as Crowe’s “nightmarish psychogram of the German nation-state,” suspecting that the Brits were more worried about “the spectacle of Germany’s titanic economic growth” in the fifty years beginning in the 1860s. At any rate, while Russia had displaced France as Britain’s greatest worry in the 1890s, “now it was Germany’s turn.” It is noteworthy, however, that by 1890 France had become a stable republic, as Britain was, and Germany was France’s immediate geopolitical rival, not Russia.

Still, “the future was not foreordained.” The geopolitical structures of a European war existed by 1907 but they “cannot explain the specific reasons why that conflict arose.” Decisions by statesmen had not dictated war. The “decision-making processes” nonetheless made war more likely, and here Clark turns his attention more steadily to the character of the European regimes.

Although “early twentieth-century Europe was a continent of monarchies,” with only one major republic, France, this did not mean that the monarchs ruled effectively, unimpededly. There was the perennial problem of monarchy, succession, “yoking large and complex states,” modern states with advanced weaponry, communications, and transportation—a technology of speed—to “the vagaries of human biology” and human personalities—the first ranging from the very long-lived Franz Ferdinand to his very short-lived heir apparent, the second ranging from “the mild-mannered despot Nicholas II” to volatile Wilhelm. The monarchies themselves varied, as Russia’s czar was an absolute monarch “in theory at least,” the British kings “constitutional and parliamentary monarchs with no direct access to the levers of power,” and the Kaiser “something in between.” The combination of personal character and capacity with institutional constraints made monarchic behavior difficult to predict. And in any event, all of them were substantially restrained by their governments, whether they cared as little for serious thought on foreign policy as Nicholas II, deferred to his ministers as readily as did Edward VII and George V, or blustered much and did little, as was the wont of the Kaiser. “The presence in only partially democratized systems of sovereigns who were the putative focal point of their respective executives with access to all state papers and personnel and with ultimate responsibility for every executive decision created ambiguity” was a regime problem that became “a source of obfuscation in international relations,” the principal management of which fell to the foreign ministers, who “moved to establish a more concentrated decision-making structure that would enable the executive to balance domestic and foreign imperatives and to impose discipline on the most senior officials.”

Regime differences supplemented these regime commonalities. In Russia, “the energetic and talented” foreign minister, Sergei Witte negotiated a compromise with partisans of absolutist monarchy, instituting a Council of Ministers whose chairman could remove “an uncooperative minister” but did not have the power to prevent individual ministers to present their opinions directly to the Czar. Thus, “everything depended on the balance of initiative between the successive chairmen, their ministers and the Czar.” When “charismatic and dominant” Pyotr Stolypin served as chairman, his foreign minister, Alexander Izvolsky, treated the Czar respectfully but never with obeisance; he took care to establish lines of communication between the foreign ministry and the Duma, Russia’s national legislature. The policy result strayed from Stolypin’s line, which was “to withdraw from the adventurism of the years before the Russo-Japanese War,” a stunning Russian defeat, “and concentrate on the tasks of domestic consolidation and economic growth.” Encouraged by British foreign Secretary Grey, Izvolsky hoped to exchange better relations with Britain for British guarantees of improved Russian access to the Turkish Straits. This policy never gelled, and Stolypin carried the day until his 1911 assassination. After that, muddle prevailed, and Clark takes the opportunity to caution that “this was one of the central problems confronting all the foreign policy executives (and those who try to understand them today): the ‘national interest’ was not an objective imperative pressing in upon government from the world outside, but the projection of particular interests within the political elite itself.”

France was a republic, but a republic of a specific kind: a parliamentary republic. The churning of ‘governments’—that is, of executives—endemic to that kind of republicanism resulted in rapid turnover of foreign ministers and in the consequent ascendency of professional staff. Senior ambassadors “developed an extraordinarily elevated sense of their own importance,” as seen in the brothers Paul and Jules Cambon, ambassadors to Germany and Great Britain, respectively. During Paul Cambon’s time in London he saw nine foreign ministers. Somewhat understandably, he “did not regard himself as a subordinate employee of the government of France whose expertise entitled him to a major role in the policy-making process,” a sort of Charles de Gaulle of the bureaucracy, a person who “did not merely represent France” but “personified it.” Later, as foreign minister, he was the principal moving force behind the Entente Cordiale with Great Britain, the preliminary to which saw France relinquishing its claims on Egypt and the British settling with the French over Morocco. The ambassadorial cadre inclined toward detente with Germany, but the staff at foreign ministry in Paris, enjoying “formidable institutional and structural advantages” beginning with the location of their offices in Paris, pressed successfully for ending the 1909 Franco-German Accord. “Here, as in Russia, the flux of power from one part of the executive to another produced rapid shifts in the tone and direction of policy.” 

In Germany, the imperial chancellor ran foreign policy as both minister-president and foreign minister of Prussia, “the dominant federal state whose territory encompassed about three-fifths of the citizens and territory of the new empire.” This regime feature was designed by and very well suited for Bismarck. After Bismarck’s ouster, Wilhelm II determined to become “his own Bismarck,” as he put it. He failed, “but his antics did paradoxically produce a concentration of executive power,” as ” most senior politicians and officials clubbed together to ward off sovereign threats to the integrity of the decision-making process.” Tensions ensued, although the appointment of “steady, moderate and formidable” Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg to the chancellorship in mid-1909 “brought a degree of stabilization.” 

“Britain presents a rather different picture,” as its constitutional monarchist but essentially republican regime left the foreign secretary free of “unwanted interventions” by “the sovereign,” who wasn’t really sovereign, anymore, though influential. And Sir Edward Grey, who could count on “the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith” and a “network of senior officials” at the Foreign Office ‘who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy,” stayed in office from the end of 1905 to the end of 1916—undoubtedly “the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.” Importantly, British parliamentary republicanism has usually proven more stable than French parliamentary republicanism and did continue so to prove in these years. [1] Grey was strongly anti-German and pro-French, likely preferring republicanism to monarchy and, as noted, sharing France’s longer-standing concern with the rapid gathering of economic and military power by the German state. Grey proceeded with caution, however, preferring not to disclose “any obligation to come to France’s aid” in the event of a German attack. “It is easy to see how this state of affairs…gave rise to confusion,” especially in Germany, already worried at the Franco-Russian alliance. And the de facto Anglo-French not-exactly-an-alliance emboldened the French in their dealings with the Germans, especially when British military commanders assured their French counterparts of their support. Grey “maintained the appearance of an open door to Berlin in order to placate the non-interventionists,” while also issuing “harsh warnings to the Germans, lest they come to the conclusion that France had been comprehensively abandoned and could be attacked without fear of a British response.” Such “mixed messaging” led to “perennial uncertainty about British intentions” in Berlin.

All countries undertook arms buildups, although again there were differences from one regime to another in the degree of civilian control over the military and over funding for the military. The French regime featured the “firmest” civilian control, but the civilian leadership, led by prime minister Raymond Poincaré in the years before the world war, was itself hawkish, increasing military spending and approving General Joseph Joffre’s offensive deployment of troops, beginning in 1912. So, while civilians were formally in control, Joffre “wielded greater power over the armed forces than his aristocratic, militarist German counterpart, Helmuth von Moltke,” who “could compete with…civilian colleagues on an equal or superiority for political influence,” given his “privileged access to the sovereign”; the same was true of the military commanders in Russia and Austria-Hungary. In republican Britain, too, Major General Henry Wilson, who despised Grey as an “ignorant, vain and weak man, quite unfit to be the foreign minister of any country larger than Portugal” and rejected civilian control of the military in principle, worked to militarize the Anglo-French entente. While in all regimes civilian control prevailed, no one was quite sure how solid that control was, or would be. The German government (rather like Communist regimes of later date) even “encouraged the British to believe that the Berlin government was split between a dove and a hawk faction and that British concessions would strengthen Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg against belligerent elements.”

As to the press and public opinion, more vociferous under the conditions of civil-social democratization described by Tocqueville three-quarters of a century earlier, they did make “political critique” more “demagogic,” “diffuse,” and “extreme.” All regimes took it seriously, as even the monarchies regarded public support as “an indispensable ersatz for democratic legitimacy” in the new age of egalitarianism. But keeping an eye on popular effusions and agitations didn’t mean being “swept along” by them. Rulers understood that the popular mood was divided and quixotic. Clark quotes U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, no Old World fossil, who described public opinion as combining “the unbridled tongue and the unready hand.” For the most part, regimes attempted, with varying effectiveness, to manipulate popular opinion, very often subsidizing newspapers; in foreign policy especially, “the press was the instrument…not the determinant.” By July 1914, civilian rulers had prepared the public not for war-eagerness but for war-readiness. 

All these complexities led to imponderables and continue to do so for historians who would sort them out. Even as European countries consolidated into two geopolitical poles, seemingly simplifying the task of understanding, confusion and suspicion persisted, even intensified. “It is not a question, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, of reconstructing the ratiocinations of two superpowers sifting through their options, but of understanding sustained rapid-fire interactions between executive structures with a relatively poor understanding of each other’s intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliance) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia.”

 

Note

1. Why so? The usual explanation is the difference between English and French ‘national character,’ but that only begs the question of what accounts for that difference.

David E. Sanger: New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2024.

 

His troops massed along the Ukrainian border, Russian president Vladimir Putin flew to Beijing, where he met with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping, showing “the world that he and his fellow autocrat could combine their power and influence” for “one common purpose: to stand up to the United States, frustrate its ambitions, and speed along what they viewed as its inevitable decline.” Against political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s claim, made in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, that “western liberal democracy” stood “as the final form of human government,” abetted by worldwide commerce and Internet conversation, the allied despots essayed to prove that monarchy, abetted by disciplined state elites and supported by populations unified by nationalist fervor and fear of the regime, would overbear the democratic republics by using commerce as a weapon and controlling computer linkages within their territories, while building up their military power and testing the nerve of complacent republican politicians, who had shown themselves incapable of guarding their countries’ borders even against peaceful (if often illegal) immigrants.

New York Times journalist David E. Sanger regards this as “a more complex and dangerous era than we have faced in nearly a century,” with two major powers aligned against the United States and its allies, with dangerous regional threats from Iran and North Korea, and with the ever-present undercurrent of Islamist terrorism. “We all have a lot to lose.”

Although the 2002 meeting between Vladimir Putin and U.S. president George Bush fostered “the storyline…that the Cold War was over, never to return,” that Russia would join the World Trade Organization and possibly the European Union (with NATO membership to follow?), the fundamental problem was that the Cold War hadn’t ended the same way as World War II: Germany, Japan, and Italy had had their regimes changed from tyrannies to republics, but Russia was no republic and the Communist Chinese regime went through it all untouched. True, Putin could join the Americans in a campaign against terrorism, but “it soon became clear that everyone had a different definition of who was a terrorist and what to do about them”—an unsurprising point to anyone who understands that different and indeed fundamentally opposed regimes are likely to define things differently. “It was Putin’s bet that if he joined with the Americans’ antiterrorism efforts, the West would look the other way on some of Russia’s human rights issues.” In this, he had the support of the new generation of Russian intelligence operatives and military officers, who despised their elders for having ‘lost’ the Cold War. Putin shared this sentiment: “By allowing the Soviet republics to flourish, each with its own distinctive culture, he argued, [the Soviet rulers] sowed the seeds of splitting away from Moscow.” Marxism-Leninism had been too optimistically internationalist. And so, Putin “didn’t keep a bust of Lenin in his office; he kept one of Peter the Great,” Russia’s modernizing czar. The extension of NATO to the Central and East European countries liberated by the disintegration of Soviet power proved a unifying threat to Putin’s Russians—a threat that would have been no threat at all, had the Russian elites intended to move toward a republican regime. They didn’t. As President Bush ruefully confided to his aides and allied foreign heads of state, “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,” still nursing the assumption that he ever was one.

When it came to cultural independence, Ukraine irked Putin more than any other neighbor. “Ukraine is not even a state!” he is said to have said, and has obviously proven that he believes, by his actions. He had already launched cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, successfully invaded Georgia in 2008, paying “almost no price” for these adventures. Indeed, the subsequent Obama Administration embarrassingly proposed a “reset” of relations with Putin’s Russia, only to be rewarded by the conquest of Crimea in 2013. President Obama sighed “that Russia would always care more about the Ukrainians than Americans would,” and that, in his words, “this is not another Cold War” since “unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology”—a point that proves not that it wasn’t another Cold War but that it wasn’t the same kind of cold war. “The United States failed to update its own perception about who Putin was and where he was headed.” Throughout, “the United States was consistently underreacting to Putin’s escalating gambits,” thanks to progressivist-historicist assumptions shared by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Bush’s former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice put it most exquisitely, telling Sanger, “Fighting for territory, thinking in ethnic terms, using resources to wage war. I thought we had moved beyond that. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We thought the linearity of human progress should have left all of this behind.” But “should” isn’t “would.” And when it comes to geopolitics, regimes count more than “human progress.” On into the Obama Administration, “the United States failed to update its own perception about who Putin was and where he was headed.” Even Obama’s last year in office, the administration was divided on that point, with Secretary of State John Kerry assuring himself that Russia was no more than “a declining competitor” and the Pentagon regarding it an “increasingly potent threat,” citing Putin’s own statements, the modernization of his country’s nuclear arsenal, along with the invasion of Crimea. As for the Trump Administration, the president persisted in ignoring the evidence, preferring to worry about Islamist terrorism. His second National Security Director, H.R. McMaster, did his best to alert him to the danger and was out of office in a year. Trump apparently accepted Russian claims that Ukraine was rightfully an integral part of Russia, suspecting its government of having interfered in the 2016 election on Biden’s side. 

In these years, Chinese rulers were touting the ‘peaceful rise’ of their country. A straightforward analysis of the Chinese regime would have shown that the rise of China, peaceful or otherwise, portended badly for the rest of the world, but the same ‘progressive’ or ‘evolutionary’ hopes prevailed. In 1997, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin negotiated a trade agreement with Vice Premier Zhu Rongji, who seemed to want to move toward a free market in his country. “The belief underpinning these visits—and virtually every element of American policy toward China—was that it would be economic and diplomatic malpractice not to entice the country toward the West,” since (it was hoped) “increased exposure to Western norms and legal systems would seep into Chinese society,” thereby “embolden[ing] China’s population to seek more capitalist reforms and, ultimately, political reforms,” setting “China on a slow train to freer expression and some form of democracy.” Meanwhile, “the more deeply that China and the West became intertwined, the less chance there would be for conflict because both sides would have too much to lose.” That two-way street proved to carry heavier traffic in one direction than in the other. But those governing the great commercial republic “assumed China’s economic interests would overwhelm its other national objective,” seeing every bit of counterevidence as “a brief deviation from Beijing’s inevitable destiny, “ignor[ing] what was occurring in plain sight.” The Communists’ crackdown on Hong Kong, that hub of capitalism, their claims of “exclusive rights to vast parts of the South China Sea” with a naval buildup to match, their bullying of foreign investors, their technology thefts, eventually disabused many if not all Americans of their illusions, a quarter of a century or so later. 

Xi Jinping became CCP General Secretary in 2012. Although he made his intentions plain to the Party cadres, those speeches were not widely known in the West for decades. [1] His “agenda remained a mystery” to U.S. intelligence agencies; it was still “easy to make the mistake of presuming that because Xi seemed fascinated by America, he was gradually becoming Americanized.” But fascination is not admiration. “What increasingly attracted the attention of the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI…was what Chinese operatives were doing in the United States,” such as offering “remarkably cheap bids to build the 3G and 4G networks of rural telecom carriers located around the country’s nuclear missile silos.” Hmmm. And then there was the theft of digital security files of 22 million U.S. government employees and their families, “Part of a broader [!] campaign by China to understand every detail and vulnerability of the American elite.” No worries, Xi told President Obama, he would cooperate in “hunting down cyber threats” and would never militarize those islands in the South China Sea.

This is not to say that regime change did not come to China. It just wasn’t the regime change anticipated by the dupes. Mao’s tyranny had been replaced by a Party oligarchy, as had occurred in post-Stalinist Russia, decades earlier. But Xi set about “concentrat[ing] power in the hands of one leader,” himself. Viewed with maximum benevolence, or perhaps naivete, it may have been that the oligarchs had become “convinced that the only way for the country to survive in a world of chaos and upheaval [was] to centralize power again, even at the cost of the openings that made China rich.” Rush Doshi, President Biden’s director for the China-Taiwan division of the National Security Council, rather suspected that this was part of “a grand strategy to displace American order, first at the regional and now at the global level.” This suspicion had been shared by Trump’s third National Security Director, John Bolton, but the president, thinking like the businessman he was, preoccupied himself with trade negotiations, gave no serious thought to China’s military and political ambitions. This is not to say that commercial relations between the United States and China were not a major element in America’s dilemma: “Americans might tell pollsters that they viewed Beijing as their country’s number one threat, but they weren’t going to give up their shopping habits,” which largely consisted of purchasing Chinese-made products at Walmart.

It fell to Democratic foreign policy advisers Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan, their expectations of positions in a Hillary Clinton administration resoundingly denied, to use their unexpected idle time to write an article in Foreign Affairs outlining the several “camps” among “the Washington establishment” regarding China. Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Sandy Berger and for most of his career, Joe Biden advocated “engagement” with the Communists, still expecting that the Communists might reform themselves; Cambell himself had advocated an “allies first” policy, whereby the United States would strengthen its relations with “allies surrounding China” such as the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam; the hardline skeptics of Communist intentions advocated preparation for possible armed conflict; others (taking a position that Washington establishmentarians typically call ‘nuanced’) advocated a piecemeal approach, dealing with each regional issue as it arises, sometimes working with China, sometimes against; finally, the ever-sanguine ‘globalists’ advocated working with China on such international matters as climate change and pandemic protection. The article’s authors admitted that some of these policies could be mixed and matched.

Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency was “grappl[ing] with the paradoxes of Xi himself,” a man who had placed “the security of the state…ahead of economic growth,” invoking some of the phrases of no less Marxist-Leninist a tyrant as Mao Zedong. But, but, the analysts supposed, “China’s new contest with the West wasn’t about ideology; it was chiefly a technological battle for supremacy and for global influence that comes with spreading Chinese telecommunications networks and aid around the world.” At the time, Xi’s speeches were not available in the West, speeches in which he insisted repeatedly that he was indeed a Marxist and the Communist Party, animated by “Marxism with Chinese characteristics,” must remain the sole ruler of China, with Xi as Party Chairman. To anyone familiar with Marxism in theory or with Communist practice, there is no contradiction whatever between Marxist “ideology” and the ambition to win technological supremacy over ‘capitalism’ and to spread “influence” “around the world.” Indeed, Marxist historicism fuses theory and practice, making any such rigid distinction misleading in attempting to analyze Communist policies. There was no “paradox.”

As for poor Biden, his warnings to Putin, consisting of a list of “red lines” that he must not cross, with no stated penalties for crossing them, was no more effective than his policy in Afghanistan, which culminated in the Taliban’s return to power, for which “the White House was quick to blame everyone but itself.” Sanger regards the American military withdrawal as strategically correct but botched in the execution, something of a reprise of the fall of Saigon in 1975. This “reminded the world that superpowers have limits,” although evidently China hasn’t gotten the message, and it’s not clear that Russia is on board, yet, either. “The mullahs in Tehran, the Chinese generals fulfilling Xi’s orders to prepare for a conflict in Taiwan, and Putin’s apparatchiks, all had good reason to believe that Biden and the United States, with its famously short attention span had no stomach for the kind of international entanglements that had dominated the American Century,” now more than twenty years in the past. As an example, Sanger recalls China’s successful test of a hypersonic missile, a technology Americans had yet to master, along with its nuclear missile buildup and he development of a robotic satellite arm that could disable U.S. satellites. All of this threatened to neutralize American antimissile defenses. “It was complicated enough during the Cold War era to defend against one major nuclear power”; “for the first time in its history,” American strategists “would have to think about defending in the future against two major nuclear powers with arsenals roughly the size of Wahington’s—and be prepared for the possibility that they might decide to work together.” 

Putin took the opportunity to invade Ukraine, alleging not only that it was rightly an appendage of Russia but that it was currently ruled by “Nazis.” Of course, as he tenderly put it, “what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to decide,” although it must be remarked that the decision would be made under duress. In this case, “nothing the Biden administration did…would keep Putin from invading Ukraine,” especially given Europeans’ absurd confidence that he would never do such a thing. In February 2022, Putin undertook the aforementioned trip to Beijing, after which he and his fellow despot issued a statement announcing that “friendship between the two States has no limits,” although their “bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.” Given Putin’s claim that Ukraine has no real status as a sovereign country, this didn’t contradict his intention to invade. 

As we now know, this turned out to be a “short invasion, long war.” The Ukrainians didn’t think of themselves as Russians, after all. By March, Putin admitted, “this will probably be much more difficult than we thought.” On the other hand, “the war is on their territory, not ours,” and “we are a big country, and we have patience.” They would need it, since they “failed at what they thought they were best at, what the U.S. military calls ‘combined arms operations,’ the ability to integrate land, sea, and air power together in precisely coordinated battlefield operations.” One retired Russian general observed, “there is no doubt that Russia will be added to the category of countries that pose a threat to peace and international security, subjected to the most severe sanctions, transformed into a pariah in the eyes of the international community and probably lose the status of an independent state.” But although the first two predictions have proved accurate, the third is only partly true (Russia is no pariah in the eyes of China, and that’s important), while the last seems highly unlikely—unless the general meant that Russia might eventually become a satellite of China. Moreover, as one American major-general put it, the original battle plan “was the worst plan on earth,” spreading Russian forces “too thin” and neglecting to set up adequate supply lines for the troops, since they expected a blitzkrieg-like victory reminiscent of the Germans in France in 1940. And “furious, united Ukraine” had a regime advantage; as a republic, its military had instituted a “flexible hierarchy, one that empowered lower-level officers to make decisions in real time.”

For its part, the United States provided a range of weaponry to Ukraine, while worrying about what weapons to send and how the Ukrainians might use them. Would the Ukrainians launch a major barrage against targets within Russia? Would that lead to a third world war? Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky did in fact request a missile that could hit targets deep within Russian territory. “Putin was out to kill [Zelensky] and eradicate his country” in “a war [Ukraine] would never win if Putin could fire on Ukraine from Russian territory” with impunity; “Biden’s preoccupation was avoiding escalation.” Putin took full advantage of these worries, threatening to use short-range nuclear weapons against Ukraine if faced with what he defined as “an existential threat for our country”—leaving the parameters of his existentialism conveniently undefined. “Anyone who hoped the age of nuclear gamesmanship had ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall discovered that the holiday from history was over.” For a brief time, when Ukrainian counterattacks pushed Russian forces out of Kharkiv and Kherson, “Washington was swept by a haunting fear, that the Ukrainians were so successful…that Putin would conclude he had only one real option left to avoid the humiliation,” to make good on his nuclear-war threat. Instead, he issued a military call-up of 300,000 “more men to throw into the fight.” The Ukrainians, who had argued that “Putin would threaten repeatedly but never press the button” on nuclear weapons use, could at most intimidate Ukraine’s allies—bad enough, in Zelensky’s eyes. 

As to the Chinese, “understanding Biden’s preoccupation with Ukraine,” might it not “conclude that the moment had come” to attack Taiwan? In light of China’s June 2022 declaration of “sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” over the Taiwan Strait, denying its status as an international waterway, that possibility had become more likely. Biden countered by distinguishing Taiwan from Ukraine. Taiwan, he noted, is an island democracy whose partnership with the United States stretches back decades that is also host to the most critical network of semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world. “If Taiwan ceased to exist—or smoldered under Chinese artillery barrages—the digital economy would crack apart.” While geopolitically important, Ukraine isn’t as important. Accordingly, America would not intervene with troops in Ukraine, but Taiwan was another matter. Yes, trade (including trade in semiconductors) had increased between Taiwan and Communist China, trade relations scarcely translate into peace, as Germany and France had proved, repeatedly, in the years 1870-1940. Just before a scheduled visit to Taiwan from House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the CCP navy “shot eleven ballistic missiles into the sea around Taiwan,” perhaps to indicate that Speakership is less impressive than Actionship. “By circling the island, they were saying that this was all Chinese waters.” Taiwan is economically and geopolitically important not only because it sits along a major sea lane but because it is the leading manufacturer of microchips, “the technology America let get away” because U.S. technology companies have “gradually moved production overseas without much thought about the national security implications of becoming so dependent on the supply of chips from a single vulnerable island off the coast of China.” That is, corporate executives thought exclusively in terms of free international market markets and not in terms of political regimes that can make them unfree for military, political, and (national) economic advantage, “a strategy reinforced by the reassuring myth that in a globalized world, it didn’t really make any difference where you produced the semiconductors that fuel the information age”. Corporate executives are sophisticates when it comes to economics and luxury items, but often naifs when it comes to geopolitics. “America’s dependence on a complex, easily severed supply chain for [micro]chips became even more acute than our dependence on the Persian Gulf for oil” had been before the discovery of substantial reserves of natural gas in North America. 

The Biden Administration understood that “the technology race for advanced chips and the arms race with China had essentially merged,” with surveillance satellites, killer satellites, hypersonic missiles, military drones, and quantum computers now expanding battlespace into outer space and cyber space, the latter including both the gathering of information and the dissemination of ‘disinformation.’ “The Chinese were relying on American innovation—and the openness of the Western system—to build the tools intended to defeat its creators,” eyeing Taiwan while ramping up its own technological infrastructure. The complexity of the matter made the emergency difficult to convey. This wasn’t only a problem of domestic politics but of international politics. “While both capitals insisted that they were not requiring countries to pick a side, it increasingly appeared that is exactly what they were seeking”—inevitably, given the regime conflict and its geopolitical scope. “Dozens of small, seemingly technical decisions” had large, indeed worldwide implications. There are now “three interlocking arms races,” the race for nuclear weapons, the race for dominance in outer space, and the race for dominance in cyberspace, including artificial intelligence—all depending, “at their core, on who can produce the most potent next-generation chips.” “Which countries would join the ban on selling the most advanced chips to China?” Which would purchase Chinese technology, including technology with spyware built into it? Which would line up on Taiwan’s side if Communist China attacked? Most statesmen would prefer not to choose, even as American statesman preferred not to choose sides in European wars in the first century and a quarter of U.S. foreign policy. But the new, worldwide character of international relations and the new ‘totalitarian’ regimes animated by the new historicist ideologies have made that stance largely untenable, whatever one’s wishes may be.

In the more purely economic realm, Beijing practiced “a tactic known as ‘debt-trap diplomacy.” The CCP’s much-touted Belt and Road initiative, consisting of international transportation and other development projects linking China with numerous countries across Asia and into Europe, plunged countries into debt to Beijing; the price of repaying the debt, unpayable fiscally, was Chinese ownership of that infrastructure, thereby increasing Chinese influence over governments and populations. If a government moved to cancel a Belt and Road project, as Malysia did in 2018, the CCP was happy to launch cyberattacks upon it until it backed down, as Malaysia did. American apologists for China claimed that “China was going through the same learning curve that the United States had gone through in the twentieth century—in which some of its aid initiatives were successful and some sparked debt crises.” But of course the American regime differed from the Chinese regime. A closer analogy would be America’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ whereby the American Navy could be sent to protect American business assets threatened by foreign governments. However, the abandonment of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’ wasn’t a matter of moving along a learning curve; it was a matter of returning to principles already learned and taught by the American Founders. Chinese policies are entirely consistent with the principles of Marxism with Chinese characteristics, and so any learning curve will be entirely a matter of refining tactics, not of changing fundamental strategy. 

As the war in Ukraine continued, NATO pulled together and, in the case of Finland, expanded to the Russian border—precisely Mr. Putin’s stated worry about Ukraine, although in fact Russian conquest of Ukraine would mean an advance toward, not a buffer against NATO. This notwithstanding, as Finnish president Sauli Niinistö remarked to Sanger, while there may be two billion citizens of commercial republics worldwide, there are about eight billion subjects of tyrannies and oligarchies. To counter this imbalance, the West can only appeal to ‘quality’ instead of ‘quantity,’ to technological advances in military and intelligence-gathering capacity and to some extent a more reliable alliance structure, given the distrust despots so rightly entertain regarding one another’s motives. Still, although both sides play divide-and-conquer, neither has divided or conquered its enemies and the much-predicted political demise of Putin and, lately, of Xi have not materialized. (Nor would the ruin of their political fortunes necessarily alter their states’ foreign policies for the better.)

Sanger summarizes: state sovereignty now has taken the lead against globalist complacency, very much including the assurance of secure international supply routes; republican regimes are on the defensive against “strongmen”; the China-Russia alliance is “stronger than at any point since the Korean War”; nuclear sabers are rattling, mass terror well publicized. The new ‘multilateral’ world, rather like the pre-World War I world but with weapons of mass destruction, “may indeed prove a near-permanent condition for the next several decades.” “The addition of new players, acting sometimes independently and sometimes in tandem, makes the current era far more complex to manage than the old one.” And much more simply, “America has never faced a competitor like China before.” This is the challenge faced by the Trump Administration most immediately and by the American people and their allies, fundamentally..

 

Note

1. See “The Comprehensive Strategy of Xi Jinping, 2012-2017,” on this website, under the category, “Nations.”