“The defeat of Japan opened the door for a communist regime in China that was succeeded by a more complex system that allowed China to emerge as a major economic power”

from Russia and France and to blockade by Britain. Japan was also an economic dynamo but, bereft of natural resources, was unable to maintain its industrial base without imports of oil and other industrial minerals. Its access to these minerals depended on the willingness of suppliers to sell and ability to deliver them through waters controlled by the British and American navies. The newly emergent economic powers were both militarily insecure. This compelled them to seek a rectification of the balance of power against older and frequently weaker powers.

The rise of the United States was the most radical shift. The U.S. had become the leading economic power in the world in a startlingly short time. The United States’ only vulnerability was from the sea, and the major naval powers were the British and Japanese. The United States constructed a massive navy in response, which unsettled the Japanese in the extreme and made the British uneasy. But behind this was a fundamental reality. The European empires, and particularly the British, were built on a balance of power that was no longer in place. The existing system didn’t make room for the Germans and Japanese, but it also had no place for the Americans. The Americans did not seek formal empire, but they rejected the idea that they should be excluded from economic activities in the British and French empires. A system that marginalised the United States, Japan and Germany was unsustainable.

Systemic wars are complex. Alliances shift, and the motives of allies diverge. The Japanese fear of a U.S. blockade triggered the attack on Pearl Harbour. U.S. lend-lease to Britain was contingent on the British surrendering their naval bases in the western Hemisphere to the United States. The British fought to preserve the empire. The U.S. was content to see it collapse. The Soviet Union was intent on fomenting uprising in Britain and the United States, but both supported Soviet military operations against the Germans. I make no attempt here to write the story of World War II, but rather to point out that systemic wars involve many nations, tend to be global and are complicated. Their outcome also determines the fate of nations and, for a while, of the world.

One measure of a systemic war is the degree to which the geopolitical systems change. The first change resulting from World War II was the collapse of all European empires in the 20 years following the war’s end. The second was the rise of the United States, not only as a major economic power but also as the dominant military power.

Both Japan and Germany, the nations that rose along with the United States, collapsed after the war and then reemerged as primarily economic powers, and as such, were limited forces in the world. The defeat of Japan opened the door for a communist regime in China that was succeeded by a more complex system that allowed China to emerge as a major economic power.

The next phase of history consisted of the global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. That confrontation involved both a strategic cordon around the Soviet Union and a major contest between the United States and the Soviet Union for the domination of the remnants of Europe’s empire. It also consisted of a confrontation of nuclear forces, a weapon that emerged from World War II. societies. It takes generations or even centuries – too long to be decided by individual leaders or elections.

What is decisive in the story are wars. War, particularly modern wars, are driven by necessity. Modern wars are wars of industrial production, and the size and creativity of the industrial plant shape the outcomes of wars, as does the ability to destroy the enemy’s industrial capability. At the same time, there appear to be moments in the systemic war that don’t seem tied to the underlying structure of warmaking but much more to the durability of a social order, the commitment of warriors and the chances of war.

Geopolitics is, as I have argued and tried to show, predictable. If you consider the deep structure and the imperatives and constraints of the nation-states, and ignore personalities and the public opinion of the moment, you can discern the process that is underway and see where it might be going. You can predict who will be in a war and who is likely to win it. But it is in war that the eccentric forces of will and chance coalesce to create outcomes that, if not violating expectations, give it unexpected dimensions.

It was from June 1942 to February 1943 that those eccentric possibilities showed themselves. They allow us to be surprised, certainly by how the war turned out, but also by how close it came to not turning out as we might have expected. Seventy-five years after Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, there are few who fought in those battles who are still alive. That is a good point for us to consider during these months. We now have to gain perspective over what was, in retrospect, a little more than eight months that redefined the world.

It is one thing to see the deep structure of a thing. But in systemic wars, you must also master the battles, in the grammar of war itself. So, in contrast to history, which moves slowly from a human standpoint, battles are measured in seconds, minutes, hours and days. The long wars we speak about today are political wars. Systemic wars rip apart the world and redesign it in a matter of years, with the heart of the matter determined frequently in minutes. In two weeks, we will begin with what I regard as the single-most decisive battle of World War II for all combatant powers: Midway, where the allies could have lost but didn’t, all because of events that transpired in mere minutes.