We ignore the threat of a great powers conflict at our peril
There are two important high-level trends that define global political economic matters today, and both may have serious implications for national public policymakers in the medium to long term.
One of these trends is the speculation about a war between the world’s two “great powers”, China and the US. The other is that the life of capitalism is approaching an event horizon, that point at the edge of a black hole where retreat is virtually impossible.
If SA is to make headway using the options that are available to public policymakers, both issues deserve closer examination.
It was probably no surprise when the World Economic Forum published an article at the end of 2017 that questioned the “legitimacy” of capitalism, and the way that it was “losing support”. And in January the current affairs journal The Economist published an article, on The Next War under the headline The growing danger of great power conflict. In July 2017 it had this headline: Will America and China go to war? That’s the big foreign policy question worrying Washington.
One enduring belief prevalent among pedants is that large-scale structural transformation tends to be an outcome of war between great powers. This belief has some appeal among scholars, most notably among those who receive research funding from the Pentagon or a lobby or advocacy group on K Street in Washington, DC.
Space constraints limit the elision in a single piece on the relationship between war and structural change. What can be addressed, albeit briefly, is the issue of large-scale “great power” war and why we ignore it at our peril. The media is saturated daily with conflict around the world from Syria to Afghanistan and Myanmar, to localised wars “on drugs” in Latin America or the Philippines, and Washington’s global war on terror. In some ways, not without reason, many have become inured to it all.
There is an apparent belief that war among the major powers is improbable because war would be too costly or because the world is globalised to the extent that there is a natural harmony of interests around peace. Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China’s central bank in 2006, said “we are all capitalists now”.
The emergence of this virtual unanimity on liberal capitalist triumph may be pegged to the endism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a belief spread that the world had reached the liberal utopia of consumer capitalist culture, never mind the diversity, complexity and multiplicity of preferences or affiliations that shape human interaction.
In many ways, however, we have been here before. Liberal international idealism and the naïve belief that war is improbable and obsolete was the reason the world sleepwalked into the bloodiest conflicts in modern history between 1914 and 1945. Nowhere was the optimism more evident than among politicians and thinkers in the European world — the theatre of early 20th century carnage.
Economists, in particular, believed that the world was too globalised — and it certainly was at the time — and that this made war improbable. In 1910, the British journalist, lecturer and MP Norman Angell, in his book, The Great Illusion, described war as irrational and said the costs made war obsolete.
Convinced that economic interdependence at the time made war redundant, he said that “the entire German financial world would exert its influence over the German government, thereby putting a stop to a situation which would be ruinous for German trade”.
This idealism inspired many prominent thinkers. After Angell’s 1913 lecture, Stanford University president David Jordan said: “The great war in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come. The bankers won’t come up with the money needed for such a war, and industry won’t support it, so the statesmen won’t be able to do it. There will be no great war.”
A year later the First World War broke out and by some accounts ended only in 1945 with 100-million people killed.
Early in the 21st century, we are living in analogous times. Today the US is in decline much like Britain was in the early 20th century. Today, China is on the rise, much like Germany was industrialising faster than any other economy after 1835 and seeking a greater share of the world in the early 20th century.
While Britain is fairly comfortable with its decline, the US remains stubbornly focused on making the next 100 years “the American century” and extending its control of the postwar liberal international economic order. China (and probably Russia) has challenged that in no uncertain terms.
In the time-tested tradition of the way states slope off to war — moving from polite diplomatic exchanges to public censure to sanctions and eventually military conflict — the US is apparently building its military for what The Economist described as the coming war with China, or any other power for that matter.
On March 25 US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that “all around the world where we’re using sanctions, we need to make sure we have a military that has the necessary resources”.
China has been building its military at a rapid pace, expanding its presence in the South China Sea and joining the US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan in establishing a military base in Djibouti.
All the talk of war is not surprising. Much of world history, from the creation of states to “democracy promotion” or “opening of markets” (like the US in Iraq or the British in China during the Opium Wars) has been shaped war. It would be disingenuous to deny that world history has also been shaped by trade, migration, diplomacy and the adventurism of empires from Songhai to the British, the Ottomans and the Mughals.
War is not that much of an aberration. There is a suggestion that peace may well be the aberration, which draws on evidence that the world has been at war for longer than it has been at peace. It all depends how one defines “war”.
One useful definition is it refers to an active conflict that has claimed more than 1,000 lives. Based on this, a research project has found that over the past 3,500 years or so, humans have been at peace for 268 years — only 8% of this period.
While there are many brutal conflicts around the world, with unbearable human costs, none have threatened the relative stability of the global political economy. But, after studying the world in 1913, the signs of possible large-scale war between the US and powers like Russia or China are quite startling.
THE NAÏVE BELIEF THAT WAR IS IMPROBABLE WAS THE REASON THE WORLD SLEEP-WALKED INTO TWO WORLD WARS