Is 2026 the New 1914?

LINDSAY:
In the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world looked to have put centuries of great power rivalry in the catastrophic wars it triggered in the past. The United States stood as a power without peer. Globalization was connecting economies and spurring unprecedented economic growth.

Digital technology was empowering individuals, undermining authoritarians, and spreading democracy, increasing the prospects that national differences would be settled at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. Today, that optimistic time feels like a distant memory. The promised future of cooperation and convergence never materialized.

Instead, great power competition has returned with a vengeance. Democracy is in retreat globally as an increasingly cohesive axis of autocracies seeks to undermine U.S. predominance. At the same time, U.S. foreign policy has become more transactional, fraying relations with traditional friends, partners, and allies. And nationalism is rising across the globe as countries react to what they see as the excesses of globalization and the threats posed by their neighbors. Does today’s increasingly multipolar era resemble any particular eras in the past? If it does, are we doomed to repeat the mistakes those generations made?

Or can we learn from their mistakes and manage the risks of great power competition? To get answers to these questions, I sat down with Odd Arne Westad, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and the author of The Coming Storm, Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History. Arne, thank you for joining me on the President’s Inbox.

WESTAD:
It’s really wonderful to be with you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Arne, I wanted to chat with you because you have argued, particularly in your book The Coming Storm, that the world today in many ways resembles the world more than a century ago on the eve of World War I. So perhaps we can begin there.

In what ways does 2026 resemble 1912 or 1913?

WESTAD:
In too many ways for comfort, I think is the short response to that. So I’m not too enthused, as you may have seen from the pages of Foreign Affairs, by the Cold War analogy or simile that is often used for all time. I don’t see many similarities with the Cold War.

There’s stuff we can learn from the Cold War, but systemically, structurally, this is not a cold war. The similarities, however, with the early 20th century are manifold. We come out of a period of intense globalization that seems to be collapsing as we speak.

And it’s collapsing mainly because the countries that have benefited the most from globalization have turned against it because other countries are catching up in economic terms and to some extent in social terms. That’s exactly what happened up to 1914 with new countries, Germany, the United States, several others becoming more predominant in the world that Britain and France and others had created. It’s also a time period where you see significant changes in terms of international affairs.

You see, in part because of the economic changes that are taking place, new powers are emerging. We have moved into a situation of real multi-polarity, which I think is similar to what we have today, from a relatively stable system that had been built in the 19th century to a system that is much more complex and to some extent chaotic. And then you have the other consequences that are connected to this.

You have a rise in nationalism and populism. You have terrorism as an international phenomenon in a way that hasn’t been seen before. Of course, it’s a terrorist act in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 that sets off this disaster that the First World War became.

So, unfortunately, there are a lot of similarities. I mean, it’s not identical. I mean, no two situations, as you know better than anyone, are alike.

But there are enough warnings coming out of that period that I think we should take them seriously.

LINDSAY:
I was struck, Arne, when I read The Coming Storm. One of my first reactions was why you saw the analogy to 1914 rather than, as I’ve heard some people argue, the true analogy is 1939. Why is that?

WESTAD:
Well, let me say first that I hope it’s not 1939, because if it is, then we’re in much deeper trouble than even a relatively pessimistic historian like myself would think. There are big differences between our situation today and the 1930s. We haven’t just come out of a cataclysmic war.

That has destroyed our world. That was the situation after 1918. That’s what all of these hatreds and resentments and ideologies that were turned very clearly against your neighbor, not just in terms of rivaling with your neighbor, trying to kill off your neighbor.

Those were products of a disastrous war that had lasted for four years and within which a lot of people had suffered. We have not gone through a Great Depression. We’ve gone through economic difficulties of significant size, as we’ve seen since the early 2000s.

But we’ve not gone through that. We have so far been spared a global depression of the kind that created so many of the most destructive instincts that we saw come to the fore in the 1930s. So again, I mean, there are things that we can learn from the 1930s, but I think there is also some reason for optimism in the sense that structurally our world does not look like the 1930s, even though there are some elements, especially perhaps in ideological terms, that now seem to remind us of that time period.

LINDSAY:
Arne, I want to dig a bit deeper into the events leading up to World War I. But before we do that, I want to flag something, which is your warning is based on the assumption that we can learn from history, a proposition I’m perfectly prepared to accept. But some skeptics may decide to quote Hegel and note that he once wrote that the peoples and governments have never learned anything from history or acted on the principles deduced from it.

Now, I don’t want to drag you into a deep philosophical discussion about what Hegel did or did not mean by that. But I’d like to get your sense of how you think policymakers and the broader public can actually learn from history. How do you do it well?

And how do you avoid the temptation just to ransack history for examples that bolster your preconceived notions?

WESTAD:
Beware of historians bringing false analogies, as some people say. Now, there is always a danger in this, and one has to do it with a great deal of humility and a great deal of willing to discuss with people who have different perspectives with regard to this. Now, I don’t belong to the group who are saying, you know, the only thing we can learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.

It is not like that. People will always attempt to draw lessons, to draw warnings from history. That’s, I think, in a way, how we are created.

We are created to try to make sense of things that have gone before us, especially things that we ourselves have experienced, which is sometimes the limitation. I think the ease with which people grab for Cold War analogies for our own time, because a bunch of us have lived through the Cold War, rather from historical comparisons that might be more apt, that we haven’t experienced ourselves. But I think the most important aspect of this, Jim, is that since this is something that we are very likely to do, and particularly people in power are very likely to do, we have to spend some time trying to get it right and trying to figure out what is it that really could be helpful for us.

And therefore, we have to try to do it with some degree of historical accuracy. And we have to be aware, and this is where I find many people, especially outside of policymaking circles, to be deficient. You have to be aware of the tremendous power, force, that historical analogies can have at moments of great importance.

My late former colleague and friend at the Kennedy School, Secretary Carter, Ashton Carter, always used to say that when things get really dicey in the corridors of power, people don’t speak economics or political science. They speak history. And I think he’s absolutely right about that.

So I do think we have to be aware of the power of these comparisons and we have to try to get it right. It’s only by coming up with parallels, with analogies, that make sense in people’s eyes, that can lead to a further elimination of the problem we are facing today, that this will have any effect and will have any meaning.

LINDSAY:
I think you’re quite right, Arne, in terms of talking about how historical memory can shape the decision policymakers do. I am struck that in the 1950s and 1960s, whenever a crisis erupted, the first thing that seemed to pop into the minds of American policymakers was to avoid another Munich. And then in the 80s, for many Americans, the first thing that would come into mind in any crisis is we have to avoid a Vietnam.

So I do think that there is that challenge of trying to, when you identify the parallels, figure out what the right historical antecedent is to look to, rather than to decide what it is and go from there without really thinking about it. So that leads me to want to talk a little bit more about how World War I came about, because I suspect that most people, certainly most Americans, have at best a dim sense of why Europe went to war in 1914. You’ve already alluded to the assassination of the Archduke of Austria by a Serbian nationalist, but maybe you could give me your take in terms of how Europe ended up at war when many people, in the summer of 1914, thought war was impossible.

And here I think I’m obligated to invoke Norman Angell, who famously wrote about how Europe wouldn’t go to war because of the various ways the countries of Europe were integrated with one another.

WESTAD:
So that book was one of the absolute bestsellers of 1913, not just because it told people what they wanted to hear, but also because it was a really good book. It was wrong, and it was wrong, I think, for reasons that only became obvious in hindsight. And this is what is so striking with 1914, a bit different from 1939, or even perhaps the origins of the Cold War.

In the summer of 1914, as you said, no one expected a world war. They might be expecting other kinds of wars and conflicts, but that happens all the time, as it happens in their own time, unfortunately, but not a global cataclysm. And I think there were two things that happened.

I mean, the first is that there was a very high level of popular and elite resentment against other countries. So people were blaming other countries for their problems. That’s in between these structural changes that we already talked about and politics.

The level of resentment, interestingly enough, is not as high as it is today, say, between China and the United States or between Russia and Europe, but it was pretty high, and it was much higher than it’d been probably for a century. And then into that mix comes this Black Swan event, this unexpected event, the murders in Sarajevo, which puts several of the leading European states into a situation where it just becomes more and more difficult for them to find a solution, to pull back enough so that they can avoid war. And this is what is so striking in the summer of 1914.

Everyone seems to be willing to take risks of a kind that they know could lead to war, but they do not have the wherewithal to play for time, to say, we need to meet up to discuss this. Even though there had been lots of conversations going on before the summer of 1914, meaningful conversations among great powers, but in this kind of acute situation, Germany is not willing to hold its Austrian allies back, which they almost certainly should. Russia is too afraid not to enter into a partial mobilization, even though they knew how dangerous that would be.

And at the end of the day, there are enough people in Berlin, in the German capital, who are willing to gamble that if they just push hard enough, then others will give them what they want to have instead of threatening them with war, especially Britain. So at that point, it becomes a good idea for Germany to take old France by invading Belgium, be in Paris within a week, not be willing to think through that invading Belgium is about the only thing that Germany could do to make sure that Britain would join the war and thereby create a world war. That’s the sequence, in short, in very short, the way I see it.

And this is where I fear the parallels to our own time. If you substitute Taiwan for Belgium or for Alsace-Lorraine for Bosnia, you get the kind of scenarios that I’m worried about.

LINDSAY:
Arne, help me understand the issue of agency. For some wars, and I think World War II jumps out, there’s a consensus that one leader in particular caused the war. Can we make that kind of argument about World War I?

And I ask against the backdrop of having read the Australian historian Christopher Clark’s book, which I think came out in 2012, titled The Sleepwalkers, which seems to convey the sense, as the title implies, that European leaders blindly walked into a war that none of them really wanted.

WESTAD:
I think Chris Clark is right in the sense that no one at the outset of the July crisis of 1914 wanted a war. The problem was that there were plenty of people who were open to threatening war so that they could have more power behind the demands that they wanted to put forward. And that’s bad, but that in itself doesn’t lead to war.

Again, Chris Clark is great on this, in terms of his description in Sleepwalkers. So what happened in the end was something even more terrifying. And that is that some people started thinking that if war were to come, then it would be better that it happened now rather than later.

And that form of thinking was particularly prevalent in Germany. I mean, again, Clark is right that it was not only Germans who were thinking in that direction, but there were more Germans close to power than in any other country who were willing to give the top decision makers that kind of advice. On a foundation that was shaky as best we know how the war ended.

But it was certainly strongly held. Germany was in a position, they argued, that might be its maximum moment. That might be the time when they were in a better position militarily and strategically to push their demands in Europe than they would be at any point later on.

And that’s the deadly misconception that created not just the First World War, but then indirectly the chaos of the interwar years, the Second World War, and then the Cold War.

LINDSAY:
Arne, as you look at the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, were there opportunities for European powers to avoid that war that they simply missed? Or was this, in some sense, almost inevitable because of what had preceded 1914?

WESTAD:
No, I don’t think it was inevitable. I think there were some structural reasons that were moving in the direction of increased tensions. That’s for sure.

But I don’t think it was unavoidable. And it certainly was not unavoidable in the summer of 1914, which was the other part of this question. It came about for reasons that we already talked about.

Of course, people were not willing to go for the second best, not willing to play for time, not willing to have the extra understanding that is sometimes needed to get closer to what others see as their strategic bottom line. I think this is one of the lessons for our time, is that there wasn’t a lack of communications before the First World War, a lack of conversations among leading powers. On the contrary, that was probably on the up.

And besides, these people knew each other intimately. I mean, three of the heads of state in what became the warring countries were cousins. The British king, the German emperor, the Kaiser, and the Russian Tsar.

They knew each other extremely well. And they tried to build on that close relationship when the crisis got on the way to hold back. The problem is that each of these countries, and I think it’s true for all of them, did not really understand some of the fundamental, basic strategic points of the others.

And that made it more difficult to have the kind of conversations that could have avoided war. And again, I see a parallel with our own time.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you about that, Arne. Why is it that these leaders who knew each other intimately corresponded? As you mentioned, three were cousins.

I believe the king of the United Kingdom wrote to his cousin in Germany and called him Willie. Why is it that they were unable to understand the strategic interests and vulnerabilities they each had?

WESTAD:
So, it’s important to bear that in mind because it has such significance for our own time. I mean, Kaiser Wilhelm II was the oldest favorite grandson of Queen Victoria. She literally died in his arms.

This is a man who had very strong connections to Britain. English was his mother tongue. I think the problem is understanding on the German side how significant it was for Britain that no single country was put in a position where they would dominate Europe.

I mean, the Germans had all the kinds of explanations of why the British seemed to resist all their political demands, right? They didn’t like the Germans, they were fearful of the Germans, they resented German success, all of this kind of thing. But it wasn’t really about that.

It was about the dangers for Britain of having a German-dominated Europe. Same thing in the other direction, maybe even more meaningfully, if you think about the British aspect of this. There was absolutely no understanding of what was needed to incorporate a newly created country that had already become the most dynamic economy in Europe, right at the center of the most important continent in the world.

You don’t integrate that by trying to fend it off or contain it or tell the Germans, you know, like my distinguished colleague here at Yale, Paul Kennedy, says in his book on this, basically telling the Germans, little Hans, if you just stay small, if you just do not grow any further, everything will be fine. But if you continue to grow, your growth is directed against us, right? These are the kinds of things that I’m talking about.

And again, this is one of my real worries, is that you can have a lot of conversations about strategy. I’m just back from Beijing, where I had a lot of those conversations. You can have a lot of talk about that without a more profound understanding of what is going on on the other side.

LINDSAY:
My sense, Arne, is if you look at the elite discussions in European capitals in 1914, it wasn’t just the monarchs who held this view. These conceptions were widely shared. And the few people who might question the conventional or dominant wisdom would find themselves ostracized rather than embraced or challenged.

And I think, you know, that’s an issue. But I want to bring our conversation up to the present day, because I think many people sort of thinking about historical parallels would say, yes, before World War I, we saw multi-polar world in which countries were jockeying for power. A dominant power was threatened by a rising power.

The dominant power being Britain and the rising power being Germany. But I imagine people might say, but the differences between now and then are just as important. And one difference would be today, the major powers are armed with nuclear weapons, which fundamentally changed the nature of war and in theory could make countries less inclined to go to war with one another.

And I think there’s also another line of argument, which is our economies are so deeply integrated with one another that at the end of the day, leaders will decide war is not a viable option because it would be devastating to domestic economies. That is, there aren’t going to be any easy victories. And if you do win, you may find out the country that supplied your economy no longer can do so.

How do you respond to that argument?

WESTAD:
First by saying, I wish it were true, but it doesn’t look to me like that is the case. Let’s deal with the latter one first in terms of interdependence and integration. So the world before 1914 was pretty integrated.

Not as much as we found in 2015, 2016 or thereabouts when things started to move in the opposite direction in their own age. But more than it had been ever before and more than it would be again, and I think this is the most important thing here, for almost all of the time up to the end of the 20th century. So Germany in 1914 was Britain’s biggest trading partner.

It was the biggest destination for British investments. The economies of those two countries and the economies of most European countries were woven together in a way that were far beyond anything that had been seen before and would be seen again until really the early 1990s. So when war then comes, a lot of people have been thinking along these lines.

A lot of people saying it won’t happen because it will destroy the global economy. And yet when it happens, almost no one cares about the global economy. There are a few business people who are trying to say, what will this do to us?

They are brushed aside. They have very little influence on this. Or workers’ organizations, trade unions, who are saying there won’t be a war because we’ll declare a general strike.

Most of them do. They march to war alongside most of the countrymen when the crisis breaks. On the former, on weapons, and this is a little bit more difficult.

So a few years ago, I would have said that nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have almost ultimate deterrent power. Now I’m not so sure anymore that that is the case. I think the development of new kinds of nuclear weapons, proliferation in a broad sense, the intensity of conflicts, the way they are seen, all of this convinces me that we are more in the same kind of territory, unfortunately, that we were in in the early 20th century when there was also a revolution in military affairs.

Only that back then it was battleships and aircraft and poisoned gas. And a lot of books, like the one we just referred to, were written saying war won’t happen because it’s just too terrible. With these kinds of new weapons, no one sane would want to see a great power war because of the destruction that it would lead to.

And yet, in the summer of 1914, that is exactly what happened. And I hope I’m wrong about this, but I am really worried about those aspects when it comes to weapons of mass destruction today.

LINDSAY:
Well, I would think, Arne, that the evolution of the war in Ukraine bears out its point. The cost of that war to Russia has been astronomical. Vladimir Putin did not get the quick victory that he thought he was going to get.

It’s been more than four, almost five years. It’s not clear that victory is going to happen anytime soon, but there’s no sense that Putin is changing his commitment to winning that war. I think that may tell us a bit about how leaders can assess costs and benefits in war quite differently from how we might assess those costs and benefits before the war begins.

But Arne, I want to end on the broader question of, based on what we know from history, what are the keys for enabling world leaders, whether in Washington, D.C., in the Kremlin in Moscow, in Beijing, from walking down the same road that led to 1914? Are there particular techniques that sort of jump out at you that say, these are the sort of things you want to try? Are there certain decisions that you look at and you say, this is what you want to avoid?

How do we take our understanding of how war began in August of 1914 and apply it usefully today?

WESTAD:
So there are lots of things that can be done, and this has been really important for me in these discussions, is to underline that things are not hopeless. There is nothing that say that we are doomed in the sense that we have to move in the same direction of what happened at the beginning of the last century. But we have to, therefore, draw the right lessons from this and heed the warnings that come up.

And there are three main points that are important for me to make. I think the first one, very clearly, is that we have to end the wars that are ongoing at the moment. I mean, this was one of the biggest problems before 1914, that there were lots of smaller wars going on and conflicts.

And most people were saying, these can all be kept separate. It won’t affect great powers in terms of conflict, at least not to the point of wars. And then something comes along that we cannot foresee, and all of a sudden, these ongoing wars that are not great power wars contribute to this general conflagration that we are not able to turn away from.

And I think that is true today. I think it’s true in Iran. I think it’s true in the Palestinian territories.

I think it is true in Ukraine. These all have the potential in them, if we get the wrong kind of global crisis, to contribute to absolute disaster. Therefore, we have to apply ourselves much more than what we are doing at present to resolve this and other points of tension to the point that the shooting stops.

I mean, we can’t, you know, these are difficult conflicts. Some of them have lasted for a very long time. Some people would say centuries.

Resolving them will take time. But that might not be necessary in the broader sense. What is necessary now is to find a way in which the killing stops, and therefore you do not have this general sense of tension that can lead to disaster in a war between great powers.

And let me just remind us of that, Jim, for a moment. The difference between these wars that are all terrible, just like they were before 1914, people who got through them, but they’re not world wars, right? As many people were killed in the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, as were killed in all great power wars between the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 18th century and up to 1914.

I mean, the dimensions are just of a different kind. Then secondly, we have international organizations and institutions, like the United Nations, which didn’t exist prior to 1914. We just have to have the good sense of making use of them for the purpose for which they were created.

It says in the preamble to the UN Charter that this organization was created to help free mankind from the disasters that had befallen it in the early 20th century. And that is the role the UN, if dealt with for the purposes that it was set up, can still, I think, have a major role within. And then thirdly, it’s this issue that we have already discussed, in trying to understand better where other countries, and especially other great powers, are coming from.

So I’ve just spent a week in Beijing talking to decision makers there about their views on international affairs, and especially on their relations with Japan, their issues and questions with regard to the Taiwan situation and relations with Southeast Asia. And I must say that when I then come back here, the 24 hours I’ve been back, I am struck by the difference in terms of the approaches that you have to solve these questions in Beijing, and the questions and discussions that you have on this side. So it’s not easy, this.

Because closely related people, as we talked about earlier on, before 1914 got it wrong, why should we get it right? But we have to try. Because I think without that kind of understanding, it would be very hard to handle a situation that might come, in which we have very few choices, and where war might seem as a real possibility.

LINDSAY:
On that sobering note, I’ll close up this week’s episode of The President’s Inbox. My guest has been Odd Arne Westad, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. Arne, thank you very much for speaking with me.

WESTAD:
It’s been a great conversation, Jim, thank you.

LINDSAY:
Today’s episode was produced by Justin Schuster, with director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Markus Zakaria.