The Wrong Century
Professor Westad's pre-1914 analogy is illuminating. It is pointing at the wrong historical moment.
I came across Freddie Sayers' conversation with Professor Arne Westad on Unherd this week, and I found myself nodding along for most of it before disagreeing with the conclusion. That is probably the best kind of intellectual experience, so I recommend listening to it before reading any further.
Westad's argument, broadly, is that the structural tensions of the current world resemble those of the pre-1914 era more than they resemble the Cold War. He draws an analogy between Britain and America, and between Germany and China. The first comparison I think is genuinely good. Geographically and strategically, Britain-as-America holds up.
The Germany-China parallel is where I part ways, and geography is the first reason.
Germany pushed outward because its geography gave it no choice and no protection. No serious natural barriers in any direction. Land campaigns were both the temptation and eventually the catastrophe. China is structured almost entirely differently. Desert and ice to the north and west. Jungle to the south. The first and second island chains to the east, behind a wall of American treaty allies. China's ambitions are real but its geography channels them into maritime pressure rather than the kind of sweeping territorial campaigns that consumed Europe in 1914. The comparison doesn't really survive contact with a map.
Demographics compound it. Pre-war Germany had a young, growing population with genuine energy for projection. China today has an ageing population, a property crisis, and economic fragilities that Germany simply did not face at the time. These are not comparable structural situations.
CHINA IS A TENANT, NOT A RIVAL
There is a deeper problem with the analogy, and I think it is the most important one. China is not a rival to the American order. It is the American order's most successful tenant. Its economy grew inside that system. Its trade moves mostly by sea through lanes the United States Navy has secured for decades. The Malacca Strait alone carries the majority of China's seaborne trade, and China cannot protect that chokepoint independently. Belt and Road, for all its ambition, is at least partly an attempt to build alternative routes and regional leverage precisely because Beijing understands this vulnerability. The fact that it has had to try tells you something important about the underlying structural reality.
This is not the position Germany was in before 1914. Germany was building an empire outward against rivals with comparable power and comparable ambition. China is trying to quietly convert economic weight into strategic autonomy before the system it has relied on stops functioning. That is a genuinely different problem, and it produces a genuinely different kind of tension.
ONE EMPIRE, NOT SEVERAL
Pre-1914 was a world of competing empires with roughly comparable weight and ambition. Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, all pushing outward at the same time. The war was what happened when they collided. That is not our situation. We have had one empire: the American-led global order. A single system, not a competition between several. The major powers, China included, have all been operating as participants in that system. When it loses coherence, they are not rivals finally coming to blows. They are all, in different ways, exposed. The starting condition is completely different, and it produces a completely different kind of disorder.
THE WRONG CENTURY
My own instinct, which I have been developing in my own writing, is that the better reference point is somewhere in the eighteenth century. Not the Napoleonic moment specifically, but the long period leading up to it. Powers competing before any new order had crystallised. Spheres of influence being staked out before anyone knew which ones would hold. I will not pretend it is a clean analogy either. The powers of that era were further along in their formation than what we are watching now. If anything, we may be at an even earlier stage. A moment where the old order is dissolving and the new ones have not yet hardened into anything recognisable.
That is why I am less convinced by the high-war-risk conclusion. The conditions for a world war require competing empires, young populations, funded militaries, and the industrial capacity to sustain mass conflict. Most of the industrialised world has none of those things. The parts of the world with young populations are already producing the kind of conflict that follows from this kind of disorder: proxy wars, localised instability, guerrilla fighting. Serious and damaging, but structurally different from a collision of empires.
What we are watching is not 1914. It is something earlier and in some ways stranger. An order dissolving before its successors exist. A scramble for spheres of influence before anyone is strong enough to hold them. The analogy that captures it is not a world war. It is the long, disorganised, formative period that came before one. Westad's conversation with Freddie is well worth your time. I just think geography, demographics, and the basic structure of the current order are doing more work than his framework accounts for. The comparison is illuminating. It is just pointing at the wrong century.