In his 1908 essay, “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” Vladimir Lenin concluded that while Tolstoy was unmatched in portraying the ills of society, he should never be called on to suggest a cure. The reader of today — concerned about the various sicknesses plaguing our geopolitics — is likely to come away from Yale historian Odd Arne Westad’s new book, “The Coming Storm,” with a similar impression.
Westad is preoccupied with those same years in which Lenin wrote. Globalization was in retreat; new technologies portended an uncertain future for mankind; and the world’s dominant democratic superpower was threatened by the unprecedented rise of an authoritarian juggernaut. Westad is not the first person to point out the parallels between the early 20th century and now. But he is able to distill them with admirable clarity — the growing conflict between the British Empire and a newly unified Germany is laid out in a manner brief and accessible enough to be digested in a single sitting.
Britain for nearly a century had been the world’s leading great power, with unrivalled naval strength and a grand strategy focused on maintaining the network of commerce that tied together its sprawling empire. Germany was decades into an unprecedented industrial transformation, and though its military ambitions were somewhat more regional, its leadership class in Berlin had become increasingly convinced that London was out to sabotage its rise to greatness.
If this is the recipe for great power conflict, then the U.S. and China have already provided the essential ingredients. But attitudes and structural risks alone don’t cause great wars. They require immediate causes, too. Westad’s list of potential trigger points is longer than one might expect. Pyongyang, Moldova and Kashmir all make the cut. His top candidate, however, comes as no surprise. “The Taiwan conflict,” he writes, “is a bit like Alsace, Bosnia, and Belgium rolled into one.”
The lessons Westad draws from the outbreak of World War I seem reasonable enough. If Germany’s leaders in 1914 had been sufficiently convinced that Britain would join the fight, he argues, then they would have been less likely to declare war on Russia and France. Takeaway: Explicit security guarantees are a stronger deterrent than vague ones. Westad goes on to point out that in the days between Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination on June 28, 1914 and Austria’s declaration of war on Russia a month later, Kaiser Wilhelm II actually tried to lower tensions. But German officials made sure that news of the Kaiser’s position wouldn’t make it to Vienna in time to make a difference. Takeaway: Failures of communication can be just as harmful as deliberate escalation in the run-up to war.
But it’s not clear how useful these lessons really are when applied to Taiwan’s present predicament. Westad seems to understand this. Indeed, if the U.S. were to clarify its commitment to defending Taiwan, China would be certain to retaliate, thus sabotaging any chance for stable communications between the two sides.
If Taiwan’s present status — as a quasi-independent country that China claims as a rogue province and the U.S. supports militarily but will not fully recognize — is untenable, how should it evolve in order to avoid World War I-levels of bloodshed? Westad has a few suggestions, none of which are very satisfying. The U.S. and China could reaffirm the Shanghai Communique, he says, with an added provision: America would under no circumstances support Taiwanese independence in peacetime. Westad does not seem to think that the U.S. would be in a position to demand anything in return for this concession. But he says that this would just be a short-term solution, something to prevent war long enough for Taipei and Beijing to come to their own understanding.
What would such an understanding look like? “Even a pact or a commonwealth in which everything remains the way it is today, with two separate entities except for a council that coordinates relations between them … would be very hard for Taiwan to accept,” Westad writes. “But it would be better than war.” Germany, he notes, even after two world wars and a generation of infamy, still ended up the preeminent economic power on the European continent anyway.
To Westad, China’s rise is no less inevitable. So why risk provoking Beijing in an effort to forestall it? One answer might be that without access to Taiwanese chip manufacturing, the U.S. economy would collapse. But nowhere do the words “chip” nor “TSMC” even appear in this book. The one mention of semiconductors comes in the section about South Korea.
“As China’s power grows, it is likely that it will get at least some of the position of overall influence in East Asia that it searches for,” Westad writes. This statement is a bit vague. A more precise formulation would go something like this. The Chinese military is growing. If conflict breaks out with the U.S., millions of people will die. Just look at what happened between 1914 and 1918. Compared with that, the Taiwanese people’s freedom does not feel like such a terrible sacrifice. Does it?
That’s an important question to ask, and one worthy of a top-notch scholar like Westad. But in “The Coming Storm,” he hasn’t given himself the space to convincingly answer it.
The Coming Storm by Odd Arne Westad, Henry Holt and Co., $27.99, 256 pages
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