The Coming Storm: Why 2026 Looks a Lot Like 1914 | Odd Arne Westad

24:51Demetri Kofinas:I'm not going to selfishly continue to ask questions because I think my next one was going to be about the dollar recycling, the capital surpluses, the persistent deficits, which I think is the key insight here. But let's progress to the book because it is really remarkable. It's incredibly timely, and I cannot recommend it enough. The title of the book, as I will have mentioned in the introduction, is The Coming Storm, power conflict, and warnings from history. What would you say that this book is about? I mean, we've already established what motivated you to write it because you wanted to correct the record, or in part what motivated you to write it to correct the record on people's misuse of the Cold War as an apt analogy.

25:29Demetri Kofinas:But what would you say the book is about? What should people expect to find in its pages? The book is first and foremost a warning or a set of warnings about what could happen when international systems start to accelerate towards conflict. And I think that's the parallel of all the parallels that I see with the pre-1914 world that I try to present in this book. It's not a history. It's very much a history. It's very much a book about our own time and about the choices that we need to make, in my view, in order to move away from some of those striking parallels that exist with the world in the early 20th century.

26:10So the warnings are at the core of it. We have to try to understand what went terribly, terribly wrong in a period of intense change back then that is very similar to Rome, that then produced the worst possible outcome, which was global war.

26:27Demetri Kofinas:What was it about the period leading up to World War I that makes it a more appropriate analogy? And what are some of those parallels? So this is what I tried to lay out in the first part of the book, as you will have seen. I think a great number of them. Let me just do a few. So the most important thing to me in terms of the structure of the system is that the early 20th century world was a multipolar world that had come into being rather quickly from a system back in the 19th century when Britain was the hegemonic power, the dominant global power. By the early 20th century, that was no longer the case, in part because other countries had caught up with Britain economically and financially.

27:12Increasingly also militarily or strategically, that took longer. And it wasn't just one power. It was a number of powers that seemed to divide influence in what was then the center of the world, which was in and around Europe, amongst themselves. And as this turn towards multipolarity took place, tensions increased, all kinds of tensions. So that's a second similarity that you find. I mean, it was a world that was very much preoccupied with rapid economic and technological change, quite a lot like our world today. It was a period that had been preceded by a rapid increase in globalization, so on international trade and international finance, which had reached a level by 1913 that was higher than it's ever been since, in terms of economic interaction overall.

28:06We almost got there in the mid-2010s before things started to turn in a different direction. But it was a very interdependent, very globalized kind of world in terms of the economy. But at the same time, there were lots of people who were saying that this globalization had not worked for them. And particularly people in the leading countries who were saying, loss of jobs, loss of economic opportunity, the rising powers, especially Germany and the United States were taking advantage of everyone else by exporting jobs overseas to them. So that's a striking similarity also with our own time. Let me do one more, which I think is significant, certainly significant for how things then came to be in 1914, which is the emphasis on issues such as immigration and terrorism and general resentment towards other people.

29:01There's never been a time, I think, in human history where as many heads of state had been assassinated as in the period before 1914. And that was, of course, then the Black Swan event that set in motion the disaster in the summer of 1914 was one such assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. So these are among the similarities. Unfortunately, Dimitri, there are many more. So, but these are among the most striking similarities that I see.

29:31Demetri Kofinas:So, you mentioned that this was obviously the period of the height of British imperial power and the British empire, but it was also the period known as the Concert of Europe. It was after the Congress of Vienna, and there was already a kind of framework for dealing with international disputes within the European system. So, the European states already existed within a framework of multipolarity for a longer period of time, it seems, than we are today. Why is that not as important? I mean, how would you respond to a critique that says, actually the period was not the same? Yeah, I think all of that seemed to have a chance to work in terms of how it would contain developments overall.

30:11A little bit like, think the UN being set up after 1945. What it wasn't able to handle was the very rapid growth of Germany at the center of the European system. And this is one of the striking parallels with today, of course, is that just like Germany went from nothing in terms of international power as a state, unified state, before 1870, China has now gone from being entirely on the periphery of the international system prior to the 1980s, and to a position of immense power. And it seems to me that these kinds of international systems, and we can discuss actually when this happens in the late 19th century.

30:54I don't think that is really that important. But with these rapid changes, what happened back then was that the establishment powers, Britain, France, Russia, etc., didn't really act in ways that could meaningfully incorporate this entirely new and powerful Germany into the system that had existed before. Just like I think we have found it extraordinarily difficult to integrate China within a meaningful international system, not just globally, which would be really hard under all circumstances, but also within Eastern Asia. So just like Europe was the most significant part of the world back in the early 20th century, In the early 21st century, without doubt, it's Eastern Asia.

31:42I mean, at least in terms of international rivalries. And even there, as we see more recently, the conflicts are so severe and so intense that it doesn't take many missteps before they could lead to the kind of situation that we saw prior to 1914.

31:57Demetri Kofinas:So when I studied World War I, I came away with the impression, and I think this is a common narrative, that it was the alliance structures, coupled with technology, the railway system, the imperative for mobilization, the Schlieffen plan, the cult of the offensive, these were the primary structural drivers that led to World War I. You make an argument that that's overly simplistic. And I love actually now that you highlighted the comparison between China and Germany and what seemed to have been a sort of resistance, an unwillingness almost on the part of the Europeans and particularly the French to accept the rise of a new powerful Germany at the heart of Europe.

32:38Demetri Kofinas:What is the story that you would tell to explain what those deeper structural drivers were that explain what made war possible in 1914? So the structural aspect here is very important. Structure in and by itself never leads to war. It's human decisions, people who decide for war who do that. But they underpin it. And under certain circumstances, they would make it more likely. So that's in a way what happened in the period just prior to 1914, that the economic resentments that I've talked about, the intensification of economic competition, the reintroduction of tariffs, trade wars, the sense that grew, I think, on the side of many of these powers among its populations, that the other countries were out to get them.

33:29Not just get their state or their government, but were out to get them. And you can follow this in the period just before the war in terms of how intense those kinds of perceptions actually became. They're not as intense, by the way, as they are between populations in leading powers today, where the level of mutual resentment is even higher than what it was in 1913. But it was still very high back then, and that, of course, led in the direction of leaders not being able to hold back when real conflict then became an issue. The other structural aspect I think is important is the one that has to do with security.

34:10And this is the one that people generally get the most wrong, in my view. There is this general sense still, when you get a general presentation of 1914, that it was the alliances that led to war. I think that's profoundly mistaken. It was the failure of alliances that led to war. It was the failure of the ability to draw on the deterrent factor that these alliances should have been that led to war. If it had been clever, to be very specific about this, if it had been clever to people in the German leadership in Berlin and in Potsdam in the summer of 1914, that their actions, which became increasingly aggressive, could actually lead to a global conflagration because the Russian-French alliance was actually going to hold, and quite a number of people in Berlin queried that.

35:05And even more importantly, that Britain would then come in on the side of France, at least indirectly Russia. If that belief had held up, there wouldn't have been a war. The sense on the German side that these alliances were fragile, that they could be exploited by rapid action on the German side, particularly towards France, that's what contributed very significantly to the catastrophe. So one has to think about the strategic aspect of things here as well. And we don't do that often enough, in my view.

35:40Demetri Kofinas:I mean, there's an obvious parallel there between China and the United States and Taiwan and strategic ambiguity and the possibility that Chinese may feel that the United States is simply unwilling to come to Taiwan's defense and they'll be willing to roll the dice. There's also a very clear and ominous parallel in the German case with how they felt encircled. The European powers were afraid of Germany, and at the same time, their fear of Germany led to actions that led the Germans to feel understandably encircled. And so that also seems in some way to have driven us towards this conflict in 1914.

36:16That's precisely the process. And I'm afraid that we are repeating some of those same mistakes, which is not an argument for the United States not fulfilling its obligations towards friends and allies in the Eastern Asian region or the Pacific. Quite on the contrary, as I say in the book, I think an American withdrawal or an American decision to become less involved in the security of that region at this point would be a disaster because it would encourage exactly the kind of problems that we had prior to 1914. in that you have global change taking place much too quickly for anyone actually to handle.

36:57But the issue is, how do we then deal with a resurgent China into a position, of course, that China held for a very long time in Eastern Asia until the middle part of the 19th century, without it leading to conflict and war? And that's where deterrence plays a role, for instance, with regard to Taiwan, as you mentioned. But reassurance also plays a very important role. And that means, for instance, trying to involve China in dealing with important regional conflicts that exist within this region overall. On the US side, and for that matter, on the European side as well, trying to ameliorate the relationships overall between China and some of its neighbors, rather than being seen as trying to exacerbate the conflicts that exist, would, in my opinion, be a much, much smarter approach.

37:49Because it was the latter. It was those kinds of issues, and particularly the German alliance patterns being allied to a decrepit empire in continuous decline right next to Austria that led to the disaster in 1914. So de-escalation, I think, is an important part of all of this. And of course, as you will have seen from the book, I couldn't help being struck with the parallel between China's relationship with Russia today and Germany's relationship to Austria pre-1914?

38:19Demetri Kofinas:You set this up perfectly because that was going to be my next question, which is going to start with the observation that this was a very rich period in diplomatic history. And the world that we live in today looked very different. Even though there are parallels in terms of multipolarity, this was the world of the end of empires. You had the Austro-Hungarian empire coming apart. You had the same thing in the case of the Ottoman Empire, and you had the rise of nationalism and nation states. Again, something that's different today. Many of these nations that were vying for nationhood at that time now have nation states, and we're dealing with the conflicts that stem from that.

38:56Demetri Kofinas:So, as you said, there are analogies here. One of them is the parallel you draw or the analogy you draw between Austro-Hungaria and Russia. China, as we established, is Germany. Britain is the United States. France, it seems to me, based on having read the book that your closest parallel to that is India, which just shows you how the geographic footprint that we're talking about here has expanded. Let's just, for those, again, not everyone will know this history. What was so unique about Austro-Hungaria's internal political, and that's the other thing too, which I love about the book. Now, I have to mention this, which is you made such an important point of bringing out how internal political dynamics and constraints within all of these countries were also primary drivers.

39:36Demetri Kofinas:In the case of Britain, what led to so much of the strategic ambiguity was the internal politics. In France, Alcest Lorraine and the loss of its territory was an outstanding source of grievance. The rise of German nationalism created this tenuous alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which on the face of it, people that are looking at Austria and saying they both speak German, they might think that seems like a natural alliance, but yet it wasn't because the rise of German nationalism threatened the monarchy in Austria-Hungary. So, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about this, the richness of the political challenges, and then let's try and draw those parallels.

40:14Demetri Kofinas:Most strikingly, of course, Russia. I mean, Russia today, in some senses, is the only remaining large country that still exhibits some of those late imperial dynamics. Yeah. No, that's right. I mean, let me start with one point where I disagree with you slightly, and that is with regard to the nationalism and nation state kind of issue. So you're absolutely correct in saying, of course, in our own time, at least to some extent, much of that division into new nation states breaking away from earlier empires has already taken place. The parallel though, I think, with the pre-1914 world is in the issue of where that had happened up to that point.

40:53And that was mainly in Eastern and southeastern Europe, where that process had already taken place, was underway prior to 1914. And it was exactly that, that had in the end set off the disaster that led to the 1914 cataclysm. So even though there is no exact parallel, and I agree with you on that, there are some striking similarities with regard to, I guess, what you could call the imperial collapse and immediate post-colonial kind of setting back then as well. It's difficult to handle under any circumstance, And the magnitude of those difficulties today are far greater than what they were, at least on paper, in 1914.

41:30On that, we would agree. So I think with regard to Russia, I think it's always difficult, even though I had great fun with my students when we were putting together this manuscript to sort of point out who is who in terms of current international affairs compared to what was the situation prior to 1914. I think, by the way, that you're entirely right in saying that India is France. I think that's a really smart observation. With regard to Russia, I mean, the problem is this, from a Chinese perspective, but also in a more general sense, very parallel to Germany and Austria. Where else could China turn?

42:09And it's not that there is that much love lost in Beijing. I'm just back from Beijing. With regard to Russia, contemporary Russia, they see all of its weaknesses. They see how it's likely that Russia, even after the war in Ukraine, could get involved in all kinds of other wars and conflict at its borders, and that this would be problematic for China. Just like Austria's many wars and many conflicts prior to 1914 was problematic for Germany. But the question is, where else to turn? So that's the issue that I hear over and over again in Beijing, of the larger countries, there is only Russia. And Russia is willing, because of its weakness, to accept Chinese power and Chinese influence, even over some of its own territory and some of its own resources.

42:59Quite similar to the relationship between Germany and Austria prior to 1914. And I think this is one of the real difficulties that we are facing, is that if we end up in situation where China and Russia become ever closer integrated with each other in opposition to almost anyone else. Then we have a situation in which I think conflicts much more severe than the ones that we are seeing at the moment in terms of international affairs are very, very likely to happen. Again, absolute parallel to the early 20th century. And this is why so many historians, when they look at the summer of 1914 are saying, what happened in the summer of 1914 was a disaster, but it was also to some extent an accident.

43:44I don't believe in the accident theory with regard to this. It was built up structurally and politically over some time. But I do think that the structures, for instance, the relationship between Germany and Austria, were so significant that the chance that there would have been some kind of conflict later on, even if the summer of 1914 had not happened, are quite important, are quite significant. So we need to bear that in mind when we think about the relationship between structure and agency on these kinds of issues. We have to think about both.

44:16Demetri Kofinas:Are there parallels we can draw between Austro-Hungary's invasion of Serbia following the assassination of the Archduke and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Yes. And similarly speaking, the desire by... I mean, this also I think is an opportunity to reach back into the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of Russia's influence into Europe and its Eastern satellite countries. I mean, so what are those parallels, do you think? Absolutely. So I think with regard to Ukraine, there is not an immediate parallel, I think, I hope, with what took place prior to 1914. It's more of a indication, very clear indication, of the kind of difficulties that Russia will have, even after, which we would hope, there would be some kind of fragile ceasefire with regard to Ukraine on so many of its borders.

45:08I mean, the chances that Russia would go from this one to stumbling into some other kind of conflict, that could then be the kind of conflict that would have even more wide-ranging international repercussions. But the chances of that happening are quite high. So I think one has to be careful with drawing immediate parallels here with regard to the conflicts themselves. I think that's hard to do, or at least it's beyond what I'm capable of doing. But I think seeing the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine as a symptom of where Russia is now in terms of international affairs, and the likelihood that even after that conflict is, if not over, then more limited than what it is now, that Russia could end up in some kind of catastrophic conflict with others, that chance is pretty high.

46:02So I think it goes back actually to how I think we have to think about history. I mean, the point about this book is not to present history as some kind of straitjacket. Because things developed the way they did in the early 20th century, we're more or less bound to repeat some of the same mistakes today. We are not, But we are in very similar territory. And it's understanding that territory, I think, in a way, that under the best kind of circumstances would help set us free from repeating some of those same mistakes.

46:30Demetri Kofinas:So I'm not sure if you're familiar with Carlo Mazala. He was on the show recently. He wrote a book called If Russia Wins, and it explores one of a number of potential scenarios in which Russia, in this case, were to occupy the city of Narva in Estonia. And the driver of this is a desire to test NATO and in testing NATO, essentially neutering the alliance and then giving Russia now free reign into influencing Europe in a way that it hasn't been able to since the end of the Cold War. How familiar are you with some of these scenarios? And is that, in your view, something that could you see the Russians driving this of their own initiative, not taking a backseat to the whims coming from Beijing, but actually seeking the initiative on their own?

47:18Very much so. And I think, I mean, again, the parallel is very striking with what happened in the year 1914, all put together in the relations between Germany and Austria. It wasn't the Germans who were telling the Austrians what to do. Just like the Chinese didn't tell the Russians to go and invade Ukraine. I mean, this is to me, one of the best cases we have for understanding of this being a multipolar world, but a multipolar world with alliances and friendships built into it. And I'm afraid in future situations of future Russian policies, the same will be the case. I think the potential for Russia wanting to test out what the alliance relationships in Europe really are worth, I mean, that temptation is going to be very great if Putin is able to sum up his involvement in Ukraine as a victory.

48:14So I would almost say that it's incredibly unlikely that that wouldn't happen if that is the direction that the war in Ukraine is seen as going in. And again, unfortunately, there is a very clear parallel to the early 20th century. So the Austrian attack on Serbia was in order to discipline Serbia, for sure. But it was also to test out what the relationship between France and Russia would really be like. I mean, everyone understood that attacking, shelling Belgrade, attacking Serbia, issuing demands that made Serbia basically into a country that would forever be under Austrian control, that that would provoke Russia.

48:58Everyone understood that. But the question was, the question Vienna especially was, would France really bother about that? I mean, would it really be interested in that kind of confrontation? And I'm pretty sure that if that had been understood at the time, again, I think the chances for war would have been much less.

49:15Demetri Kofinas:So I'd like to explore at least one more analog to the present time before we move to the second hour, and that is maybe Britain is the good one to explore you because Britain was the maritime empire just as the United States is. And it was in some sense protected by its geographical detachment from Europe. It saw itself as an offshore balancer in some sense. What are some of the other obvious parallels, do you think, between Great Britain in 1914 and the United States today? Well, I think there are many parallels. I mean, the most striking one is, of course, how some leading politicians in Britain prior to 1914 had decided that this globalization that Britain had been key in setting up really wasn't working for them or working for the British people.

50:02There's a difference that these people in Britain, even though they influence policy to a very high extent, they never had one of their own elected prime ministers. So there isn't a sort of immediate parallel with the Trump phenomenon. But many of the attitudes are strikingly similar. At the core of it is the sense that the systemic power, the power that is really, if not in control of the international system, that contributed most to setting it up, is deserting from the system that it itself has built up. And that, I think, was one of the most destabilizing parts of the world prior to 1914, the sense that the center does not hold.

50:45I mean, that there is no power within that international system that would be able to work, if not as a hegemon, then as a balancer of how that system came to unfold. And I think that parallel is actually really striking between Britain and the United States. There are differences as well. I mean, quite a few differences also in terms of alliances. United States today has worldwide friendships and alliances of a kind that Britain just didn't have prior to 1914. in. And there are other differences as well. But that similarity of not being willing to uphold the system anymore, that one I think is quite striking.

51:23Demetri Kofinas:So Professor Westad, I'm going to move us to the second hour where I'd love to explore several additional dimensions of this story that we haven't had a chance to discuss yet. One of them has to do with the role of nuclear weapons. I mean, this is one of the obvious differences between today and the world as it was in 1914. we of course have grown up in a period where multiple generations have become intuitively comfortable with the concept of nuclear deterrence through mutually assured destruction, where nuclear weapons have served as a way of mitigating the outbreak of great power war that may in theory not have broken out in 1914, were the counterparties similarly armed with world ending weaponry.

52:05Demetri Kofinas:This is an argument I've heard many people make, and I'm curious if you would agree with it. I'm also curious if you think that the proliferation of nuclear weapons today, the fact that more countries have them, increases or decreases their deterrent effect, and whether the fact that nuclear weapons haven't been used since World War II increases the likelihood that they'll be used today because the taboo against their use has diminished. And we have some evidence of this in the case of Russia's willingness to escalate in order to deescalate during the Ukraine war and the Kyrgyzstan offensive in the late summer and early fall of 2022.

52:40Demetri Kofinas:I'd also like to explore some specific flashpoints. We mentioned Taiwan, but there are others as well. And perhaps our emphasis on Taiwan has made some of these other flashpoints more likely to serve as catalysts. I know we talked a little bit about this, but I do want to explore the role that fear plays in politics, because I see a striking similarity between the period leading up to 1914 and today, especially in the example of Britain and its American analog where politicians felt boxed in by public opinion and by what was politically feasible or not feasible, and in some ways closed themselves off to compromises that were right there for the taking that could have prevented the war.

53:23Demetri Kofinas:And this for me, I think, is one of the most striking and dangerous parallels today. And so I'd love to talk to you about ways to mitigate it and to mitigate the larger incentives that may push us into such a war? And what are some of the recommendations that you would make? Because you devote quite a bit of time to corrective actions in the book that I'm looking forward to talking about. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Professor Westad, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers.

54:03Demetri Kofinas:All subscribers get access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Professor, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page.

54:38Demetri Kofinas:Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Don't Jingle