The Coming Storm:
Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History
By Odd Arne Westad (Henry Holt and Company)
This book is two things: an analysis of the lead up to World War I, specifically with an interest to how the multi-polar “Great Powers” political situation caused it to come about, and a look at our contemporary world and how it seems that the world is moving once again into a multi-polar circumstance of major empires and no Pax Anybody.
There is a grand analogy at work between now and then, where the U.S. is the U.K., China is Germany, Russia is Austria, India is France, and Brazil is the U.S.. And the emphasis of the history is how something like World War I was as unthinkable to the players then as it would be for major armed conflict between these nations now.
The contemporary section is stronger than the historical one. The author focuses on Asia as the central point of war risk. The prospective pain points and how they might be solved is bracing and open about the limits of our knowledge. The historical one is weak owing to the space allotted. The lead up to World War I is something that multi-volume books are written on without including digressions into modernity.
The key takeaway from the historical section is the aforementioned unthinkablity. Metaphors do not suffice to explain getting into the Great War. Nothing is obvious, except everything that is, and nothing is bound to happen, except those things that are totally predictable. It is humbling if nothing else.
The problem is that there is no hypothesis here. “Look at these two similar things” only gets you so far. Assuming the read is correct that there are a whole bunch of similarities1, the book does not give a reason to expect similar results other than the similarity.
The project is weirdly limited. It would feel like the sort of monopolar ‘End of History’ world was more the exception than the rule, but here Great Powers acts as a sort of term of art to describe a specific sort of imperal-ish nation-state. Yes, okay, maybe, but we have a lot of examples through history of a lot of other multi-polar scenarios. I feel like any statement about the one we are in now requires more of a general study.
But I feel that the purpose here is more to serve as a sort of alarm to whomever still thinks impossible war-war between two or more contemporary powers, potentially in a way that produces spillage to other power. Snarkily, though, I think that this is a pundit-brain sort of take. Maybe the great unwashed are too ready to predict something big, but that sort of contrarian small c-conservative thinking also only goes so far.
My thanks to the author, Odd Arne Westad, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Henry Holt & Company, for making the ARC available to me.
- In my motto of history does not repeat, I am a bit suspect of this as a narrative. It is an easier sell to me that the problems that exist always existed, and that the different polarities are more about a choice of frame rather than anything politically coherent. But this really runs to the problem of it being too big a topic for the room provided. ↩︎
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