The Coming Storm: Odd Arne Westad Asks If We're On the Brink of World War Three

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0:33 Andrew Keen: Hello everybody, it’s Tuesday, the 3rd of March 2026. Yesterday featured a very interesting conversation with a very distinguished historian, Christopher Clark from Cambridge University, best known of course for The Sleepwalkers, his history of how Europe sleep-walked into World War I. It was of course the ultimate nightmare and we’re pursuing that theme today with another very distinguished historian, this one from Yale University, Arne Westad.

1:13 Andrew: He has a new book out which is a warning about perhaps in the 2020s we may be repeating that same sleepwalk into a catastrophic global war. He has a new book out, it’s called The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History. Arne is joining us from New Haven in Connecticut where as I said he teaches at Yale. Arne, congratulations on this new book.

1:39 Arne Westad: Thank you, Andrew, it’s really good to be with you today.

1:41 Andrew: You begin the book, Arne, with a trip to the killing fields of France and Belgium as a kind of, I guess, a historical tourist, reminding everyone of how terrible that war was, that First World War. Remind us of how awful the front was and why you begin your new book with the reminder of the bloody carnage of the First World War.

2:07 Arne: So this links almost directly to the last guest that you had, I wasn’t aware that Chris Clark had just been on, and Chris’s work on the First World War, particularly the origins of the First World War, played into my thinking about this when I started conceptualizing this book.

2:26 Arne: But you’re right, the book actually started with a walk I did among the cemeteries and the memorials of some of the worst battlefields during the First World War. And then from that, I tried to draw some inferences that I hope will help us to avoid repeating those same mistakes.

2:46 Arne: Let me just give you an impression of how dreadful and how monumental but also how unforeseen this was. So during the first two weeks of that terrible Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916—first two weeks—as many soldiers were killed just in that one battle as died in wars for the previous 100 years, between the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War.

3:14 Arne: So that’s one of the most important aspects of this book, is that all wars are terrible, but Great Power wars are terrible at a different scale, in a different order than what other wars are. And the book is written as a warning, coming out of my understanding of that war and how it came to be, with some of the striking similarities that I see to our own time.

3:38 Andrew: Very chilling. You’re a historian both of the Cold War—your book The Cold War: A World History was extremely well reviewed—you’re also an expert on China. And of course, if there is another world war, it seems, Arne, and perhaps correct me if I’m wrong, it’s going to originate in this new Chinese-American rivalry. Is that fair?

4:04 Arne: It could. I mean, I see the world now—and that’s another similarity to the world in the early 20th century—as basically multipolar. I mean, it’s not bipolar, it’s not divided up between two superpowers as, you know, the world that we lived much of our lives in.

4:22 Arne: It’s very much similar to what you find late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. But within that system that we have today, I think for some time the United States and China are going to be the most significant poles, the strongest among many Great Powers that will vie for power and influence on a global scale.

4:42 Arne: And unfortunately, because of the way points of conflict have been stacking up with regard to East Asia, a war that would involve those two Great Powers, China and the United States, is probably among the more likely scenarios for Great Power war in our time.

5:00 Andrew: So remind us of what the world was like in 1914 on the brink of this terrible war, Arne, in terms of the existing powers, the coming powers, the marginal powers, the wannabe powers. Who were the key players in your view in the Europe that, as Christopher Clark said, sleep-walked into the First World War? No one quite understood what they were getting involved with; many people thought the war would be over by Christmas. Half the diplomats it seems who declared war didn’t even want to go to war.

5:36 Arne: More than half, I would say, and I think Chris would agree with me. It was a world, Andrew, in many ways strikingly similar to our own. It came out of a 19th century that had been, in terms of Great Power conflict, border peaceful, certainly compared to earlier centuries.

5:54 Arne: It came out of a period of intensifying economic globalization with international levels of trade and investment and finance that were—we were almost at the same level when things started to take a different turn in this country in the mid-2010s as we were in 1913.

6:14 Arne: Think about that. I mean, the economic integration among the leading powers was greater than what it is now. But it led to very similar results. So particularly within the leading countries and perhaps most importantly within Great Britain, the most important of those dominant empires, there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with how that international system in economic terms had actually worked for them.

6:40 Arne: So they had been the ones running around the world in the 19th century propagating for free trade because obviously at the beginning of that time period that served Britain’s own interests to a T. But towards the end of the 19th century, it became clear that for many people in Britain—a little bit like for many people in the United States now—that system didn’t seem to deliver what they were looking for.

7:05 Arne: So, you know, jobs going overseas, technologies being shared with others that use them more efficiently than what the British themselves did. A lot of these similarities that are very striking of a system coming under stress. And a dominant Great Power, as Britain had been during most of the 19th century, starting to withdraw from the international system it itself had created, right? And here you see some of the similarities in terms of what has been happening in our world today.

7:36 Andrew: What about the cultural and technological stuff, Arne? One of my favorite history books is by the Viennese historian Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914, in which he focuses on the disruptive nature of new technology. And in many ways, when you read The Vertigo Years, or at least Blom's version of the vertigo years in the run-up to the First World War, you’re reminded of our age of massive technological disruption—obviously the internet, AI, biotech, and so many other new technologies.

8:13 Arne: It’s a brilliant book, it’s a fantastic book, and it’s a book that argues exactly along the lines of what I put forward in The Coming Storm. It shows how disconcerting, disorienting, the broad and very, very rapid transformations in technological terms and, you know, in social and cultural terms that followed from it were for many people right at the beginning of the 20th century in ways that are strikingly similar to the world today.

8:44 Arne: Technologies that of course had enormous promise for improving the lot of humankind, but could also be turned to very destructive purposes. But maybe first and foremost—and I think this is an important point for what we’re discussing today—these technologies sped up time.

9:01 Arne: They made connections between people closer—think telegraph, telephone, these kinds of things—but it also reduced the time available for making decisions in peacetime as in wartime. And that’s one of the things we see in that terrible July of 1914, that the Great Powers ran out of time to resolve the situation that had come up after a black swan event that no one foresaw.

9:27 Arne: So that uncertainty and the fear that came out of it—the fear and resentment that it created among leading powers in the world—is a very important part of that book. Blom is very good on issues that I deal with in the book in terms of terrorism and in terms of debates about immigration.

9:46 Arne: Those are striking similarities to what we’ve seen over the last few years, especially in the West. And they had not been much present during the 19th century but came at the core of what happened in the early 20th century. More heads of state were assassinated through terrorist action between 1900 and 1914 than at any other time in human history. And it was of course one of those terrorist actions that were the immediate backdrop to the crisis in July 1914.

10:17 Andrew: Yeah, and of course the assassination in Sarajevo. I wonder, Arne, in political and philosophical terms at least, that terrorism, that violence reflected a shift in, certainly on the left and maybe even the right in Europe, towards a kind of nihilism. We see in some ways a similar kind of thing going on in the United States—people assassinating health executives and all sorts of other people because they believe they’re immoral. Are some of the political currents, particularly amongst radicals, are they similar in the run-up to the First World War as they are today? This shift towards both the extreme left and right and this cult of violence of one kind or another and as well a kind of fetishization of violence both in terms of doing it and reacting against it.

11:13 Arne: I think that’s right. I mean, there are no exact parallels; there aren’t in any of this. But in terms of that emphasis both in terms of relations among states and domestically in the leading powers, that violence might present some kind of solution to one’s troubles, there are some real parallels between now and back then.

11:35 Arne: And I think it comes out of what we’ve just been talking about: a world that is becoming much more complex, much more complicated compared to the relatively easy truths that seemed to be there at least for a significant part of the 19th century. Stability was not all good. I mean, I wouldn’t argue that, you know, if you compare say the Cold War, our more recent past, it was necessarily better, but it was more stable, right?

12:02 Arne: And it didn’t lead people to be pushed to extremes both in terms of their overall world view, but also how they look at other people within their own societies as we are seeing today. Or at least we’re seeing it today on a much, much greater scale, which I think is only possible to compare with the world in the beginning of the 20th century.

12:25 Andrew: What about the element of an Edwardian gilded elite who seemed to be out of touch not just with everyone else but with history, and the equivalents, certainly in the United States today, a new gilded elite—you teach some of their kids I’m sure at Yale. Are there similarities on that front too, this increasing inequality and this remarkably privileged, powerful, wealthy class?

12:54 Arne: The rise in inequality, I think, in some countries had a great deal to do with this because it unsettled things. It made people at the middle and lower part of the income ranking much more uncertain about what the future would bring for them.

13:10 Arne: So the 19th century, not everywhere, not for everyone, but overall, had been a century in which a lot of people believed in progress: progress for their countries, progress for themselves as individuals, for their families. By the early 20th century, a lot of that had been brought into question and inequality on a global scale had a lot to do with this.

13:33 Arne: And particularly inequality and rising inequality and rising tension within the imperial centers such as in Great Britain itself or in France or in Russia. So I think, you know, the lack of stability that we found in that immediate pre-war era, it didn’t by itself create a cataclysmic war, but it made it so much harder to pull back when a world-class crisis came along that leaders of these nations had to resolve.

14:04 Andrew: Yeah, and of course what you call a world-class crisis wasn’t even at the time, by so many of the statesmen as you talked earlier, they didn’t even understand it was a world-class crisis, and some of them didn’t even seem to think of it as a crisis. Arne, you’re too good a historian to know that history doesn’t exactly repeat itself; maybe in some ways as Mark Twain supposedly said, it rhymes. But what’s the fundamental difference then between the run-up to the First World War in Europe and the world of the 2020s? What distinguishes the two periods?

14:46 Arne: So I think there are differences. I mean, the biggest difference of all is the one we spend the least time thinking about: we know how it all ended in 1914. We know the suffering that that implied and the suffering that then would go on for at least two generations after that, which is rooted in the First World War—communism, fascism, a global depression, a second global war very much connected to the first one, and then the Cold War division of the world.

15:15 Arne: You know, that long arc of suffering, we know why that happened roughly speaking. We know that the First World War laid the foundation for much of that and therefore we can hopefully concentrate our minds on avoiding some of those things that led to war.

15:32 Arne: Another issue which we do not put enough emphasis on, I think, is that today we have international organizations which didn’t exist—at least not in the same form—back then, first and foremost the United Nations, which was set up with the explicit purpose in the preamble to its charter of avoiding yet again inflicting on humankind the kind of disasters that the first part of the 20th century had brought. It’s up to us whether we are willing to make use of those.

16:03 Arne: The third one that’s often mentioned, which I’m much less certain about, is the existence of weapons of mass destruction. And the reason why I’m less certain about that is that I see a lot of signs—really worrisome signs—in our own time that that kind of deterrent factor against war, the kind of mutually assured destruction idea that you found during the Cold War, particularly with regard to nuclear weapons—I’m not so sure if that fully holds today.

16:32 Arne: I think we are more in a kind of situation like we were before the First World War where people were writing long books about why these new technological advances that we were talking about, but particularly in terms of military affairs—so poison gas, aerial bombardments, battleships—that that made war unthinkable because the consequences would be enormous. And I think we are taking refuge to some extent in the relatively long time period of peace that we’ve gone through now to say that because of the weapons of mass destruction that exist today, that makes Great Power war almost unthinkable. And I don’t think it is unthinkable.

17:15 Andrew: Yeah, and it’s interesting that’s another similarity, we’ve had this long period of peace as Europe had had in the period before 1914. Arne, you talk about “we know,” I assume you’re talking, you’re using the word “we” from the West. But you’re a China scholar, your last book—or the last book before this one—The Great Transformation, is about China. You’ve spoken in China, you were just in the Yale Center in Beijing talking about the lessons from history. Are the Chinese—and I know that’s a rather vulgar term because it’s speaking to billions of people—but in your interactions with Chinese scholars, historians, thinkers, technologists, business people, government officials, are they thinking about this kind of scenario? Are they familiar—are they as familiar perhaps as British or German or even American scholars with the catastrophe of the First World War?

18:22 Arne: I would say that they are overall. I mean, the question for them as it is for us is whether they would want to apply it. And of course, in China being a political dictatorship, there are lots of reasons why people are careful, particularly in terms of drawing out some of the comparisons that we’ve talked about.

18:41 Arne: That said, I presented this book in China not very long ago, I’m actually going back there next week to continue those discussions. And there is absolutely no doubt that a lot of decision makers and a lot of scholars in China take these warnings from history very, very seriously. They do understand how the kind of position that they are in now is in many ways similar to what happened to the new powers at the end of the 19th century.

19:10 Arne: First and foremost Germany, whose situation they are much more similar to, but also to some extent the United States, which was, we mustn’t forget, the fastest-growing new Great Power in the late 19th century and which created its own forms of dissonance within an established international system. So the Chinese are aware of this.

19:30 Arne: The problem they have, I think, is in many ways strikingly similar to what were the challenges for Germany and the United States back then, which is what to do with this tremendous amount of new power that they now—that they now possess.

19:44 Arne: And likewise on the Western side, and especially on the US side, it’s much of the same problem. I mean, my friend and colleague Paul Kennedy, who’s a professor at Yale, when he writes about the rise of British-German antagonism in the late 19th century, he says that what the Brits were basically telling the Germans that, “You know, if you could just stop growing, little Hans, if you could stay the same way that you were before, all would be fine and dandy,” right?

20:11 Arne: But that’s exactly what Germany couldn’t do and what China cannot do today. So that’s why in the book, in speaking to officials and others in China, I make this point that, you know, it really takes two to tango on these kinds of issues. And the form of compromise that I’m calling for in this book, and I’ve been calling for for a long time, is something that has to be created; it will not come by itself. If we let things continue in the direction that they are taking now, both in China and elsewhere, I think it is more likely than not—and I really hate saying this—that we will end up in some kind of Great Power war within the foreseeable future.

20:53 Andrew: Chris Clark, I heard him on another show a few months ago comparing Trump with Bismarck in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way but also suggesting that they did have similarities. I know he’s also compared Trump with Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the German statesman who is most associated with the war, of course, not perhaps the most impressive figure in anyone’s history. One of the things that confused me, Arne, in terms of your argument that maybe China is the new Germany, is that one could say many things about Xi, but he’s certainly not Bethmann Hollweg, is he? I mean, Chinese leadership is much more authoritative, less stumbling than the kind of statesmen who dragged Germany into the First World War. Or am I thinking about it wrong?

21:50 Arne: Oh god, I hope he’s not another Bethmann Hollweg because that would be an absolute disaster.

21:54 Andrew: Well, he isn’t, I mean, Arne, whatever one might think of him, he’s a tough guy, he’s not from some sort of decrepit old German aristocracy.

22:04 Arne: No, but he is from a Communist Party, also in terms of his own origins, that have a very clear but somewhat peculiar view on how power is to be exercised. And that presents limitations to him, but they’re not the same limitations as Bethmann Hollweg or any of that class would have.

22:25 Arne: But I have played around a little bit—and my Chinese friends really do not like it when I say this—with comparing the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, in its current incarnation, to the German Junker class before—before the First World War. Increasingly militaristic in terms of how issues can be resolved; increasingly authoritarian in terms of their outlook domestically and worried about any kind of political change or political challenge to themselves.

22:58 Arne: And maybe more strikingly of all, with a direct non-democratic control over the military. I mean, the military in imperial Germany was commanded by the Kaiser, not through the Reichstag, not through the German parliament, not even through the government, which is exactly similar to the kind of situation that you have in China today. I mean, Xi Jinping commands the People’s Liberation Army because he’s the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, not because he’s China’s president.

23:31 Arne: So there are some similarities. I mean, they are not overlapping similarities in the sense that you can go directly from one to the other, but it’s a helpful way of thinking because it—it makes us focus on some of those things on the Chinese side that are most worried about. I mean, I’m enormously worried about many things on the American side as well, but the Chinese side is significant, I think.

23:55 Andrew: And probably the Bethmann Hollweg-Xi comparison is the wrong one, it’d probably be more appropriate to compare Xi with the Kaiser, who was also a rather weak-willed spoiled character. And we did a show last year, Arne, with a historian of Xi and his father, and whatever one says about Xi, his life was really tough, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s the opposite of the Kaiser, of Wilhelm II.

24:26 Arne: I think in terms of what drives leaders to act in particular ways, it’s their own understanding, their own view of their upbringing and their origin that really matters. And it’s clear that Xi had a much tougher upbringing in terms of what happened to his father than what was the case for Wilhelm II. But it would also be wrong to argue that Wilhelm II had a happy childhood and a happy upbringing. He didn’t.

24:55 Arne: And he also felt that he was caught in between these many different worlds, which is not entirely different, I think, in terms of background from Xi Jinping. I think you have to be very careful, though, with comparing political leaders because on these kinds of issues that we are talking about now, it is very much the more sort of specific background, the specific lessons that these people have drawn in terms of their rise to power that really matters. And in spite of the structural similarities, I do see many, many differences in terms of the cast of characters. Whether that is going to help us in a broader sense if a real crisis comes along, that remains to be seen, but it is, as you say, important to note the differences.

25:44 Andrew: Arne, we did a show a few years ago comparing—and lots of people have written articles and books on this—comparing the American and Russian systems both Soviet and pre-revolutionary. I wonder—and I’m sure everyone’s thinking well, who if—if—if the coming storm is a repeat in some ways of the First World War, who’s Trump in the game? I know you just told me we can’t play that game, but it’s my show, so we’ll continue playing it and you’ll tell me off. Is Trump Nicholas II, a complete clown, the Russian emperor defending an old regime that was in complete denial about its structural problems, unwilling to reform? Or is that the wrong way of thinking of it? Is there a Trump in—in the build-up to the First World War or maybe one would find it in Germany even if Germany is more like China?

26:45 Arne: I think the closest parallel—and again, it’s not an exact parallel—that I can think of is Joseph Chamberlain. So the British unionist, conservative politician who became the driving force for breaking away from the free trade system setting up tariffs and trade wars. Chamberlain never made it to prime minister, so that’s the big difference, but he came pretty close and he came to influence his party in a direction that no one would have foreseen, very much like what Trump has done with the Republican Party.

27:21 Arne: So I think if you’re looking for a—a parallel also in terms of how the political discourse went, then I think Joseph Chamberlain is a pretty, pretty good comparison. It was quite an impressive feat to be able to turn significant parts of the British Conservative Party, the unionists aligned with them, against the forms of free trade that they had been significant spokespeople for for so long.

27:48 Andrew: What about the systems, the political, the socio-economic systems that were that were part of this catastrophe? Are there equivalent between the US system today and the Russian system before the First World War in terms of their decrepitude, their dysfunctionality, or is that again the wrong way of thinking of it?

28:13 Arne: I see more parallels, though again not exact, with Great Britain, which had had a very—or relatively at least—stable political system for a very long time, which seems to get into all kinds of trouble in terms of political instability, in part because of this genuine sort of Edwardian political realignment that took place before the First World War, but also the threats from within again against the system. So increasing labor unrest, what threatened to be a civil war in Ireland.

28:46 Arne: I mean, a lot of people thought that that was going to completely upend the whole British political system and if the First World War had not come along, they might not have been entirely wrong about that. So the kind of stress that you find within the system, a system that a lot of people thought was maybe not fully stable but at least very, very predictable in some broad political and constitutional terms for a very long time.

29:13 Arne: By the time the crisis of 1914 comes along, these people were under tremendous pressure because nothing seemed to be certain anymore in British politics, very similar to the kind of situation that you have in this country now. So that’s probably the closest—the closest that we get.

29:32 Arne: The trouble though, in the early 1910s or before the First World War, was that Britain was not the only country that went through these kind of domestic upheavals. Almost everyone had the same kind of development. In many ways, Germany was the most stable of the lot, which is saying something, you know, in terms of how these political systems operated. Russia was full of political crisis as you already alluded to, France was going through one of its regular upheavals. You know, it was a very, very unstable world. And that probably wouldn’t have led to war if it weren’t then for events coming along that just made those structural challenges impossible to handle.

30:17 Andrew: Some things never change, geography of course. When it comes to the Russians, they’re always defined by their geography. But maybe nothing much has changed—Putin famously is nostalgic not just for the Soviet Union but for the Russian Empire. In terms of the players in this potential new catastrophe, Arne, could Putin be the equivalent of Nicholas II then, a nostalgist, someone again without any grasp of reality or association with his own people?

30:57 Arne: I think the closer parallel, because we have to think about this in a sort of broader comparative setting, the closer I get to looking at this, also in terms of the overall patterns, the forms of thinking, the more similar I find the Putin regime to be to Austria-Hungary before the First World War. An empire in long-term, ongoing decline, which happened to have some kind of alliance to the most rapidly rising Great Power next to them, meaning Germany.

31:32 Arne: There’s a lot in that that reminds me of the China-Russia relationship today. I mean, the parallel with Russia is that—is not only about the story of decline, which is clear and absolute both in Austria’s case and in Russia’s case today. It’s also that they have quarrels with almost everyone on their borders, which is one of the things that historians of the First World War have been really preoccupied with.

31:59 Arne: If it hadn’t been Bosnia, it probably would have been somewhere else, because Austria had so many of these, just like the Russians, you know, have today, at least under Putin’s regime. There is danger in that. It’s very important to remind people that Germany, the rising power, wasn’t really the one who got the First World War started, at least not at the outset. It was the Austrians who acted because they thought they could act because at the end of the day the Germans would be there to back them up. And the Germans did very little to prevent that kind of perception from spreading in Vienna, with disastrous results in the summer of 1914. That, I think, is the—is the closer parallel. Not an exact parallel, but the closer parallel to Russia’s situation today.

32:44 Andrew: You mentioned that the Sarajevo assassination would have been hard to imagine before it happened, I’m sure there won’t be many Russian statesmen going around in cars in Sarajevo these days, so it’s going to be something we don’t expect. Everyone’s preoccupied, of course, with Taiwan. You wrote an interesting piece recently in the Financial Times about Greenland and America and the end of Atlanticism. Where should we be looking, Arne, if if there is the coming storm, if there is a crisis from a place that we don’t expect? What are the counter-intuitive tips? The other comparison I guess that could be made between the two periods is the growing—I mean obviously in the before the First World War, there was a scramble for Africa for colonial imperial reasons; these days there’s a scramble for Africa for rare minerals. So the First World War almost broke out over gunboat diplomacy in North Africa. There’s of course US gunboat diplomacy now in Venezuela and Cuba. Should we be looking where we don’t expect?

33:57 Arne: There are so many of these cases and that’s the—that’s the challenge in a way, again very similar to the early 20th century, is that it’s very hard to figure out what could actually come at us. I mean, one we have already touched upon, which would be some kind of terrorist action in some kind of setting. But in broader sort of territorial terms, besides the obvious ones—and I agree with you that Taiwan is the one that has been centered on most for some good reasons—there are quite a few.

34:28 Arne: I’m worried about what’s happening in the Middle East at the moment. I—I disagree with the many—you mean Iran or Gaza or Israel? With Iran and Gaza rolled into one in a way. I mean, this is the problem, that a lot of people are saying, well, the Middle East is the Middle East and what happens in the Middle East stays in the Middle East. That might be true when we had the bipolar international system or a unipolar international system. In this kind of multipolarity, I’m not so sure that’s true anymore. I think it’s quite possible that these kinds of conflicts could get out of hand under the wrong kind of circumstances and spark some kind of much broader conflagration.

35:12 Arne: I think, you know, with regard to other issues in Asia, for instance, the relationship between China and India is very dangerous. Dangerous to a degree that I think most people do not—do not recognize. And then of course, there are other things that we do think about, but we might not think about in the right kind of way, such as the relationship between China and Japan or the situation in North Korea. I mean, what happens under these kind of circumstances that we’re having at the moment if the North Korean regime starts to unravel? And when it starts to unravel, it’s going to go pretty quick.

35:48 Arne: So these are the kind of things that worry me. I mean, as I say in the book, none of these are issues that—that we are powerless against in terms of doing something about, but if we are going to do something about them, we better start now and not wait till a full-fledged crisis comes along under the worst possible circumstances.

36:11 Andrew: So where do we start, Arne? You mentioned the United Nations earlier, certainly the current American regime is not only hostile to the UN, as even established its own rival Trumpian organization. All sorts of growing controversies about warfare a few days ago, Anthropic stood up to the Defense Department. We have new technology, AI in particular of course, that if there is a war, it’s certainly not going to be like the Somme. But where do we begin to ensure that we don’t have this catastrophe 2.0?

36:49 Arne: So I think the most important place to begin is in terms of Great Power compromise around issues that are of real significance. And of course we have to go with what we know, and we know, for instance, that the Taiwan conflict is one that could easily turn into an absolute disaster.

37:06 Arne: So we have to start working on that by imagining—reimagining circumstances under which these tensions cannot be done away with—they’re going to be there for a very, very long time—but where they can be managed. And at the moment, we seem to be moving exactly in the opposite direction, that it’s like, you know, people pulling on a—on a—on strings with a knot in the middle and just making that knot harder and harder and more and more difficult to resolve.

37:34 Arne: It’s not impossible to imagine a US and a Chinese administration who would be able to think rationally about Taiwan. And in my view, that rationality would—would be something along the following line: that the United States would declare that it would under no circumstances support Taiwan independence, and China declaring that it would not use force against the island except in a case where it declares its independence. A lot of sensible people on both sides or all three sides have been talking about this for some time, but it’s pretty clear to me that it’s that kind of thinking—which of course we have been capable of doing in the past, right?

38:13 Arne: Think about—think about the 1970s and—and Richard Nixon and—and Mao Zedong or for that matter, you know, people like Kosygin and Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. So it’s not as if that possibility for compromise in spite of keeping your basic fundamental beliefs intact is impossible, but it’s just that we have to think about how to do it. And that’s my fear at the moment, is that we are moving further and further away from that kind of—compromise.

38:43 Arne: The UN could play a really important role with regard to this. The UN was built for the kind of multipolar circumstances that we’re having today. It wasn’t really well suited to a Cold War kind of world or American, you know, unilateral positioning as we saw after the end of the Cold War. But it’s pretty well suited for what we have today. And I think it’s a huge mistake, not just by the Trump administration, but by—you know, by other leading Great Powers to move away from that scenario when we need it most.

39:18 Andrew: What about the role of progressive politicians, particularly with an internationalist bent? Of course, Germany, the socialists were excluded from power, didn’t play much of a role in the outbreak of the First World War and then were dragged into it and most of them actually, perhaps regretfully in the end, supported the war. What does the left—how can the left play a role in this, Arne, a left which is in some ways in crisis, that doesn’t seem to be able to reinvent itself in the 21st century?

39:56 Arne: So I think the role of political opposition in general is to try to present an alternative that would put their countries in better order. I mean, I’m not among those who believe that in case of a conflict that oppositional forces at the national level would have that much of an impact. Before the First World War, one of the most fundamental mistakes that you already alluded to was that there wouldn’t be a war because, you know, the working class and the left and their organizations would oppose it. There would be a general strike and therefore they couldn’t be, you know, marching of people to the frontlines. And that turned out to be an entirely—mistaken illusion, right?

40:37 Arne: I’m worried about this because I think in a way that it contributed to the kind of situation that we got in 1914, this idea that it could easily be stopped. It can’t easily be stopped. But what can be done to help is if you have less tension in terms of domestic politics, if you have actual suggestions for people who suffer from the kind of economic development that we’ve seen over the past generation and would put them in a better position so that they wouldn’t support, you know, nationalist populist alternatives that could so much more easily move in a direction of international conflict. That, I think, is the role of the left under the current circumstance and they are not doing particularly well on that.

41:22 Andrew: Wise words from a wise man, the author of The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History. It’s going to keep us up at night, Arne, but it’s out today and it’s an important read in an age where the world does seem to be on the brink of some sort of catastrophe or other. Thank you so much and congratulations on the new book.

41:45 Arne: It was a great pleasure to join you. Thank you so much, Andrew.

41:48 Andrew: [Outro Music] Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening to or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I’d be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.