S00: Great powers this, great powers that. The category great power gets thrown around a good deal in the conversation about global strategy these days, but we rarely stop to think about just what is a great power. Are there standard characteristics that define them, certain ways they behave or strategize in their own right? Today, the great Brendan Sims and I discuss these questions of definition and more. How did the process of historical formation that produced today’s great power system, such as it is, actually work? What historical analogies work best in understanding great power competition today? And Brendan and I have an interesting debate here about the relevance, or lack thereof, of World War II analogies. It’s a really interesting conversation. Let’s get into it.
S03: It is a 54 war, this Milwaukee invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 19, date which we will live. (..) The experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.
S00: We continue to pass the range of grand. Our people are not seeing buildings. (…)
S02: Fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.
S00: Hi, I’m Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Brendan Sims. He is the founder and director of the Center for Geopolitics at Cambridge University. He also teaches there at Peterhouse College. He’s the author of many fantastic books. You’ve been on the show in the past, I believe, to talk about your book about the Battle of Midway. I’ve profited from a book you co-authored on Hitler’s decision-making following Pearl Harbor. You’re the author of a magnificent biography of Hitler. And then most recently, and the subject of our conversation today, The Return of the Great Powers. Brendan Sims, thanks for coming on School of War. Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed your book and profited from it on a number of levels, to include the most basic one, which is how much time you spend helping us understand just what is a great power. It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, really, in recent years. And everyone sort of has a general idea of what they mean by it. But if you twist people’s arms, well, one is tempted to make the old reference to the U.S. Supreme Court and the definition of pornography. (.) It’s very difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. Brendan, what is a great power? How does one define the thing?
S01: Well, it is, as you imply, quite difficult to be specific. And I say in the book that it’s easier to talk about them than to define them. My colleague, William Mulligan, talks about the duck test. You know, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck, which is in some ways quite close to that definition from the Supreme Court. (.) The way I define them is both in behavioral terms. So these are the powers which are shaping our world in a very fundamental way. They do that through their political action, diplomatic action, say, through the United Nations Security Council, military action. And they do that, more importantly, on the basis of four capabilities, which I define as resources, reach, reputation, and resilience. So the great powers will have those attributes in differing dimensions. But they will all have those attributes to some extent, and they will have them more than the other contenders in the field.
S00: And let me ask you this. There have been all these historical definitions that either address the question of great powers directly or seem to point to it. You work through them early in the book, and I found this passage to be very helpful. So you start with Von Ranke, you talk about Mahan, you talk about Mackinder. Which of these, and then there are more contemporary ones like Joseph Nye’s conception of soft power, Paul Kennedy’s focus on economics. Maybe walk us through a few of these that you’ve found most valuable to yourself in thinking all this through.
S01: Well, I think all of these approaches have something to be said for them. So you’ve got somebody like Alfred Thea Mahan, who will be well known to many American audiences as the great theorist of naval power in the late 19th century, who emphasizes the importance of maritime strength. So that the future, the past, and also the future, in his view, lay with the maritime powers. Then you’ve got the great British geographer, Horford Mackinder, who coined this idea of the heartland, and he was saying, no, no, Mahan is essentially wrong. It’s really all about land power, because, of course, the railway has now, to a certain extent, nullified the power of steam. And so a land power that integrates the Eurasian space is going to dominate the world. This was actually a view which a lot of people held, including in the United States, in the 20th century. Then you have somebody like Paul Kennedy, who wrote the really strependously good book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. It’s one of those books that I wish I myself had written. And he emphasizes the importance of economics. And he says, basically, you know, great power depends on having an economic base, and that great powers will pivot or leverage their economic strength. But then they might overreach. You have what he calls imperial overstretch, and then they decline. And that’s a viewpoint that has a lot going for it. But as I argue in my book, economics isn’t everything. And there are many powers that are economically strong, but are not great powers. And there are great powers, for example, Russia, which are not economically as strong, but have other attributes. But, and one could lengthen that list, but really the historian that I was most influenced by is actually the one that you mentioned right at the beginning, which is the great, who is the great granddaddy of, in fact, the whole historical profession. The German historian, Leopold von Ranke, who, in 1833, penned a very famous essay called The Great Powers. And in it, he argues that really the great powers have shaped Europe. The great powers, of course, are military powers, but they’re also cultural and political powers. So, he says, not only does a great power have to be able to seal off all the other great powers militarily, which, by the way, I think is a rather expansive definition of great powerness. He was thinking, really, of 18th century Prussia. But he also argues that a great power needs to stand for something in the world, which is why I emphasize the importance of reputation. (.) People have got to look at this great power and think, well, you know, what sort of principle do you represent? So, for instance, you know, Prussia might represent the Protestant principle. (..) In Germany, Britain represents, you know, constitutionalism. (.) Russia represents orthodoxy and so on. So, I’ve actually found, in that sense, Ranke to be the most useful of all the possible examples I’ve looked at.
S00: Let me ask a question that’s based in an analogy to regional powers, because this question of how hard it is to define a great power, all these different routes to it, puts me in mind of Iran right now, which is a front of mind for me these days for obvious reasons. No one would claim Iran is a great power, but, of course, it’s been a regional power for a long time. But sitting here in the summer of 2026, you’re faced with this unusual set of circumstances where, by every objective measure, it really ought not be a regional power anymore. Its economy is completely hammered. Its military, despite the president’s, you know, proclivity for overstating things and making absolute claims, It is nevertheless the case that the Iranian military has been just badly battered and damaged between this year’s conflict and the previous year’s conflict with Israel. (.) In terms of the global or the regional appeal of its ideas, I suppose there’s a case to be made for it there with the Houthis and Shia and Iraq and things like that. But really, it’s this accident of geography, that it’s a stride one part of the Strait of Hormuz, and a kind of fanaticism and aggressiveness. It’s willingness to aggressively use the leverage it has that forces itself into the considerations of everyone else, where, again, like a sort of rational assessment of the balance of power might lead you to conclude that they’re out for the count. It just strikes me as, it’s a regional power, of course, but it strikes me as an illustration of the fact that it is just hard to assess these things. And I don’t know if you think your sort of spirit or fanaticism on some level plays a role.
S01: Well, certainly, will plays a large role, and one of the points I make in the book is that sometimes small or middling powers can frustrate the great powers. That happens all the time. The book went to press before the current Iran war, but I instance, for instance, the resistance of Ukraine to Russia. And, of course, you’ve got the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan. So it is frequently the case that the great powers don’t have it all their own way. (..) And we’re seeing that at the moment in the Gulf. That doesn’t, as you quite rightly say, make Iran a great power. It lacks really any of the, well, perhaps, it lacks, I would say, at least two of the vital ingredients. It doesn’t have the resources to be a great power on par with the other great powers. And it doesn’t have the geopolitical reach. It’s got reach within the region. It can reach out to other parts of the world. For instance, Iranians attacked the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, for instance, and there are other examples. But it doesn’t have the kind of heavy lift military capacity that certainly the United States, the PRC, even the British, and, in fact, the French also have. And the Russians certainly had until recently. But I think the crucial point for our purposes is not to deduce from the current frustration of the United States in the Gulf, which is real, and the current frustration of Russia in Ukraine, which is very real, and the U.S. and Western defeat in Afghanistan. Not to deduce from that, that they’re not great powers. They are great powers. But they are sometimes frustrated. (.) That’s really the way this should be looked at.
S00: I want to get to your discussion of the great powers today, who belongs in the club, who’s aspiring, and all that, which you spend a fair amount of time in the book discussing. But before we do, can we speak for a few minutes about how the system evolved? Much as in your quest for a definition you began with Von Ranke, I enjoyed how in your desire to understand the system, you went back to ancient Rome. (..) If you wouldn’t mind, tell us a short version of the story from the start.
S01: Well, the powers and differences between powers, of course, is really as old as recorded history, and I refer to that. The main story, the so-called emergence of the great powers, as I entitle it in my opening chapters, that really begins in the early modern period in Europe, when you’ve got the Habsburgs, the Spanish, the Austrian Habsburgs, you’ve got England, you’ve got France. You then have, in the course of the 18th century, joining them, Prussia and Russia. And then you’ve got, from the end of the 18th century, the global enlargement of the great powers, with the creation of the United States. And then, of course, Japan joins in the 20th century. You’ve got the People’s Republic of China. So you have what is originally a European system, then is enlarged globally. And that system is built around a system of a balance of power, which is then periodically challenged by hegemons. So ones that people will be familiar with are, of course, Napoleon, then Hitler. You’ve got the contest between communism and the West, and so on. And then I argue that, really, after the end of the Cold War, you have something like the eclipse of the great powers, where one school of thought says, well, we don’t really have great powers because the Soviet Union has collapsed. The PRC is now sort of moving towards a more integrated relationship with the West. (.) And in any case, the overarching power towering over everybody is the United States. So we have a unipolar world, but we no longer have a multipolar or great power world, because we only have one great power. Others say, truly, the concept of great powerness is irrelevant in this ever, you know, integrating in this ever more globalizing and transnational world. (.) And that was really the world that we had for the 20 years after the collapse of communism. And then, progressively, you had, first of all, the rise of the Sino-American antagonism in East Asia. And then, secondly, the rise of Russian revisionism, which, of course, becomes visible to everybody from 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the instigation of the war in Eastern Ukraine, but really was also evident at the latest by the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and then became absolutely indisputable, of course, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And that’s why I talk about the return of the great powers. And this, of course, is reflected in the rhetoric of the protagonists over the last 10 years. If you take, finally, the instance of the national security strategy of the first Trump administration in 2017, it refers specifically to the return to pure competition, the return to great power strife. So, that’s a phrase that you didn’t find in the Obama-era national security strategies.
S00: Let me ask you about the Cold War. You know, if the base case for understanding great power is sort of 19th into 20th century competition for freedom and, at times, hegemony amongst European powers and Britain there off the coast, you know, the differences between the Cold War and that seem apparent, at least at a superficial level. That is to say, one, here’s the Cold War spoken of frequently in ideological terms as a competition between two different visions for world order. (..) And yet, you, in your account, even though there may be differences, you understand it is more fundamentally a great power competition than something unique in itself. Can you say more about that?
S01: Well, you’re quite right that, of course, ideology played a big role in the Cold War. And equally, of course, in the early modern period, ideology was very important. So, in the 17th century, there were huge confrontation, which culminated in the 30 Years’ War between the Protestant and the Catholic powers. In the 18th century, the fact that Britain was a Protestant and constitutional power was important in its antagonism towards France, which, of course, was Catholic and an absolutist. So, the ideological has always been mixed in with the traditional realpolitik. And, of course, during the Cold War, what was remarkable was that after a period when the PRC, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union were aligned under Mao and Stalin, in the early stages of the Cold War, they then fell out. And, of course, from 1972 onwards, the PRC and the United States were actually collaborating in important ways in order to contain the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union actually deployed about a third of its resources in the 70s and 80s in the Far East. So, that’s a very good example, I think, of the way in which traditional great power considerations overlay ideology, even at the height of the Cold War.
S00: You know, I’m struck looking at your book and thinking about your various audiences. You know, here in the United States, we are now well into a second Trump term. As you point out, it was the 2017 National Security Strategy that talked about great power competition. I have the sense that here in the United States, whether everyone who needs to take on board what should be taken on board about this subject has actually done so, that this has been a meaningful topic of discussion for some years now. I suspect that in Europe, possibly even the UK, where I’m not following the debate closely at all, that there may be, that things may be a little behind on that front. Is that your impression? And what is it that your fellow Brits or across the channel there in Europe, do you think it is that people most misunderstand about the current moment?
S01: Well, I think that Europe in general is a bit behind the United States. The British are less behind in that regard. I mean, I think they were much quicker to get, in particular, the Russian threat than many other Europeans. Although, of course, in northern Eastern Europe, they were also pretty clear about the challenge emanating from Moscow. And I think that the difficulty that much of Europe had was that it was really in a kind of a bubble from the end of the Cold War. It had persuaded itself that that bad world, which is a huge part of the original establishment of the European project, which was designed to contain Germany, which was designed to contain Germany and to deter the Soviet Union. I mean, it was actually, in many ways, a great power project in its origins. Had, in fact, that project had evolved into something much more introverted and self-satisfied, if you like, by the year 2000, where there was a very widespread sense within Europe and the European Union that they had really transcended power politics. War, violence, that was really something the Americans still did. You know, Bob Kagan talked about Mars and Venus, and I think he was right in this respect. And they almost adopted a kind of a superior attitude towards the U.S. in this regard. Now, that has completely gone. The Europeans, in general, are now confronting the fact that they are in a much more dangerous world than they had imagined themselves in in the year 2000, not just because of, you know, the large-scale return of international terrorism, not just because of migration, but also, of course, because of great power threats, because the People’s Republic of China, which they had imagined they were converging with, actually turns out to be, A, militarily threatening, and B, economically ravenous. Russia, which, again, they thought was converging with them, turned out to be predatory. And the United States, sorry to say, appeared in their regard at least to be uncertain in its commitment to Europe. Now, I have my criticisms of the Trump administration. I don’t actually see it in quite the negative way that many Europeans do. But one way or the other, I think the Europeans, intellectually, have certainly begun to understand the problem. The difficulty is turning that recognition into concrete action, because there are all kinds of barriers to do with expenditure on welfare, disagreement on priorities, and so on and so forth, that are getting in the way. But you only have to look at the huge increase in defense expenditure over the last few years on the continent of Europe to see that things have changed.
S00: It’s striking, isn’t it, that this unipolar moment that we are now seeing in the rearview mirror, it seems. How widespread the misunderstanding of what that moment was at the time. And, I mean, my defense is I was a teenager when, you know, when it was really in its full flourishing. But I’m no doubt not immune from this criticism. How few people understood something that I think you illustrate well in the book, that in so many ways it is this function of American, what seemed to some to be a kind of natural evolution of political goodness was, in fact, rather a moment, a geopolitical moment, a moment determined by American victory in the previous competition and a sort of pleasant moment, at least for the United States and its partners, before the next competition started to loom. So how widespread that misunderstanding was. And at the same time, I’m also struck by, despite how chaotic the world seems now compared to how it did, say, on September the 10th, 2001, how much widespread contempt there is for that moment across so many parties, to include in the United States, elements of American politics on left and right, who are utterly contemptuous of that moment as being bad for America and Americans. Perhaps the critique is a bit more understandable if you’re not an American. But both the failure to understand what that moment was and the widespread contempt for it sort of across party lines, across countries, even as we now sort of sit in a world that, to me, is sort of demonstrably, meaningfully, extraordinarily more dangerous, and not just for Americans, for everyone, really.
S01: Yes, I completely agree with you. And probably the best illustration of that amnesia on the European side is the widespread belief, which was even stronger until recently, that the peace of the continent was to be attributed to the European Union. Now, I don’t mean any disrespect to the European Union. It’s done very many good things in Europe. It has helped keep the peace in a number of places. That’s beyond question. But the peace in Europe as such, of course, is really the achievement of NATO, and within NATO, primarily of the United States, also of Britain and other allies. But, you know, that point was often forgotten. You know, NATO has not been given the Nobel Peace Prize, but the European Union has. (.) And so I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding within Europe, or at least there was, about to which factors they owed that long period of peace.
S00: So it’s 2026. You argue that there are four great powers and a bunch of other aspirants, and those four are, unsurprisingly, the United States and China. Number three is Russia, which I think most would agree with, even as there would be some chin-stroking about Russia’s future and its economy and so forth. But I think most would agree to include it. And then, Brendan, the fourth is the United Kingdom, which, as I’m sure you’re aware by this point, some critics have reacted, have looked askance at your inclusion of the United Kingdom on that list compared to others that you might suggest, one might suggest, could belong there at least as much, say, for example, France. And I ask this question a little bit to make trouble, but really from a place of love. And I want to stipulate that because I got into a bit of a tiff with Boris Johnson on this show just recently when I was asking some questions about the capacity of the Royal Navy, and he seemed to take me as wanting to be insulting. Far from it. I would love nothing more than for you to write that the United Kingdom is the fourth great power and for that to be universally accepted as an obvious fact by all of your readers. I don’t think it’s quite where we are. Could you make your case for it?
S01: Yes. So, I mean, the first point I’d like to make is that obviously I recognize, and it would be obtuse not to, that there are big differences between those four powers. So, you’ve got a very clear gap between the United States and the PRC at the top and the Russian Federation and the UK at the bottom. So, that is absolutely to be taken as read. Historically, that’s not unusual. I mean, in the 18th century, (.) everybody knew that Prussia was considerably weaker, for example, than France or Britain or even the Austrians until they weren’t. (.) but nevertheless, you know, they agreed that there was a pentarchy of great powers. (..) But the other thing that I indicate actually on the cover of the British edition of great powers is that the great powerness of both Russia and the United Kingdom is under attack. So, the four flags, which are pristine on your American edition of the book, (.) two of them are actually frayed. The Union flag and the Russian flag are frayed on the UK edition. I was unable to persuade my American publishers to fray the flags.
S00: What was their counter-argument? Too subtle or something like that?
S01: Yes, more or less. They said it would confuse an American audience. So, there we are. So, I am obviously aware of the critique. So, I think the reason why I include the United Kingdom among the four is, first of all, I think it is at least as strong as the Russian Federation. The only metric according to which the Russians, and it’s an important metric, I grant you, but the only metric under which they are stronger than the UK is actually nuclear weapons. According to any other metric, in particular economic power, So, the United Kingdom is the fifth or the sixth largest economy in the world. So, if you are going for the top four powers, (.) being the top five or six is already not bad. (..) Until 2021, it was actually in dollar terms the third largest military spender in the world. So, for decades beforehand, it has been among the largest military spenders. It has considerable reach through the Royal Navy, which has its flaws, but is still a very important factor. It has the bases, obviously, in Falklands, (.) Gibraltar, Cyprus, and elsewhere. So, it has that reach. It has a considerable reputation, and it has quite considerable resilience, you know, won over time through its performance in the international sphere. And, to give you an example of this, the UK, (.) in 2022, when the Finns and the Swedes were applying to join NATO, there was a period between making the application and the kicking in of Article 5, you know, the mutual security guarantee. And to bridge that gap, they requested and received bilateral guarantees, including from the UK, specifically within Europe. A clear recognition that the UK was the European leader in that part of the world. The UK also leads the Joint Expeditionary Force in that part of the world. So, it plays a very, very central role, in other words, in European security. And, indeed, through the AUKUS submarine alliance with the United States and the Australians, also an important role more globally, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. And, interestingly enough, Aaron, when the Wharton School, about 10 days ago in Pennsylvania, (…) conducted a survey among several thousand people asking them to list the strongest powers in the world, the UK was number three. (.) So, there are, I would argue, there is wisdom in crowds.
S00: So, this next question sort of takes the form of asking for a friend because I sort of worry about these forces in American politics and there are ways in which the British fashion can sometimes be a few years ahead of the United States. But you have a Labour government now. does this government understand the UK to be, would they agree with you? Do they understand the UK to be a great power and would they be entirely comfortable with your understanding of global affairs as viewed through this lens of great power competition? (.)
S01: I, my sense, I’m not, I don’t actually personally know Mr. Burnham, the Prime Minister. My sense is that that’s not his priority, that he’s very focused on domestic factors. I think that he, he is being and will be dutiful in regard to some of the foreign policy challenges like Ukraine, but that he lacks, for example, the zest that Boris Johnson brought to this picture. And I do accept that my argument about the strength of the United Kingdom would have been stronger in 2022 and 2023 than it is today. I think that the UK’s position as a great power is by no means guaranteed. I think it is under threat. I can see it being lost if the current position on defence expenditure is maintained. So it’s definitely in question. But it is my expectation that whatever happens under the current administration, that in due course, the UK will get to a higher defence expenditure, will play that role that in my view, it should play in the world. And one of the things I try to do in the book, in fact, is to get people not to focus so much on the moment, but to look on the performance of powers over time historically. (.) And in that connection, I believe, and I hope, that the difficulties we’re seeing at the moment in the end will be temporary.
S00: I mean, the reason I ask is both because I am curious about British politics and how they affect all this, but also because here in the United States, as you know, I mean, it’s hardly controversial to say that the Democratic Party has decent odds this fall in the midterm elections and just the pendular nature of American politics would not be shocking at all for there to be a Democrat who succeeds in a run for the presidency in 2028. But even beyond that, as you’re also aware, (.) you know, there’s a socialist movement within the Democratic Party (.) that is further to the left than the mainstream of Democratic Party positions to include on foreign affairs. in recent years (.) and, you know, I’m struck and would certainly, I think, in some ways (..) take an account of global affairs as competition between great powers as a virtually immoral (.) way of looking at the world. I suppose, in a way, there’s nothing different between this phenomenon and stuff you could have encountered at the turn of the 20th century where you have pitched competition between great powers flirting with catastrophic war and, meanwhile, parties within many of those countries (..) advocating for de facto revolutionary ideas that reject the whole nature of great power competition even as it plays out. It’s a complicated phenomenon. I don’t really know what to do with that. But that’s the reason I ask the question because I think here in the United States, it’s certainly one very possible future here that in only a few years we could have (.) control of government by folks who really would rather not participate in great power competition even though the United States along with China is one of the two indisputable entries on that list of great powers.
S01: That’s correct. (.) But if we look at what this means for the UK, (.) I think that while in the short term it could raise some issues, for example, with regard to the nuclear deterrent, which is independently targeted and deployable but depends on US maintenance. So if the US were to pull out either, you know, because of some MAGA consideration or because of some extreme leftist (.) democratic configuration, then a solution would have to be found very rapidly. However, in general terms is a point that I make in the book and I think many people don’t really realize is the more the United States retreats from Europe, the more important the United Kingdom becomes. its simple balance of power logic. And indeed, we see this in the huge validation now being given to the Joint Expeditionary Force (.) for a long time ignored by the European Union, more recently now praised because it’s really the one outfit within NATO which does not involve the Americans and is led by the UK. (.) So I do think that is an aspect that people haven’t sufficiently considered with regard to the UK.
S00: In terms of the way that this all plays out for the future, I’m curious what your various conceptions are of the way world order is likely to go. It does seem like some notion of multipolarity tops your list if you want to make the case for that and also describe any possible alternatives.
S01: Well, you can certainly envisage a multipolar world which, if you follow the strict logic, would have, you know, the United States as one pole, the PRC obviously as another pole, Russia as a pole, and then perhaps the European Union or some combination of the European Union and Britain as a pole, possibly India as a pole. I myself tend to favor rather what I call the by-order option. In other words, that we will essentially see a confrontation between the authoritarian order, which is made up of actually of two poles, which is the PRC and the Russian Federation, and the democratic order, which is actually made up really of three different forces. The United States, obviously, the European Union, and then what I refer to as the rest of the West, which is the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia, actually some pretty important actors when you collect them together, militarily actually more important taken together than the European Union. So you’d have three Wests, as it were, facing off against two Easts. So these seem to me the two possibilities. I mean, another might be some form of continental division. Some people have suggested that, you know, the revival of the Monroe Doctrine rechristened the Donro Doctrine suggests that the United States would confine itself to the Western Hemisphere, and, you know, the Russians would stick to their own patch, and the PRC conceivably to East Asia. That seems to me implausible, (.) not because the Russians and the PRC wouldn’t want it. I think they probably would quite like that, but because I see actually no evidence that Donald Trump, thankfully, by the way, is intending to confine himself solely to the Western Hemisphere. He intends to make the U.S. influence felt in other parts of the world as well. And while that is quite often uncomfortable for us, I still vastly prefer that to the alternative, which is the Americans retreating only to their hemisphere.
S00: It’s possible to see your book, I mean, in some ways it’s possible to think of our conversation for this last half hour or so as an attempt to give a dose of realism (.) to well-meaning people who, you know, form their assumptions about the future of world order, you know, in the 90s and early aughts and are slowly, but perhaps too slowly, coming to terms with the nature of international competition as it has long existed in the system, which is sort of one of your main points in a way, is that none of this is really particularly new, at least at a level of principle. (.) That, and, you know, we could continue for another half hour in giving well-thinking people like that a hard time, but realists have their own characteristic errors in both practice and theory. I could name a few from the Trump administration right now if I were so inclined. (..) You know, where do, this sort of realist reaction to the well-meaning vision of a world coming ever closer together based on shared struggle against, you know, common challenges like climate change and transnational terrorism and so forth, if that’s being replaced by this more realist vision of interstate competition over very traditional things like resources and visions of world order, where does, where does this reaction, this realist reaction go too far in your view? What does it characteristically get wrong?
S01: Well, before I get onto that, I should say that, God forgive me, I myself was one of those who believed in the 1990s and the early 2000s that, in a sense, we were in the new world. I felt ambivalent about it because as an historian, I worked on the old world and so I sometimes had to wonder about my own relevance, but I did genuinely think that we had got, to a certain extent, got beyond some of these issues. and so I don’t consider myself prescient in the cosmic sense. I would say that I woke up earlier than most, but later than some. Now, when it comes to the problems with realism, I think it takes us back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the way in which ideology has always intertwined with the realpolitik. So, (.) the difficulty with realism, I think, is that it’s sometimes not very realistic. It makes assumptions about how actors behave, which simply are incorrect. So, you know, Donald Trump thinks that the Iranians, you were alluding to this earlier, would simply stop. You know, simply because they had been so battered that any sensible person
S01: Well, if you know, I don’t know a great deal about Iranian history, but I know enough to know that is not likely, given the mindset of the mullahs. So, that’s a mistake that you can easily make. The Trump administration has also made, I think, a mistake, made at least originally, I think it’s backing away from it now, the mistaken assumption that the Russians would see that they had more in common (..) with the United States and could be peeled off and brought into a combination against the PRC. There’s no sign of that happening and it was based, the strategy was based on a misunderstanding of what happened in the early 70s with Mao and one could go on. So, an approach to the world that is purely realist and doesn’t take into account these ideological factors on their side and ours is not going to work either. (.)
S00: I’m curious when you, as it were, woke up to this new reality. For me, it was, because, (.) again, with my defensive youth, (..) again, to cite that, nevertheless, I’m in the same boat as you. And for me, it was a deployment to Afghanistan where I really did go persuaded of the view that once we removed the Taliban boot from the neck of the oppressed Afghan farmer, this farmer would rise up and seek all of the things that humans as humans naturally want, like, you know, free enterprise and the vote and all these things that Americans sort of take for granted or at least value greatly. (.) And, as it won’t surprise you to hear, nothing of the sort happened. The reality was much more complicated. We could spend hours and hours talking about what the reality was, but it wasn’t that these were the natural proclivities of man and once the Taliban was removed, they would flourish. and I spent years sort of processing that sort of at the same time that China started island building in the South China Sea and it was all of a piece to me, sort of figuring out the world I actually lived in as opposed to the world I imagined that I lived in. How did it work for you?
S01: Well, with regard to the PRC, I actually woke up quite early in the 1990s when already at that stage there was a lot of pushing and shoving over the South China Sea, Spratby Islands, (.) and other factors and there was a, in my opinion, a rather good book by Humphrey Hawksley called Dragon Strike, which set this out almost 25 years ago now. With regard to Russia, it was essentially the Orange Revolution and the Russian position there. So I think from about 2005 onwards, I was becoming more alert to what was happening in Russia. With regard to the Middle East, I think the most shocking thing I heard, because I was one of those who believed in the democratic transformation project. I supported the wars of President Bush Jr. And I did that not because I was deceived. If I was deceived, I deceived myself. I wasn’t manipulated in any way. I just, I completely overestimated the viability of the project. But in terms of a kind of a moment that shocked me, more than anything else, it actually was a conversation around Afghanistan with a student. I mean, he was a mature student who had come back from quite a senior role in Afghanistan. So this was several years into the invasion. And he told me of a discussion he had had with some tribal elders in Afghanistan. (.) And it was in the context of the provincial reconstruction projects. And he asked them, is, you know, what, which of the various different international efforts there have been that have been the most effective? And he meant, you know, was it Americans? Was it this organization? Was it that organization? (.) And the tribal elders just said, oh, it was the Russians in the 1980s. So, you know, if that was their view, and I don’t think they were trying to be funny, and they may or may not have been right, but the fact that such a conversation could happen was obviously a terrible judgment on how we had fared in Afghanistan. Not a judgment on the aid agencies or on the governments, just on the nature of the project itself.
S01: So I think that would have been the moment for me where the penny finally dropped. (.)
S00: I didn’t have precisely that conversation in Afghanistan but I certainly had conversations that like it shocked me. So I feel a sense of sympathy with your student there. You know, the thing about the return of these old gods that most concerns me, Brendan, and you are also the perfect person to address this, is less the notion that, gosh, the world’s going to look a little bit like, you know, 19th, early 20th century Europe again. Not that that wasn’t a dangerous world and not that it couldn’t end in catastrophe. It’s a very serious situation. But I’m actually more worried about the way in which the threat of totalitarianism from the 20th century seems to me to be much diminished in people’s minds here in the 21st century. And as we, and this sort of goes back to the critics of the unipolar moment, there are a lot of Americans who are quite comfortable with the notion that the world is moving towards multipolarity, (.) that that unipolar moment, which was economically bad, they argue, for many Americans, is receding into the past. We will have a more just economy. We will have a better balanced (..) application of resources to international commitments versus domestic commitments. These people are both on the left and the right, by the way, and they come to these views for different reasons, but their views often overlap, as you know. (..) And to me, sort of comfortably holding these views often involves at best a kind of forgetfulness about just how dark things got in the middle of the 20th century, and you’re a great chronicler of this as Hitler’s biographer. (.) And of course, you have Stalin on the other side of the ledger and Mao. (.) So it involves at best a kind of forgetfulness of this, and at times, dare I say, a kind of flirtation with those sorts of politics at the far left and the far right, even in American domestic politics. (..) in the efforts of these various parties to take power domestically. It all is deeply, deeply concerning to me because say what you will about the American system (..) in partnership, of course, with the United Kingdom. It defeated Nazism. It contained first Stalinism, then the Soviet Union more broadly. and that was, those two triumphs were far, far better than the alternatives, which were really darker than anything that it’s quite possible to conceive of. And I just, I find, I find the flippancy with which this is passed over as an incipient danger in the new system. The last great power system, in other words, just to state the same thing again and much more briefly, the last great power system collapsed into these wars of extraordinary human darkness. (.) And I’d rather not do that again. (.)
S01: Yes, and of course, they will be even darker in a sense because what Churchill referred to, you know, as the lights of perverted science are even worse than when he made that statement during the Second World War because, of course, now we have nuclear weapons and other weapons of immense destructive capacity. So I’m completely with you on that. and I absolutely see what you observe, which is that you’ve got on the right, you’ve got, you know, people like Nick Fuentes and others who seem a bit unsure about, you know, which side he would have been on in the Second World War. You’ve got on the left the sympathies with Stalin or at least with communism. (.) And what I think that shows is, and it’s a point that I’ve made in a different context drawing on the theologian Alex Ryrie is that in some ways we’re living in a post-Hitler world. Hitler is no longer the absolute evil against which people define themselves. And I think that’s partly because there was a certain, if you’ll forgive me, laziness, perhaps on our sides, always to invoke the Second World War in whatever context. And so there’s been a reaction against that from the left and the right, particularly from the right. And in a way, what I think we need to do is to find new narratives and new explanations which don’t always hark back to the Second World War because that is now a very long time ago and people just don’t see that as their main reference point any longer, say, compared to when I was growing up in the 1980s when you still had many people around even in positions of responsibility who had experienced the Second World War. (.) That’s no longer the case. that generation has completely basically died out. So I think while we must condemn the phenomenon you’re describing, absolutely, we should also set ourselves the task of finding a new way of talking about these things that exposes us less to this kind of backlash.
S00: I’m with you. I mean, it’s impossible to disagree with what you just said. But at the same time, the problem, Brendan, is that (.) if the very evils that you’re trying to avoid were uniquely captured in the catastrophes of the 1930s and 40s, and the whole point is that those catastrophes were somewhat unique, (..) it’s then a challenge to then go make the case from phenomena of the last few decades. The whole point is that people in the 19, you know, aughts, say, couldn’t see any of it coming because it was just so awful and they hadn’t experienced really anything like it. I mean, again, you’re the person who can speak to all these things, but you have the Napoleonic Wars there in the far-off recesses of their past, but even those wars, quite frankly, were not what happens in the 30s and 40s. And so if we have to, for perfectly reasonable rhetorical political reasons, find new ways, the truth is the original way was a pretty good way because it’s illustrated the reality that we’re trying to avoid.
S01: That’s true, but it was also very constrictant. It didn’t allow (.) for dissent and it became then implausible in certain contexts. So, you know, and I’ll go out on a little bit on a limb here, you know, to criticize Israel, of which I am a great supporter in many ways, but it is true (.) that many criticisms of Israel were, some of them, many of them are undoubtedly anti-Semitic, but of course not all of them are, many are not. but the discourse there was, I think, very restricted as a result. And of course, then any act of aggression then immediately became, you know, Hitlerian, you know. Putin, is he Hitler? Well, he’s not really Hitler, you know, it’s something different. There are comparisons, I’ve made comparisons to aspects of his thought, but it’s a distinct phenomenon. and the difficulty is simply that we then become implausible if we keep on harking back to that sort of almost perfect moment after 1945 when, you know, the greatest generation have prevailed, an American foreign policy establishment comes in, and everything seems to be in a proper order. Because, of course, that was the thinking that brought us (.) Suez, it’s the thinking that brought us Vietnam, (.) and one could think of other examples. examples. So that’s, I mean, whether I like it or not, it’s just that the cat is now out of the bag. We are now in that post-Hitler, (..) post-Hitler world, and so constantly invoking Hitler, I think, and the 1930s has sufficient in and of itself to win an argument. I think that just no longer works.
S00: Brendan Sims, when I say this conversation is alarming, I’ll know that you know the, I mean, in the best possible way, and I always appreciate your time here on School of War. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Aaron. This episode of School of War is also presented by Stratolaunch, a leading pure-play hypersonics company. Hypersonic weapons systems travel five times faster than the speed of sound, making them difficult to predict, track, and defeat. America’s advantage in hypersonics depends on delivering testing, targets, data, and systems at pace. Stratolaunch is built for that mission. Stratolaunch’s reusable and autonomous Talon-A testbed exceeds Mach 5 speeds, enabling customers to evaluate advanced hypersonic technologies under true hypersonic flight conditions while collecting critical flight data. Together with its expendable hypersonic targets and weapons subsystems, Stratolaunch helps the U.S. and its allies move new hypersonic technologies from concept to capability faster and cheaper
