Comity, Rivalry, and the Real Drivers of War

Winston Churchill reflected that “no part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening.” A century later, the origins of the First World War should still interest us for what they reveal about the causes of great power conflict. An underappreciated insight from the Great War is that anxieties incited by imbalances among “rising” and “ruling” powers—popularized by Graham Allison as the “Thucydides Trap”—can overcome the stabilizing influence of shared interests, institutions, and ideologies. Too often depicted as an ideological clash of democracies against dictatorships, the Great War was in fact fought between liberal states with similar societies, interwoven interests, and cooperative habits. It was fratricide, not kulturkampf. Today, the example of the Great War should discourage us from reducing Sino-American tensions to ideological differences or assessing common interests and cooperation as a means of insurance against war. In 1914, a close-knit community of states succumbed to the anxieties that provoked a great power war. Washington and Beijing today have an even narrower margin to avoid Armageddon.

What Caused the Great War?

Graham Allison’s Destined for War examines (among other cases) prewar Anglo-German relations through the “Thucydides Trap,” a prism derived from the ancient Athenian’s dictum that “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” Allison subscribes to Thucydides’s judgement that fear, honor, and interest drive political action. His analysis suggests fear is an especially salient motive in fin de siècle geopolitics. He contends Germany “rose further to threaten British industrial and naval supremacy,” bringing disquiet to Whitehall. He cites British unease that the growing German navy seemed intended for, in the Admiralty’s assessment, “war with us.” In turn, he situates Germany in a worrisome position between an aggressive Russia and an anxious Britain. Specialists on the outbreak of the war, like David Herrmann, Christopher Clark, and T. G. Otte support Allison’s attention to fear, examining how fear of the future and fear of losing allies drove Europe towards conflict.

Allison omits ideology from his analysis, the most commonly invoked cause of the Great War, even by those who waged it. In 1913, General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War asserted Germany had been “robbed” of its natural boundaries, had a duty to “check the onrush of Slavism,” and that “war is a biological necessity.” David Lloyd George pronounced in 1914 that Britain fought to rescue Europe from “the straight road to barbarism” presented by “the Prussian military caste.” In 1917, Woodrow Wilson branded the Central Powers “autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.” Since then, Barbara Tuchman has portrayed Wilhelmine Germany as infatuated with militarism. Fritz Fischer and A. J. P. Taylor made the Great War the culmination of Germany’s nineteenth-century Sonderweg from liberalism to authoritarianism. Robert Kagan attributes Germany’s encirclement “solely” to its domineering Weltmacht, or pursuit of world power. Ideology also matters to scholars sympathetic to Germany. Whitehall Germanophobes for Christopher Clark, Tsarist grandiosity for Sean McMeekin, and death-obsessed modernism for Modris Ekstein shadow the road to war.

The World of Yesterday

In truth, however, pre-war Europe’s ideological differences were modest. Excepting republican France, fin de siècle Europe’s great powers were governed by combinations of crowned heads, elected legislatures, and written constitutions. Britain and Germany particularly resembled this norm—and one another. Kaiser Wilhelm was “Cousin Willy” to King George and doted on by his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Germany’s Reichstag and Britain’s parliament were elected on broad franchises. German ministers were not legislatively accountable like British ones, but both needed legislative assent to borrow, raise, and spend money. Independent judiciaries administered law in both. The 2.5 million union members in Germany and 2.2 million in Britain were easily the continent’s largest labor movements. Traditional elite vestiges, like the Prussian Landtag or the British Quarter Sessions and House of Lords, attracted resentment but, apart from the Lords, avoided reform. Social detente was attempted to ameliorate class conflict. Otto von Bismarck’s “Practical Christianity” established the world’s first social welfare regime and inspired the British Liberals’ “People’s Budget.” Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s (unsuccessful) Prussian Landtag reform aimed to mollify labor. More effectively, the British Liberals partnered with the fledgling Labor Party in the 1906 election.

“Nationalism” did not prevent continuous Anglo-German governmental consultation on security questions like warship construction. Anglo-German naval officers often fraternized at festivals like “Kiel Week.” Moreover, when war came, it was greeted with ambivalence. Most British unions reacted with an “industrial truce,” while Prime Minister H. H. Asquith secured parliamentary support for war only by dividing his Liberal Party. In Germany, unions held massive anti-war demonstrations before heeding Kaiser Wilhelm’s plea for inter-class Burgfrieden to defend Germany against reactionary Russia. Rather than reflect a cleavage between democratic and autocratic societies, Germany and Britain were comparable ones with similar concerns and interests. 

What is more, pre-war Europe was cooperatively integrating. The overlapping interests of European finance actuated Norman Angell’s 1912 claim that “commercial interdependence” would “create a consciousness which must make for more efficient human cooperation, a better human society.” International agreements coordinated maritime law, telegraphy, railroads, postal services, and tariffs. Summits at the Hague regulated warfare in 1899 and 1907. International Protestant denominations convened a World Missionary Conference in 1910. Socialists had been gathering in the International since 1864. This international culture encouraged compromise during disturbances like the Boxer Rebellion, the Moroccan Crisis, and the Balkan Wars. Peace activists like Bertha von Suttner celebrated pacificism’s movement “from the hands of the so-called Apostles into the hands of the powerful and into the minds of the awakening democracy.” Not only “could Europe act together,” reflects historian John Keegan, it could “also think and feel together” through its cosmopolitan elite, middle-class pursuits like foreign tourism, and working-class socialist internationalism.

The Great War helped to rupture common bonds and stoke ideological animosity. Yet these are its consequences, not its causes. Anxieties over power imbalances drove Europe to war. Fears were inflamed by Germany’s rise, Britain’s decline, Germany’s sense of encirclement, and common dread of isolation during crisis. Every European power in 1914 worried that their strength would decline, and their counterparts’ increase in the future. Fear encouraged the great powers to risk war in the present rather than risk a worse power balance subsequently. Conflict occurred despite comity and commonality. 

Today’s World—and Its Risks

Americans have persistently understood and responded to the challenge posed by China’s rise in ideological terms. Many have looked to economic, social, and political convergence to soothe Sino-American tensions. Bill Clinton declared that “the best path of advancing freedom in China is for the United States to intensify and broaden its engagement.” George W. Bush predicted: “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.” In 2013, Nicholas Kristof decided Xi Jinping would “spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well.” Five years later, Mike Pence beseeched the CCP to “return to the spirit of reform and opening” so that Sino-American “prosperity and security grow together, not apart” once more.

Detractors of engagement with China also prioritize ideology. Andrei Lungu links CCP hostility to the United States to its 2013 “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” naming democratic “universalism” an existential threat. To Joseph Torigian, Xi believes in “continuous self-revolution” to avert liberalization. Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher advocate defining Sino-American relations as a “new cold war” because the old Cold War models how to “achieve victory without war” against a “capable, belligerent, Leninist regime.” Departing from Pence, Mike Pompeo in 2020 declared: “America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries.” Xi’s “bankrupt totalitarian ideology … informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.” Invoking Richard Nixon’s words in 1967, Pompeo concluded, “the world cannot be safe until China changes.”

The problem with prioritizing ideology is not that sanguine hopes for engagement have been proven groundless. More problematic is conflating ideological antipathy as a driver of war. Ideological animosities compound the risks of war, and ideological mobilizations often sustain warring nations. Yet the Great War’s example underscores that anxieties induced by power imbalances are weightier drivers of war than ideology. Unless tempered by attention to these anxieties, expectations that “changing” China will make the world safe could prove just as groundless as engagement’s gauziest hopes. Sino-American war would be a serious risk even if China’s leaders commemorated Liu Xiaobo rather than Mao in Tiananmen Square.

Shared values do not obviate clashing interests. Britain and Germany could both submit to liberal governance at home and clash over what Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow termed Germany’s “place in the sun,” Britain’s desired naval preeminence, and their common concern in July 1914 not to lose allies by balking at conflict. Ideological hostility did not incite these clashes; security expectations commensurate with their power did. Autocratic or otherwise, China is likely to take positions on its borders, political economy, global military presence, and a litany of other areas conflicting with American positions. American naval navigation in the South China Sea, American leadership in new technologies, American influence at global institutions, and in the Indo-Pacific would produce friction with any Chinese regime. 

Nor do shared values remove fear. German liberals looked to Westminster’s example, but feared the Royal Navy’s threat to their commerce. Lloyd George and Churchill’s admiration for German social welfarism did not dispel the specter of Germany conquering France. Even if future Chinese statesmen respect the Gettysburg Address, American partners in East Asia will face a nearby superpower capable of threatening their security or detaching them from Washington. And will China feel any safer athwart American allies than Germany felt flanked by Britain’s Franco-Russian friends? Future compromises could depend on both states accepting less than what they perceive as necessary to their security. In such circumstances, both could imagine conflict in the present as less perilous than a weakened position in future crises.

Another insight from the Great War is to qualify our confidence in mutually self-interested cooperation. Lyle Goldstein advocates “cooperation spirals” between China and the United States. From modest confidence-building measures, Goldstein imagines these spirals culminating in agreements on issues like Taiwan. Recently, William Hurst and Peter Trubowitz proposed Sino-American military dialogue and a “code of conduct” in the South China Sea. Common interest in stability and measures to sustain it do not guarantee peace. Few states benefited more from the status quo than Britain and Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm’s tears, Moltke’s nervous collapse, and Edward Grey’s foreboding over “the lamps going out in Europe” suggest Anglo-German leaders apprehended war’s disasters. Europe’s great powers maintained many “cooperation spirals.” Britain and Germany compromised over Morocco in 1905 and 1911 and persistently discussed naval armaments. They even refrained from blows in a Bosnian crisis in 1908.

Ideological comity, shared interests, and cooperative habits are likelier to alleviate than exacerbate great power tensions. There is certainly no question that a less odious regime than the CCP would benefit China’s people. Yet heeding the example of 1914, we should not assume ideological rivalry primarily drives the risks of Sino-American war. Nor should we look to cooperative habits as insurance against conflict. Europe’s great powers were more ideologically aligned, institutionally integrated, and cooperative than China and the United States could become in the foreseeable future. Allison’s warning that power imbalances inflame anxieties, which cause wars, means catastrophe is never distant. Lacking Europe’s safeguards before 1914, catastrophe is potentially quite close today.