Cold war or hot world
The attempt to think through and with China proved to be fittingly quixotic. It turned into a much bigger undertaking than initially anticipated, taking about a month and resulting in more than 12,000 words. In the process of researching and writing, I became more convinced of the claim I made: China is too important to be left to the specialists. A vital part of the contemporary conjuncture is recognising and reckoning with the reality that China matters. A country of 1.4 billion people is truly full of multitudes, reducing it to simplistic tropes actively inhibits our capacity to understand the present. Having orientated somewhat, now we can return to our disordering disorder.
One of the most prominent frames for understanding US - China tensions is ‘the Thucydides Trap’, the argument Graham Allison developed on the foundations of ancient Greek history:
Thucydides’s Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power.
Allison’s work is considerably more thoughtful than the bumper sticker version suggests. Nonetheless, it is written by an American in America and for Americans, all of which shapes the language and perspective offered. While there is much that could be said around the thesis, here one observation: the frame is that of great powers, with the dangers that come from one growing in strength and the other losing ground. To quote the pivotal, evergreen line from the historian Thucydides, ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.’ The insight is about relative power: one gaining in strength in relation to the other. What such a perspective occludes is weakness.
Instead, thinking in terms of absolute strength suggests the danger lies precisely in both the United States and China struggling and feeling threatened, albeit in different and uneven ways. The point does not need to be laboured, the news is full of stories about Chinese economic weakness and political instability in the US. Less considered is what can follow: the dangers that come not from strength, but a sense of vulnerability. An embattled US and a threatened China, a world of weakening powers. Both countries have been grappling with the combined and uneven consequences of modernity and post-modernity. This returns us to a different Thucydides, the one offered by Richard Ned Lebow:
Thucydides’ one authorial statement about the origins of the war is best understood as a judgment about who was most responsible for the war. The subsequent narrative of Book I attributes the war to the peculiar political cultures of both hegemons, the machinations of third parties and a series of miscalculations made by their leaders.…
Thucydides wants us to consider modernization the most fundamental cause of war; it made Athens the most powerful political unit in Greece, transformed its political and intellectual culture and threatened Sparta’s way of life and core identity. The hyperactive and aggressive political culture of Athens, the miscalculations of Pericles and the overconfidence of the Spartan war party might all be understood, at least in part, as epiphenomena of the modernization process. Seemingly diverse, if reinforcing, causes of war are thus linked and give a new meaning to Thucydides’ assertion in Book I.23.6 that “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.”
Moving back from the tiny city-states of ancient Greece to our present 8 billion people reality, what one finds is entropy, the breakdown of the old without the appearance of the new. Moreover, both powers are acting in ways that are contributing to these disintegrative dynamics. Internationally, the US continues to have unrivalled destructive capacities, but has been losing its ability to lead; whereas China has unrivalled productive capacities, but has been struggling to convince others about its intentions. Neither country appears capable of offering a forward-facing vision of international order, both remaining trapped in the past: one lost in the intoxicating nostalgia of unipolarity, the other entrapped by the comforts of ressentiment borne from past traumas. In the 1980s, Hedley Bull spoke of ‘the great irresponsibles’, a depiction that might again be appropriate.
Consider this statement by UN Secretary-General António Guterres at a recent press conference:
What we are witnessing is a multiplication of conflicts and the sense of impunity. And the sense of impunity that is not in the relations among the big Powers, where the risks of world war are bigger. It’s a sense of impunity everywhere. I mean, any country or any military entity, militias, whatever, feel that they can do whatever they want because nothing will happen to them. And, that, contrary to the situation during the cold war, where there was indeed a serious risk of a third world war because of the nuclear arsenals, and you remember the dramas that we faced in that moment. But at that time, it was true that there was some guardrails, that there were some norms. And, when things would get out of control, the two super-Powers would come together and solve the problem. Today, this no longer exists. And the fact that nobody takes even seriously the capacity of the Powers to solve problems on the ground makes the level of impunity an enormous level.
This was not an unguarded comment from the UNSG, it is a message he is constantly repeating in vain. Guterres places these failures within a wider context of challenges: ‘our multilateral tools and institutions are unable to respond effectively to today’s political, economic, environmental and technological challenges’ and ‘we have no effective global response to emerging, complex and even existential threats.’
Moving from the UN in the East Coast to Hoover in the West Coast, Niall Ferguson is logically consistent in being dismissive of polycrisis and in proposing ‘Cold War 2’ as a frame. The latter assumes more of the same, the former wages this time might actually be different. The latter is a world of clashing great powers, the former is a world of flailing weakening powers. Indeed, there is a perverse comfort in returning to a cold war configuration, even if major war is a risk, at least it is something we recognise and believe we understand. What the polycrisis frame proposes is that the interconnected and intensifying nature of systemic risks, especially those related to climate and planetary boundaries, means that our present predicament is unprecedented.
A way of reconciling the two perspectives, however, can be perhaps be found from again turning to Thucydides. In his translation of The Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes wrote of, ‘the greatest things, honour, fear, and profit’, out of which he would emphasise the centrality of fear. While these emotions do not explain all, they explain quite a bit. In her reading, Gabriella Slomp observes:
A relevant common feature of Thucydides’ and Hobbes’s arguments is the belief that in a world characterized by uncertainty about the behaviour of others, fear is the dominant passion.
The challenge becomes how to manage and channel fear. The failure to do so is one of the hallmarks of the current conjuncture. In different ways, what unites America’s ‘underground empire’ of coercion, and China’s ‘kitchen sink’ conception of security, is an impossible desire to assert and extend control. Both countries are trying to assert their independence, impose their will, while being foiled by the entangling realities of ‘enforced cosmopolitanism’. With fear comes a refusal to accept uncertainty. Hartmut Rosa explains what follows:
We cannot control our late modern world in any way: politically, economically, legally, technologically, or individually. The drive and desire toward controllability ultimately creates monstrous, frightening forms of uncontrollability.
Noteworthy here is how this recognition accords with a tragic reading of Thucydides, as proposed by Lebow:
In contrast to most theories that take stable structures, societies and identities as the norm, tragedy emphasizes the dynamism of social life. It recognizes that the accommodations individuals and societies make with the tragic polarities are always temporary. They are uneasy compromises that can never be adequately justified by logic, may be difficult to legitimize politically and are likely to encounter a succession of moral and political dilemmas. Like the moon’s tug and pull on the oceans, they give rise to inner tides that find outward expression in breaking waves of conflicting obligations and loyalties. Our search for ontological stability must give way to acceptance of the truth that social life, and our understandings of it, are, and always must be, in a state of flux.
And from this, it is possible to identify how reading Thucydides might not simply lead to thinking in terms of great power competition, but also can offer a different way of viewing the contemporary, in terms of uncertainty, change and tragic dilemmas.
To finish, this discussion can be sharpened by specifying one such tragic dilemma, namely: cold war or hot world?
What unites both military planners and climate scientists is a belief that the next decade is crucial. For the former, it is a period of intense and heightened risk, as the US and its allies rush to rebuild their military and industrial capacity, while China continues its rapid, uneven development. Both sides race towards employing AI and digital technologies for military advantage. Many US officials and analysts believe that the risks for war with China are heightening in the coming years. Meanwhile, for those that take a global perspective, it is a pivotal moment, as 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries that regulate the Earth system have been crossed. According to research at the University of Exeter, ‘climate change is now so severe that major tipping points are currently at risk of being crossed today … and more tipping points are threatened in the 2030s when the world will likely exceed 1.5°C of global warming.’
Timothy Lenton tries to counter this worrying outlook by also emphasising positive tipping points that can accelerate change towards decarbonisation. And what are the key examples offered? ‘There's real, concrete data and evidence that the transition to renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), for example, are accelerating exponentially and have become self-propelling.’ At the heart of the case for positive tipping points is the rapid rollout of cheap and effective green tech, which invariably means relying on China as the manufacturing superpower. Yet this is precisely what is now being warned against due to great power rivalry. Allowing China to keep and strengthen its dominance in green tech is presented as an unacceptable security risk. Here one can identify a possible second order consequence of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah, which leaves all supply chains suspect. It is only a matter of time until this case is used as another argument against importing Chinese batteries and solar panels. And such concerns are not without cause, the differences that split these countries are not simple misunderstandings, they are fundamental conflicts of interest and belief. As can be seen in more and more parts of the world, violence and war are on the rise, and without security, little else is possible. This discussion can be extended, but the core contradiction should be readily apparent.
Cold war or hot world? To which could be added the possibility of a hot war and a cold world, in which a major conflict leads to ‘nuclear winter’. None of the options are especially enticing, but that is precisely what a tragic perspective emphasises. What one is left with is the vertiginous recognition that the ‘trap the world has become’ is actually far more complex and complicated than what Allison’s rendition suggests. Rather, the tragic reading of Thucydides provided by Lebow accords more with conditions of polycrisis, in which a potent mix of contingencies, choices and conflicts will shape what comes next.