Old Divisions Renewed --- For decades, the presumption among many world leaders was that an international global order would soon arrive. Today's world is far more polarized.

“The Return of the Great Powers

 

By Brendan Simms

 

Basic, 480 pages, $35

 

The Coming Storm

 

By Odd Arne Westad

 

Holt, 256 pages, $27.99

 

When al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Vladimir Putin was new and uncertain in his job as president of Russia. Jiang Zemin, a reformist autocrat with whom the U.S. got along, was the leader of China. Great-power conflict was nowhere on the horizon. Had it been, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq wouldn't have unfolded as they did, as the U.S. wouldn't have been able to devote so much of its energy to toppling regimes and establishing democracy in the Middle East.

 

The delusion of linear progress in history ran deep. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, declared in 2005 that to debate globalization, which he believed transcended the world of nation-states, was like discussing "whether autumn should follow summer." Policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic blithely assumed that engagement with the West would lead China to liberalize. As for Russia, even as late as 2014, German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed Mr. Putin as someone living in a defunct 19th-century world.

 

It turns out there is no liberal direction in history, and we are back to a world that Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century German master strategist, would recognize.

 

The title of Brendan Simms's "The Return of the Great Powers" says it all. Mr. Simms, a historian at the University of Cambridge, is no sentimentalist, and the tone of his book emanates a bracing realism.

 

Soft power be damned, Mr. Simms defines a great power in terms of its geography, population, number of nuclear weapons, size of its economy, network of military bases and resilience in the face of pain.

 

Mr. Simms is a writer of piercing insight and concision.

 

He argues that the U.S. has squandered power in unnecessary middle-size wars in the Middle East, leading us from the unipolar world that existed shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall to a bipolar one with the rise of China and eventually to a multipolar world characterized by naked "peer competition."

 

Surveying the present geopolitical landscape, Mr. Simms considers the "self-restraint" of Japan, which chooses to husband rather than unleash its incredible technological and economic resources. He refers to the "false dawn" of France under President Emmanuel Macron, who like previous French leaders has sought a multipolar world to balance against the Anglo-Saxons, even as he has discovered that his magnetic personality isn't sufficient to overcome the limitations of France itself.

 

There is the "self-denial" of Germany, which, like Japan, on account of history, chooses not to pursue "great powerness" despite its technological and economic strength. So intent has Germany been not to play the great-power game -- and yet to benefit from it -- that it has outsourced its security to the U.S., its economy to China and -- until events in Ukraine -- its energy needs to Russia.

 

 The Brussels leadership of the European Union sees itself as a "norm setter," which is sanctimonious nonsense, unless merged with some form of coercive force.

 

Then there is Russia. I believe that Russia, has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the U.S. in 30 minutes.

 

Mr. Simms says that the U.S. is both an aggressive great power and an anti-great power, as internationalism and isolationism are baked into the country's geography: a vast continent protected by oceans yet connected to the rest of the world through the great sea lines of world commerce.

 

"The Return of the Great Powers" emphasizes the geopolitical and economic centrality of Asia. Taiwan is a powder keg, akin to a combination of Alsace, Bosnia and Belgium before World War I. East Asia has replaced the Europe of the early- and mid-20th century as the focal point of world conflict. To avoid a war over Taiwan and the South and East China seas, we need to comprehend what happened in Europe a little more than a century ago. Odd Arne Westad begins "The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings From History" with a poignant and haunting visit to World War I memorials and cemeteries in France.

 

He notes that 40 million casualties, military and civilian, was the price of the 1914-18 conflict. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, there were 70,000 casualties. In the face of such an accounting, Mr. Westad asks, is there any more important issue than war and peace?

 

The answer isn't as obvious as it seems. For Americans, West Europeans and the Chinese, peace and stability are taken for granted. "Today," the author writes, "less than half of one percent of the world's population has experienced Great Power war." And there is nothing that encourages the drift toward great-power war as much as the loss of collective memory.

 

Today's similarities to the world of 1914 are legion. As was the case then, great powers are heavily armed and poised to "dominate their neighborhoods," Mr. Westad writes. Nationalism, populism and protectionism are on the rise while immigration and terrorism remain challenges. Mr. Westad adds that the threat of nuclear destruction, which helped keep the peace during the Cold War, is less of an inhibitor now. In another throwback to 1914, he observes that while America is still the greatest power in absolute terms, its power in relative terms is eroding fast as a combustible multipolar world takes shape.

 

Now as then, we live in a world full of nationalist and communal resentments, though the decision times for today's leaders are shorter, pressured as they are by the speed of the news cycle, and the advent of artificial intelligence compresses strategy itself. Mr. Westad, a historian at Yale, makes a powerful case for compromise. The media are filled with passion for human-rights causes. Holding great powers to account is the intellectual order of the day. This is estimable, but Mr. Westad -- with the Battle of the Somme in mind -- suggests that there is an even higher morality that might require concessions on those very issues to keep the peace.

 

Though Mr. Westad doesn't mention it, one is reminded of a young Henry Kissinger's assessment in "A World Restored" (1957), about the post-Napoleonic peace treaties wrought by conservative aristocrats, that the greatest danger in international affairs isn't "wickedness" but "righteousness," which can often lead to war.

 

Mr. Westad praises Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for choosing "to engage in detente with the Soviet Union," which, though it offended both human-rights activists and hard-line foreign-policy purists, halted the drift toward great-power war, "the prospect of which was very real in both the 1970s and the 1980s."

 

It may be hard to think of Nixon as a moral president or to reduce Reagan to such a simplistic theorem, but Mr. Westad's point is vitally true in the sense that he means it. Given our own tinderbox of a world -- in the face of the Somme, in the face of millions killed -- the highest morality has nothing to do with domestic scandals and everything to do with preventing great-power war.

 

---

 

Mr. Kaplan is the author of the forthcoming "China Whisperers." He is a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: Old Divisions Renewed --- For decades, the presumption among many world leaders was that an international global order would soon arrive. Today's world is far more polarized. Kaplan, Robert D.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 July 2026: C7.