And here I think I'm obligated to invoke Norman Angle, who famously wrote about how Europe wouldn't go to war because of the various ways the countries of Europe are integrated with one another.

So that book was one of the absolute bestsellers of 1913.

Not just because it told people what they wanted to hear, but also because it was a really good book.

It was wrong.

And it was wrong, I think, for reasons that only became obvious in hindsight.

And this is what is so striking with 1914, a bit different from 1939, or even perhaps the origins of the Cold War.

In the summer of 1914, as you said, no one expected a world war.

But Arne, I want to end on the broader question of, based on what we know from history, What are the keys for enabling world leaders, whether in Washington, D.C., in the Kremlin, in Moscow, in Beijing, from walking down the same road that led to 1914? Are there particular techniques that sort of jump out at you that say these are the sort of things you want to try? Are there certain decisions that you look at and you say this is what you want to avoid? How do we take our understanding of how war began in August of 1914 and apply it usefully today?

On the other hand, we have a strong interest in ending the war in Ukraine, and could you imagine China and the US coming to the table and making some kind of grand bargain? I'm not saying they should solve everything, but coming to the table, establish a framework, uh, that looks at these two conflicts at the same time.

I think that's highly unlikely.

I mean, in terms of actual, um, negotiating involvement by these two powers that would look at the two conflicts in parallel.

I mean, I wish we were in a global situation where that was possible, but I don't think we are.

But there is another element to this which might end up having some of the same effect, and that is that China's patience with a high level of instability that Putin's war in Ukraine is causing is now running thinner than what it did in the past because of the added instability in the Middle East.

So in that sense, there is a kind of convergence on the Chinese side with, with regard to this.

I also think with regard to Ukraine, that it is dawning on the Chinese leadership, though far too slowly, that this is not just about Russia and the United States, that the real price for China, uh, the real challenge for China here is the relationship between China and Europe over, over the war in Ukraine.

You can't trust him, and the agreements that we made, he never respected them."

And I'm curious, is that the analogy that you're in part seeking to imply, that if this relationship between the United States and China isn't clearly carefully managed and handled, that we could end up somewhere that would make no sense and that nobody intends us to be.

So that's part of why this parallel works, I think, is a warning.

The First World War, like most great international conflicts, have many sources.

I mean, some of them are structural, some of them are even more accidental than they are connected to decisions that policymakers make at a certain point.

I mean, there were a lot of structural conflicts, particularly in terms of a long period of globalization that was in crisis, of tensions in terms of nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism.

The most privileged powers in Great Britain is, I think, the best example of that.

Feeling that they were all done by the international system that they themselves had set up.

What would you say to our listeners?

Help us put Africa into the framework of your book.

I'm glad you raised that, Todd, because it is something that I've been very preoccupied with over time and something I'm still very preoccupied with today.

And the starting point, of course, has to be this...

Perhaps the most remarkable of all the developments that we have seen in our own time, which is that I think it was 2024, was the last year in which there was any natural population growth, meaning actual increase in live birds, in any country outside of Africa.

That is remarkable.

I mean, that has never happened before in human history, that you have all demographic growth concentrated on one continent.

And the consequences of that are going to be massive.

What's the most realistic near-term intervention that could actually reduce the probability of sort of escalation, the worst case scenarios?

And I would note here that you wrote a piece in, in 2021 in Foreign Affairs with Li Chen, a Chinese historian, where you do kind of point out that there are some warnings in that history, even if we shouldn't try to make the parallel too exact.

No, I think that's absolutely correct.

I think, I think John and Hal have got it right in the sense that there are some very significant lessons that we should learn from, you know, the most recent long-lasting international system, which was the Cold War.

Let me return to that in a second.

I think the problem, though, is that the way that the phrase Cold War or the term Cold War has been used in order particularly to characterize the Sino-American relationship really is not sufficient to describe a very new reality.

So I've already talked about multipolarity, which, you know, is one of the issues at stake here.

Uh, I don't see the world as turning increasingly, uh, even when I, I wrote that piece back in 2019, I didn't see the world becoming increasingly bipolar as during the Cold War.

That in some way seems like the most worrying element of this as I look at it.

So can you explain what that order was, and why did Britain dismantle it, and how did that then lead to the Great War?

So this is one of the similarities, I think, uh, with our own time, that back then the leading power, Great Britain, uh, were among the first to take steps to break down the kind of order that it had put in place during the 19th century, just like the United States has been doing much of the same today since the mid-19-- uh, since the mid-2010s.

And I think there is a lot of, there are a lot of lessons from that.

But if you look at what happened, um, a hundred years ago, I think very much of this was a little bit like it is today in response to the high level of globalization that you found during the latter part of the 19th century.

Globalization in terms of economic and social technological integration of a level that we don't even have today.

I mean, there was more international trade, there was more international investment, uh, relatively speaking, in the period before 1914 than we ever achieved since.

And for many people, um, around the world, this of course prevent- presented enormous opportunities, uh, not least opportunities in the rising powers such as Germany or the United States to catch up with Britain as the predominant power in terms of economic development and in terms of technology, just as we have seen of late with regard to China first and then other emerging powers, uh, of our own time.

But another thing that I th- think the United States is doing is dismantling also political alliances, right? With NATO, with Europe, and there doesn't seem to be, uh, any logic behind that, and that does- seems to be different than what Britain was doing back then.

So bringing that into the modern era, what, what can we draw from previous experience of the rise or collapse of globalization and the, and the, and the, the development of technology that maybe should make us less or more worried about the period we're in now?

No, that's a good question.

I mean, it was actually the end of globalization or globalizations that first got me interested in writing this book, because it seemed to me that our own moment is so similar to what we had in the early 20th century, with a very long period of globalization economically, socially, that had been going onFor a very, very long time, and it seemed to be very successful for most of the countries involved until what was then the, the predominant powers started turning against it because they felt that globalization was not working for them.

Just like the United States, in many ways, was the leader in trying to break away from a globalizing international economic system that the United States itself had created in the middle and late, late 20th century.

And that is really striking.

I mean, how quick those processes can be, right? I mean, I remember when I was working in London in the, in the early 2010s, and, and some of us, I was at the LSE, good place for this, started talking about industrial policy.

And people were saying, "Industrial policy? Isn't that like the, you know, 1950s? It doesn't belong to our time." And then you see how quickly things have, have changed, including to a very high extent for Britain itself, right? So, so that is a similarity.

They're gonna get a nuclear bomb."

How does that differ, certainly in a, a case like, say, Russia and Ukraine, where you have an expansionist country, how does that differ from, say, outright surrender?

So this is where one has to be very careful, and I think, again, those warnings from history may come in with regard to this.

And the Ukraine war is a, is a, is a almost a perfect example of this.

So on the one hand, you have to avoid the sense that you le- legitimize Russia's war of aggression, territorial-based war of aggression against Ukraine, uh, because the consequences of that would be quite severe.

On the other hand, you have to bring the active phase of a war that, at the moment, is so obviously, blatantly not going anywhere to a halt, to some kind of ceasefire arrangement.

What, what I generally said with regard to this, and sort of mimicking the Chinese and their, uh, their, their way of putting Chinese positions on, on international issues, what, what Europe and United States should have with regard to Russia as the ceasefire negotiations get underway are the three nos.

So no recognition of Russian territorial grabs, no recognition of Russia having a final say on any security arrangements with regard to Ukraine, and no influence by Russia on the integration of Ukraine into an EU setting.

And presumably retaining that understanding, because it's not as if previous leaders haven't had that understanding, but if we were to relearn it, we can't go through the cycle all over again.

along.What were the three pre-1914 strate- strategic considerations in Europe?

So the, the main strategic considerations, I think, were, uh, especially connected to the idea that some level of deterrence would prevent war.

I mean, a little bit like how much of our thinking has been since 1945, m- particularly with regard to Europe, but also to some extent with regard to, to East Asia.

So I think this was the, the prevailing idea, was that, uh, the, uh, patterns of alliance that were there would act as a natural deterrent against war.

And at the same time, there was this sort of concept overall that great powers would be able to sort out the differences among them on the bigger issues, while smaller countries would then fall into lockstep with what their, their bigger patrons would, would want or, or set the, set the direction for.

Now, of course, the, the, the, the, the, the challenge with this was that, as I said earlier, there were, had been no serious attempt at integrating Germany into some kind of general collective European security system, in a way similar to what we failed, in my view, to do with Russia and China after the, after the Cold War ended.

Uh, I don't think in our own day that these arrangements would necessarily have been a barrier against, um, Chinese or, or, or Russian, uh, aggressive intent, but they would have delivered a kind of framework in which some of these strategic tensions could have been dealt with in ways that are far superior to, to what we are seeing today.

And what are the three strategic considerations among contemporary great powers?