A thread on the path to World War I. Parallels between UK–Germany conflict then and US–China conflict today—and the obliviousness of elites conducting it—make it urgent to learn this now largely forgotten history. Excerpts from J. Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed.
This arms race dynamic should be familiar: imagining that intensifying the threat you pose to your rival will lead to safe subordination of the other (“deterrence”) rather than unleashing an explosive spiral of insecurity and nationalism:
It’s important to keep in mind the larger context that encouraged the arms race dynamic to spin out of control. First, intense anxiety that the other country posed an intolerable threat to future growth:
Second, the feeling on both sides that the other was trying to sabotage their own existence as a great power:
Third, the growth of organic collectivist forms of nationalism:
Fourth, the sense of zero-sum strategic competition cultivated by all of the above:
Finally, the ideological claim on both sides that securing their own hegemony was required to secure the general good of the world:
Not all of these elements are fully developed in the US–China conflict, but things are rapidly moving in that direction. And the stakes are much higher now given the threat to human life itself posed by today’s weapons and climate change.
And in contrast to the 1910s, today there are clear alternatives that would resolve the conflict without entirely overthrowing the global system. I discussed some ideas here: foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Jake Werner

Jake Werner Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jwdwerner

9 Jul
1. Since it pains me to write an essay without footnotes, I thought I’d do a thread on all the reporting, research, and thinking that stands behind this article.
2. First, a bit more of my own thinking on the historical forces behind today’s global crisis of democracy. Both to explain the worldwide reactionary turn and to develop a strategy to revive democracy, we need a systemic conceptualization, not moralizing.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
3. Short version: the advance of formal democracy and negative freedoms over the last 40 years proceeded at the expense of substantive democracy and positive freedoms, leaving the foundations rotten for all. Here’s a wonderful discussion of these issues:
amazon.com/Escape-Freedom…
Read 25 tweets
1 Apr
Biden’s pitch on public investment. It’s not just a misrepresentation of the US–China conflict. It’s also a child’s conceptualization of the global crisis of democracy: USA=democracy, but no one will like us if we’re not big and strong! And then they won’t want to be like us! 1/ Image
As this and endless versions of the same op-ed show, the US elite does not take democracy seriously. Rule by the people requires not just a periodic option to vote but, first, a meaningful choice—real differences among candidates leading to different outcomes in governance. 2/
And second, it requires that the voters, outside the one day they get to cast a ballot, are living lives that equip them with the self-confidence, knowledge, status, and sense of belonging in the community to make participation in politics both desirable and meaningful. 3/
Read 14 tweets
13 Mar
The liberal international order, functioning as designed on the single most consequential question it faces right now. I guess India and South Africa are sinister revisionist powers. 1/
law360.com/lifesciences/a…
If we want to understand what’s going on in the world, the dominant US foreign policy framing dividing the world between democracies and autocracies is not very useful. As this episode illustrates, it’s the rich vs poor divide that is more often the salient distinction. 2/
The dominant ideology is so powerful and blinding that when someone in the US says “the democracies”, it’s almost always coterminous with the rich, former colonial countries. It’s frequently used in situations that obviously do not include most of the world’s democracies. 3/
Read 8 tweets
11 Mar
1. The main thing happening here is everyone dressing up their pet priorities in anti-China rhetoric because, as Douglas Holtz-Eakin says, “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing”. But underneath the opportunism there’s a very dangerous substantive issue.
washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021…
2. We should celebrate the breakdown of the neoliberal prohibition on setting economic priorities openly and democratically. But what’s emerging in its place is a bipartisan consensus around a nationalist industrial policy to hoard scarce global growth for the US.
3. Even those in the executive branch—the home of universal considerations—seem to have given up thinking about how the interests of the US could be aligned with the interests of the rest of the world, offering instead only scaremongering on China to try to bring others along.
Read 7 tweets
30 Jan
Good news! Western commentators too often conflate Xi’s centralization with his reactionary politics. These need to be conceptually separated—in China and around the world—because progressive politics also requires overcoming fragmented politics, but for very different ends.
A big reason Western commentators interpret centralization under Xi as nothing but authoritarianism is that don’t really know anything about how the Chinese state has operated for the last forty years. So a crude stereotype of monolithic Oriental despotism fills in the gap. 2/
In fact the state became highly fractured among jurisdictions and within officials (their public duties at odds with their private interests). What Xi is attempting with the anti-corruption and Party discipline campaigns is to regain the center’s ability to impose priorities. 3/
Read 4 tweets
14 Jul 19
Quite a troubling piece from János Kornai: life in China “had frozen under Mao”; Western liberals naïvely brought the spark of life (market reform), inadvertently causing “the resurrection of the Chinese monster”; the West must now destroy the monster. 1/
ft.com/content/f10ccb…
It's hard to read the Frankenstein metaphor as anything other than a claim about the racial or civilizational essence of China. What’s interesting is the tension within the piece between the remnant abstract universalism of liberalism, still the conscious commitment, and the 2/
emergent culturalism, which has now become the real (though still unconscious) substance of the thinking. That’s best seen here, where the disavowal of the obvious consequences of his point serves as a crude screening device to escape awareness of his betrayal of liberalism. 3/
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(