A superb analysis drawing on some very insightful articles recently on the rising tensions between China and America.It is surely a sign of deepening global political tensions that the Financial Times, one of the world’s leading newspapers, chose to start the New Year with an editorial entitled “Reflections on the Great War”, drawing parallels between the present situation and that which led to the catastrophe 100 years ago.
As the editorial noted, in January 1914, few Europeans could have imagined that just seven months later “their political and military leaders would plunge the world into a cataclysmic war”, resulting in tens of millions of deaths and casualties over the next four years.
While offering the reassurance that “there is no reason to fear that the world is on the edge of such an epochal disaster”—no doubt, something similar would have been said in January 1914 had the question been raised—the editorial nevertheless noted that “there are some disquieting similarities between then and now.”
The Financial Times was not the only newspaper to draw a parallel between the geo-political relations of 2014 and those of a century ago.
In a comment published on January 2, British Daily Telegraph economic columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard referred to the return of the “spectre of 1914.” He noted that New Year predictions, while never easy, were “nigh impossible in the midst of a global regime change with so many political bombs primed to go off at any moment.”
Likening China’s imposition of an Air Defence Identification Zone in attempt to challenge Japan’s claims to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea to the German Kaiser’s disputes with France “to test Britain's response before the First World War,” he continued: “Asia’s two great powers are on a quasi-war footing already, one misjudgement away from the chain of events that would shatter all economic assumptions.”
In the “brave new world of 2014,” Evans-Pritchard continued, it was no longer “Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, but history returning in tooth and claw.”
The two newspaper articles are among many such commentaries comparing the deepening conflict between the US and China to the tensions between Germany and Great Britain in the lead-up to the outbreak of World War I.
Warning that the friction of rival nationalisms and historical grievances were “no less capable of causing war today than they were in 1914”, the Financial Times noted that “the risks are especially acute if the international system is being reordered by the rise of new great powers and the relative decline of old ones.” A century ago Germany was seeking its “place in the sun” at the expense of the British empire. Now, increasing tensions in the East China Sea between Beijing and its neighbours, which rely on US support, “recall Germany’s strained relations with Britain, France and Russia before 1914.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hchdc
This radio broadcast of the top foreign policy bods of the BBC also mentioned the prospect of war between China and America. Like the foreign policy experts, the chances are low as one hopes that rational leaders will understand the madness of a great war.
But of course, the same feeling prevailed in 1914 and rational actors still ended up going to war.
The only consolation is that Europe is a total backwater and the main action will be in East Asia.