The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Do we ever learn from history? If so, the parallels between the world today and the world in 1914 should strike us forcefully. Then, as now, the world’s big economies were deeply intertwined. The decades preceding the First World War marked a peak of globalisation that the world economy only regained in the 1990s. Like today, people believed ever-deepening ties of commerce rendered the idea of war irrational. It was thus unthinkable. People had grown complacent after decades of peace. Of course, there was always the crackle of distant gunfire, such as Britain’s Boer War, in South Africa, and periodic colonial skirmishes on almost every continent. But the last real clash between the ‘civilised powers’ had been more than forty years before, in the 1870–1 Franco-German War. Even then, it was strictly bilateral. Europe’s last big war had wrapped up almost a century before, with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Much like my own generation, someone of Keynes’s age was unlikely to have direct experience of conflict – or any real fears they would be touched directly by war. Like the Boer War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 took place in another time zone and was fought by a primarily lower-class volunteer army. The rest of us carried on shopping, as George W. Bush had urged us to do. More to the point, there was plenty of appetite to shop. Just as we exult in our Apple products and artisanal coffee, so Keynes’s generation revelled in their Darjeeling tea and the internal combustion en...

Victorian Britain was the hegemon; Bismarck’s Germany the challenger. In 1880, Germany had barely a third of Britain’s manufacturing production. By 1913, Germany had overtaken it.6 The similarity to China and America today is unmissable.

The chances that Trump will casually threaten China and get pulled into a dynamic he cannot control should be taken very seriously. Bismarck once said, ‘Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.’ It is conceivable Trump is possessed by some kind of morbid spirit. More worrying, however, is his proudly held ignorance of how other countries think – and thus how rivals such as China will interpret his actions. As Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz and others observed in earlier times, the key to good diplomacy is to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes. Reducing the scope for confusion is the best way to prevent wars.

What strikes Westerners (and I am no exception) as self-evidently a good thing sounds to Chinese ears just another example of missionary zeal.

What makes Chinese proud? I asked Eric Li, the Shanghai-based private equity investor, which two historic events he prized above others. The first was China’s detonation of the hydrogen bomb in October 1964. This proved the Chinese people had ‘stood up’, as Mao promised in 1949. ‘It was so extraordinary because the People’s Republic was just fifteen years old and very poor,’ said Li.13 The test also proved China was capable of catching up with Western technology. The second was Britain’s transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The handover ‘closed the curtain on China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign invaders’. Both of Li’s examples show China’s deep-rooted desire to be treated with respect and dignity.

China’s incentive to maintain Hong Kong’s relative freedoms has less to do with honouring its obligations to Britain than with convincing Taiwan that its way of life would be secure under China’s rule.

Governments of all types – democratic and authoritarian, small states and superpowers – are losing their ability to anticipate events.

Trust is the glue of a successful free society; fear is the currency of the autocrat. It is the former that is most desperately needed. By this measure – the most important of all – Trump is an unabashed autocrat. The more resistance he encounters, the more he will sow mistrust. Technology is Trump’s friend. Science is his enemy.

Nuclear control is a fundamentally top-down problem. It cannot be solved by civil society.

While Trump is president, global proliferation is almost certain to get worse. Indeed, he has expressly called for a new nuclear arms race. ‘[If] countries are going to have nukes, we are going to be top of the pack,’ he said shortly after becoming president.

Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.

When confusion is a strategic goal, it is doubly important for public figures to have the credibility to refute dangerous inaccuracies.

crisis? This book does not dare offer precise forecasts. But it is safe to say that if Germany fails to lead Europe, the European Union will fall apart. Europe may have to turn into a fortress in order to save itself.

There is a thin line between convincing people of the merits of a case and suggesting they are moral outcasts if they fail to see it. Liberal America crossed that line long before Obama took office.