Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

On the surface, Kaiser Wilhelm II had every reason to be optimistic in 1914. A century earlier, Prussia—the forerunner to Wilhelm’s German Empire—had been thrashed by Napoleon. Into the 1850s, a loosely confederated Germany was, one British observer later said, a “cluster of insignificant states under insignificant princelings.”1 Since the unification of those states in 1871, however, Germany had been a great power on the make. Its factories churned out iron and steel, erasing Great Britain’s once-unassailable economic lead. Germany built an army unparalleled in Europe; its growing navy threatened British supremacy at sea. By the early 1900s, Germany was a continental heavyweight pursuing an audacious “world policy” aimed at grabbing colonies and global power. “Germany towered above all the other continental states,” historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote; it seemed destined for dominance in Europe and perhaps beyond.2 Yet the kaiser and his aides didn’t feel confident. In the East, one enemy—Russia—was building up its army, enlarging its fleet, and slashing the time required to ready its forces for war. In the West, another enemy—France—was dramatically enlarging the army it could hurl at Germany. Even worse, a Franco-Russian-British entente had Germany surrounded, while the kaiser’s allies, he complained, were dropping away like rotten fruit.3 Perhaps time was not on Berlin’s side: If Wilhelm did not make a dash for greatness soon, Germany’s military position and hopes for worl...

Germany must strike to “defeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,” the chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, declared in 1914, even if that meant “provoking a war in the near future.” 4 When a diplomatic crisis broke upon Europe that summer, the kaiser’s government did just that—making the decisions and taking the risks that helped turn the assassination of an Austrian prince into the global conflagration known as World War I. If Germany’s rise had given it the wherewithal to destroy the balance of power, its impending decline drove the aggressive gamble that plunged Europe into darkness.

It is the resulting fear of decline—not the optimism created by perpetual ascent—that frequently incites risky, belligerent behavior. When growth slows, anxious expansion often follows. When a country is surrounded by enemies, it may try reckless gambits to break the closing ring. Most important, conflict can occur even when there is no “hegemonic transition”: The real trap may come once a previously rising challenger realizes it won’t overtake its enemies. When a dissatisfied power’s window begins to close, when its leaders fear that they cannot deliver the glories they have promised, even a low-probability lunge for victory may seem better than a humiliating descent.

In other words, the reason China’s trajectory is so alarming is not that it will inexorably overtake America. It is that some of history’s deadliest wars were started by revisionist powers whose future no longer looked so bright.

In 2015, Harvard University’s Graham Allison appropriated the wisdom of the ancients to explain the rivalries of the present. Throughout history, Allison argued, power transitions have led to war. This danger is particularly acute because China will soon be “the biggest player in the history of the world.”7 The task of the coming decades will be managing the rise of a country that is destined to replace America as the world’s leader, without causing a violent cataclysm along the way. That formula, not surprisingly, appeals to Xi Jinping, who has cited the “Thucydides Trap” in calling on America to accept Chinese primacy in Asia and beyond.

A country whose relative wealth and power are growing, whose position is improving, will surely enlarge its geopolitical horizons. But it should also want to delay a climactic confrontation—to avoid prematurely bringing down the wrath of the reigning hegemon. Such a country should presumably conduct itself as China did for two decades after the Cold War, by hiding its capabilities and biding its time.

Most of the rising countries that stagnated during the past 150 years tried to revive their economies through mercantilist policies—the use of state power to lock up markets and resources—and international expansion. They cracked down at home and carved out spheres of influence abroad. They built up their militaries and used them more assertively. In many cases, this behavior fueled great-power tensions. In some cases, it triggered major wars.

During a long economic boom, businesses enjoy swelling profits, and citizens get used to the good life. The country achieves greater international power and prestige. Leaders feed these expectations, promising the people a future of prosperity and greatness. Then stagnation jeopardizes everything. Slowing growth makes it harder for leaders to keep the people fat and happy. Economic underperformance weakens the country and gives its rivals the upper hand. Fearful of unrest, leaders repress domestic dissent. They become determined to restore stronger growth and keep foreign predators at bay. Expansion seems like an escape hatch—a way of grabbing new sources of wealth, rallying the nation around its leaders, and warding off looming threats.

Even America once engaged in anxious expansion. In the 1880s, the long post–Civil War economic surge ended, and the 1890s saw a brutal financial panic and a prolonged depression. National unemployment averaged nearly 12 percent from 1894 to 1898. Strikes, lockouts, and other labor battles became frequent and bloody.14 Beset by domestic strife, American officials also worried that the country was vulnerable to European mega-empires that were eating up the globe. Africa and Asia had already been devoured; the Western Hemisphere might be next.

Washington didn’t gently accept this fate. The government violently suppressed strikes at home and jacked up tariffs on foreign goods while engaging in a burst of global expansion.16 The United States pumped investment and exports into new markets in Latin America and East Asia while keeping its home market relatively closed against European goods.17 It built a vast navy and seized key strategic points such as Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal route. It fought a war against Spain, sent troops to China, and asserted a right to keep foreign powers out of the Western Hemisphere. “The United States . . . stands face to face with the greatest conjuncture that can confront a people,” wrote one leading expansionist. “She must protect the outlets of her trade, or run the risk of suffocation.”

Fortunately, these were mild cases of anxious aggrandizement. In each case, democratic institutions served as shock absorbers for aggressive urges and internal tensions. In each case, the country still had a relatively open, dynamic economy that could compete in foreign markets. These characteristics made it easier to restore growth by promoting innovation and peaceful commerce, rather than using full-blown military aggression to create a self-contained economic bloc.19 Finally, because postwar Japan and postwar France lived within a relatively healthy world order led by Washington, they had limited need—or ability—to engage in the worst forms of mercantilist expansion.

But what happens when stagnation hits authoritarian regimes that lack democratic legitimacy and traffic in blustery nationalism? Whose uncompetitive, state-controlled economies rely on crony capitalist networks that profit from mercantilism? That’s when countries simply push their way into foreign mark...

Consider imperial Russia. That country enjoyed an economic boom from the late 1880s to the turn of the century. Industrial output doubled, while iron and steel, crude oil, and coal production tripled. By 1900, however, a deep slump was under way. Peasants ransacked estates, workers destroyed railways and factories, and dozens of senior officials were assassinated. Russia’s rulers feared that its technological backwardness would condemn it to “industrial captivity” by more advanced nations.20 A scared, absolutist government cracked down severely: By 1905, 70 percent of the empire was under martial law and more than 10,000 people had been executed. The Russian military grew, with both the naval budget and tonnage of the fleet rising by nearly 40 percent between 1901 and 1905.21 Government-controlled banks and industries became tools of economic expansion. St. Petersburg pushed hard to strengthen its in...

A century later, Vladimir Putin’s Russia turned aggressive under similar circumstances.23 After the global financial crisis and a crash in oil prices ended a run of hydrocarbon-propelled growth, Putin needed new ways of strengthening Russia’s position, propping up its resource-dependent economy, and averting challenges to his rule. He criminalized dissent, murdered his political challengers, and steered Russia deeper into autocracy; he dialed up the nationalism and xenophobia toward foreign enemies.24 Putin sought to create a Eurasian economic bloc centered on Russia—“a new imperial community,” one cheerleader called it. He deployed state-owned enterprises, such as oil giant Rosneft, and government-backed mercenaries as tools of state power in overseas regions. Not least, Russia lopped off chunks of two neighbors (Georgia and Ukraine) that were ...

Faced with a Western-leaning Ukraine and the consequences that might follow, Putin chose to use the fruits of a years-long military buildup to vivisect that country instead. Russia annexed Crimea and fomented insurgencies in eastern Ukraine in 2014, a state of open hostility that lasted until Russia launched a full-scale invasion—representing Europe’s largest interstate military conflict since World War II—in 2022.

Economic stagnation even helps explain some of the most violent, radically disruptive behavior the world has ever seen. During the 1920s, Japan and Germany grew rapidly before hitting a wall. During the Great Depression, both countries went on expansionist rampages that were fueled by toxic ideologies as well as a desire to seize land, resources, and other assets before enemies—many of them self-created—could move in for the kill.

If rapid growth gives countries the ability to act boldly, stagnation can provide a powerful motive for rasher forms of expansion and belligerence. That’s why the most dangerous sequence in international politics is a long ascent followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.

World War I marked the calamitous coda to an era of remarkable German ascent. Between 1864 and 1871, Wilhelm I and his “iron chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, forged the German Empire through short, brilliantly orchestrated wars against Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and France. The unified state soon became an industrial juggernaut. By 1910, Germany had Europe’s leading economy; by 1914, it produced twice as much steel as Britain and had twice as many miles of railroad track. Defense spending multiplied nearly fivefold between 1880 and 1914; Berlin soon commanded Europe’s most fearsome army, and its shipyards were building a navy that would nip at Britain’s heels. Looking back, historian Paul Kennedy doubted whether the relative power “of any two neighboring states” had ever changed as much “in the course of one man’s lifetime as occurred here between Britain and Germany.”31 Not since Napoleon had Europe seen a country with such potential to dominate on land while also vying for supremacy at sea.