• Geopolitics

Never travelling further eastward than the horse-fair at Temesvar, never inviting personal risk in an encounter with anything more potentially desperate than a hare or partridge, he had constituted himself the critical appraiser and arbiter of the military and national prowess of the small countries. … And his judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words “the Great Powers.”

But as this diplomat reads the news of a bold Serbian advance in the first Balkan War, the flavor goes out of his coffee. Suddenly, the “comfortable, plump-bodied cafe-oracle” perceives that “his pompous, imposing, dictating world” has disappeared.

A map titled “Austria-Hungary” from the Library Atlas of the World, published by Rand McNally & Co. in 1912.David Rumsey Map Collection

In a recent essay, the historian Margaret MacMillan explicitly compared the complacency and overconfidence of Europe before World War I to the prevailing mindset in the West today. She quotes another author of the era, Stefan Zweig, reflecting that “institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever.” She writes,

The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination.

MacMillan’s argument draws on a long tradition of similar warnings. In a 2017 article, historians Hal Brands and Charles Edel claimed that Americans had lost their sense of tragedy. “After more than 70 years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivaled global supremacy,” they wrote, “Americans have come to take it for granted.”

As Brands and Edel show, this warning itself draws on a powerful literary tradition. Hubris becomes the tragic flaw of the United States, and historians are cast as Cassandras, calling vainly on policymakers to heed their dark prophecy.

Far be it from me to suggest that hubris was absent from either early 20th-century Vienna or early 21st-century Washington. But in both cases, that wasn’t the full story. Complacency was mixed with an intense anxiety—which fueled some of the most dangerous and self-defeating policies of both eras.

Pre-war Europeans and post-Cold War Americans were beset by existential fears about the stability of their worlds. As MacMillan herself notes, “a once-dominant power that fears it is declining can be particularly reckless.” This was something the Habsburgs discovered when, desperate to preserve their waning prestige, they precipitated the world war that destroyed them.

An engraving titled “When London Is in Ruins” by Gustave Doré published in London: A Pilgrimage in 1872.The Public Domain Review

Whatever you want to say about Europe’s fin-de-siècle thinkers, they did not suffer from a failure of imagination when it came to their own civilization’s demise.War of the Worlds is only the most famous example of a burgeoning genre of invasion literature where authors imagined their homelands conquered by a range of possible foes, from aliens to rival nations. The inversion of historic and global hierarchies was the ever-present theme. In one British story, an antipodal archeologist explores the remains of Saint Paul’s Cathedral and London Bridge. The English “have thus passed away and left nothing but these relics to attest their former magnificence,” he remarks. A similar spirit led Rudyard Kipling to imagine, on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a day when “all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

When he wasn’t lampooning the arrogance of Habsburg diplomats, Saki also made his own contribution to the invasion genre. In When William Came, he imagines a German occupation of Britain, complete with cabs traveling down Viktoria Strasse and the Kaiser’s banner hanging on Buckingham Palace. In Saki’s account, a territorial squabble in East Africa escalates, the British fleet is overwhelmed by German airpower, and the British king flees to Delhi. Germany then annexes Britain, its people becoming a “subject race like the Poles.”

A map titled “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee—New Prussia” published in Life magazine in 1916. Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection

In 1916, for example, Life magazine published an article calling on Americans to prepare for war. The alternative, it warned, was defeat and occupation at the hands of the hostile powers. Illustrating this threat was a map on the cover showing the country divided between Prussia, Turkey, and Japan. While some of the names—Turconia, Denverburg—were whimsical, the argument was deadly serious. But instead of Americans being forced to become, like the Poles referenced in Saki’s story, a “subject race,” the mapmaker drew inspiration closer to home. In a particularly revealing detail, the map features an “American Reservation” located in the Southwestern desert.

Whether satirical, fantastical, or serious, invasion literature reflected real concerns that animated Western statesmen on the eve of World War I. In an intellectual climate of imperialism and social Darwinism, it was commonplace to talk about nations as living beings and discuss geopolitical conflict in terms of their death or survival. Foreign policy became, as Russian sociologist Jakov Novikov wrote, “the struggle for existence among social organisms,” in a world that only held room for a shrinking number of great powers. In calling for the United States to annex the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt warned his compatriots, “If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace” then soon “the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by.” “When men fear work or fear righteous war,” he claimed, “they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth.”

Even when leaders saw the dangers of going to war with fatalistic clarity, they continued to fear that the consequences of sitting out a major European conflict could be even more catastrophic. If war brought immediate risks, not fighting could lead to a loss of allies or a lack of colonies, which could then, in turn, lead to national extinction. Thus, for both longstanding empires like Britain and fledgling empires like Germany, imperial competition was conflated with national and racial vitality. Both countries further feared that without naval supremacy, they could be blockaded and ultimately starved to death.

In this context, the crucial decisions of war and peace were not made in a surfeit of rash confidence, but rather with a keen awareness of the existential stakes. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, an Austrian general, declared of the Habsburgs that “so ancient a Monarchy and so glorious an Army ought not to perish without putting up a fight.” In Germany, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg told a colleague, “If there is war with France, England will march against us to the last man.” Shortly afterward, he sent his country into just such a war.

U.S. policymakers at the turn of the 21st century may have had less elaborate names than their Central European predecessors, but they also suffered from existential anxieties. The post-Cold War, end-of-history optimism—not to say overconfidence—was real. But, as people who lived through the period recall, it wasn’t the full story either. We may have had Michael Crichton and Y2K instead of H.G. Wells, but we were still on edge. Even before 9/11, the nation found plenty of things to worry about. And after 9/11, these fears took much more concrete form.

For many policymakers who missed the moral certainty of World War II, the fight against “Islamofascism” was quickly elevated to a generational struggle with elevated, if not existential, stakes. In addition to regular warnings about “the next 9/11,” nuclear anxieties from the Cold War came rushing back as well. This was the era in which George W. Bush famously warned that when “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Bush may have been stumping for a war, but he was appealing to widely shared fears. This was also the era of Graham Allison’s Nuclear Terrorism and the congressional Electro-Magnetic Pulse Commission, a time in which one writer described “a near consensus on the certitude of a nuclear attack” among experts.

A map showing the thermal impacts of a 550-kiloton surface nuclear detonation on Washington, D.C., with weather as of April 22, 2004, published in 2007. International Journal of Health Geographics

Thankfully, the United States has so far dodged the bullet from this particular smoking gun. The Iraq War, for all its terrible and ongoing consequences, was not as catastrophic as World War I. But no one could accuse U.S. politicians, policymakers, or pundits of becoming complacent over the ensuing years. From the rise of China to cyber threats, Americans were constantly reminded of just how perilous their world was.

Over the last decade, of course, warnings about the decline of the international order have emerged as a genre of their own. If some readers can’t imagine U.S. decline, or still take great power peace for granted, it is not for lack of op-eds or airport books telling them otherwise. One struggles to even choose which bestselling Robert Kaplan title to cite as an example: The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War? or Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis? or perhaps The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power.

To be clear, complacency and fearmongering can coexist. Some alarmism is justified, and there are certainly people who have remained maddeningly complacent, or deliberately oblivious to the dangers mounting around them. But diagnosing complacency as the cardinal sin of the modern United States only gets us so far.

Not everyone will respond the same way, or the right way, when you sound the alarm. Leaders will perceive different threats, and countries can overreact and underreact at the same time. Since February 2022, some commentators have warned that Washington’s support for Ukraine risks nuclear war. Others have warned that by withholding support, Washington is risking the future of the global order.

The true tragedy of geopolitics is that even having a finely honed sense of tragedy may not enough to escape it. Policymakers should certainly navigate the threats they face with humility, and we should all fight the temptation to be small, obtrusive, and self-important. But no one should be so complacent as to think that this alone will keep our fragile world from falling apart.