Yale History Professor We Are Sleepwalking Into The Next World War

TITLE: Yale History Professor: We Are Sleepwalking Into The Next World War - And We’re Running Out Of Time CHANNEL: Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl DATE: 2026-05-16 ---TRANSCRIPT--- This is a conversation with Odd Arna Westat, a professor of modern history at Yale University. He recently wrote a book called The Coming Storm, which is essentially a very direct and urgent warning that we are almost to the letter following the exact same geopolitical patterns and trajectories that more than a hundred years ago led to the First World War. the greatest and the most destructive conflict that the world has ever seen at the time and that just like then we are now sleepwalking into another world war only this time even more destructive. We talk about how the exact same conditions that fueled the conflict back then are increasingly emerging today. from a global hegeimon dismantling the world order it itself once built. A rising power that doesn’t want to be contained. Its junior partner launching a war that risks dragging everyone into a bigger conflict. Old alliances falling apart and new ones forming in a global situation filled with an increasing amount of volatility and unpredictability that only needs a single spark to start a fire. and about whether and how it can be prevented or whether it’s already too late to do that and much more. This podcast and interviews like this can exist only thanks to its supporters on Patreon to whom I’m deeply grateful and who get a bunch of perks in return for their support including the full adree version of this and other episodes and additional bonus content. And if you want to get even more geopolitical analysis to help you filter all the noise from the stuff that actually matters, I also write a newsletter. You can find the link in the description. And now enjoy the conversation. Okay. So, uh, welcome to the podcast.

It’s great to be with you, Dominic. So, we’re going to be talking about your book, which I think is quite unique given your your expertise and your credentials because you basically argue that today we’re in a situation that in many ways resembles the powder keg that was Europe before the first world war. and that many of the trends and patterns in geopolitics that led back then to the greatest war the world has ever seen until then are now emerging again increasingly and that there is growing risk that we will see the same outcome of another great war and there’s a lot to to discuss and unpack there and I’m really excited about it because I really I I love historical analogies and parallels and I love the pre-war uh era period as well. Um but maybe to start would you mind in your own words sort of laying out the core thesis first of why do you think that the era we’re living now resembles the pre914 years. Sure. So, and this is a book um that was driven in terms of uh writing it, I think, from the best possible uh standpoint, which was sheer irritation with the uh comparisons between now and the cold war era that you hear a lot about, especially in the United States perhaps, but you also find it in Beijing and you find it in in Russia and you find it a few other places. And I don’t think that analogy, that comparison really holds up. It’s a very different kind of world from what we saw during the Cold War or any point really in our own lifetimes. Uh it’s multipolar. Um it’s not bipolar like the Cold War. Great powers compete within the same economic system. There’s been a long period of great power peace that went before it with a substantial degree of economic and social integration. That’s not the Cold War setting, right? So u what historians very often do then if you want to come up with something that might be meaningful for our own time is to is to look for historical parallels that will never be exact. You know you can’t step into the same river twice. Um but could still help alert us to some of the real danger signals some of the warnings coming out of the past. And and that’s for me in terms of our more recent experience in a in in in a longer setting that is the period in the late 19th century and early 20th century before the outbreak of the first world war. lots of things in common. Uh maybe especially with regard to the kind of structural issues that I just mentioned which I think are very very similar today to what they were back then. And and the whole book is written as a warning in the sense that we have to be very very careful particularly in periods of tremendous and very rapid change as we saw in the early 20th century as well not to repeat some of those mistakes that led to global disaster in 1914. Yeah, I I do we’ll get into the exact uh systemic similarities and comparisons between then and now. But maybe before we get to that, I feel that the most common analogy apart from the analogy with the Cold War that we often see is an analogy with not preWorld War I but preWorld War II and the 1930s. And I imagine that since that’s not what you wrote the book about, you don’t really think the analogy with that is correct or not as correct as with the pre-1914 era. What what do you think about those analogies? People saying that, you know, 2020s is the new 1930s,

I don’t think it holds up. I mean, I obviously there are there are things that we can learn, warnings that we can heed from that time period as well, for sure. But as an era, as a historical epoch, they are very very different. I mean, in the inter war years, we came out of a great war that had just taken place. The world went through very rapid uh [snorts] changes that came out as a result of that global war. The rise of totalitarian ideologies, the collapse of the economic system overall in the in in in the great depression, just the the levels of of conflict of hatred that had already been created by the foregoing era. So that’s not similar to our own time. Uh I think it’s a very different kind of setting uh from what you’re experiencing today. Um that was not a normal kind of world in in many ways. You have to go back to the period before 1914 to find something that looks a little bit like the kind of world that we’ve had now with a long period of stability relative stability that had that had gone before it. So there are things we can learn from the inter war years but you know in in overall structural sense uh our time today and that time period are very different. Yeah. Because the setting that you talk about and that you describe was back then and that it is today is more a system that was in place for a long time. And for a long time it worked pretty well and ensured this this period of a long piece that but then that started for various reasons to decay and decline and didn’t work as it was intended as it did did before and that led to the whole thing falling apart and instability and that eventually to a big conflict and I guess that’s more similar to the period of that we are living now. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean I think those similarities are actually really really striking. I mean I think um the fact that almost no one alive today have experienced great power war. They have experienced a lot of water or people in some countries at least some terrible wars some horrifying wars but they have not been great power wars. And I think that’s the kind of difference that really is significant when we think about this in broad in a broad context in in two directions. I mean first one is that people really can’t imagine uh the consequences of great power war. I think even at levels of political leadership it’s hard to envisage the difference between having wars going on and having a global great power war. Um I often make the point that particularly when I speak to policy makers that as many soldiers were killed in the first two weeks of the battle of the sum in the summer of 1916 as were killed in all great power wars between the Napoleonic wars between 1815 and 1914 the outbreak of the first world war. So it’s a complete difference in terms of scale. And the second part is that since no one has experienced this, there is this general tendency as was the case before 1914 to believe that it cannot happen. Since it hasn’t happened to us, it’s unlikely that it will happen. And that I think is a is a fallacy of of of some significance. I think yeah, I think those are both great points. I think maybe on the first one, it does seem to be kind of one of the defining points about the first world war. the sort of expectation of everyone going in that it will be a relatively easy short war and everyone thought that their side’s going to win it quite easily and then this shock of how in incredibly deadly it was and how devastating the consequences were as opposed to everyone was expecting before. Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, this idea that what started in the summer of 1914 would be a little bit like the wars that had gone before, the much smaller regional wars that had been there for much of the much of the 19th century. Um, and then it turned out not to be the case. I the point there I think is a really good one. I mean, in the sense that it couldn’t be the case. I mean, from the moment when this war breaks out um in the late summer of of 1914, it is pretty clear for anyone who looks at it from a broader perspective that the chances that this will become a global war are are are pretty pretty overwhelming. But in spite of that, that was not enough to hold people back from getting that war started. And I think that’s also a very important realization here. Just a quick break here. If you care about geopolitics, and I assume you do since you’re listening to this, you might want to consider signing up to get my newsletter, Station Zero. Once every week or two, you’ll get a free geopolitical analysis, a story, trend, or pattern of something that’s really important, but that most people tend to miss. If you want to sign up, just click the link in the description. And now back to the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the point that we can never imagine, maybe it’s just a incapability of being human is to imagine that something that terrible will happen is maybe a big part of that. Um, so I think to be able to talk about the lessons and warnings for today, we probably have to kind of start talking about what actually led to the first world war back then. And you in your argument put a lot of emphasis, not as much on Germany wanting more territory and power, but a lot of it is on Britain dismantling the world order that it previously built and managed itself. And then something that I never thought about or never heard about before, and I think most people probably haven’t either. So can you explain what that order was and why did Britain dismantle it and how did that then led to the great war? So this is one of the similarities I think uh with our own time that back then the leading power Great Britain uh were among the first to take steps to break down the kind of order that it had put in place during the 19th century just like the United States has been doing much of the same today since the mid 19 since the mid20s and I think there is a lot There were a lot of lessons from that. But if you look at what happened um 100 years ago, I think very much of this was a little bit like it is today in response to the high level of globalization that you found during the latter part of the 19th century. Globalization in terms of economic and social technological integration of a level that we don’t even have today. I mean there was more international trade, there was more international investment uh relatively speaking in the period before 1914 than we ever achieved since. And for many people um around the world, this of course prevent presented enormous opportunities, not least opportunities in the rising powers such as Germany or the United States to catch up with Britain as the predominant power in terms of economic development and in terms of technology just as we have seen of late with regard to China first and then other emerging powers uh of her own time. And at some point then uh especially because Britain domestically didn’t handle its own matters uh well just like the United States hasn’t handled it its own domestic situation well in my view over the last generation. There is this populist nationalist backlash which basically says from the side of the predominant power other countries are all to take advantage of us. They’re they’re stealing our jobs. They are stealing our invention, cell technology and they are preparing to use it against us. And the reaction against that very often is to move in the direction of reducing that level of integration through um trade wars through an increasing level of of tariffs. I mean all of which we saw in the pre-1914 period as well. Now it should be said one a difference here is that the United States has gone much further much more quickly in terms of dismantling the the the international system that it itself had set up after the second world war than Britain ever did in the period before before 1914. Um the discussions the issues were were very much the same. But I think what has happened now uh in terms of taking action on some of these urges in the United States goes much further than what was the case before the first world war. I do find it fascinating that so many things that you said about Britain back then are literally one to one directly applicable to today. You could literally say the same thing about the United States today. Um I think maybe the one difference is that while you could argue that uh in the economic trade area, the system has not been working for Britain back then, maybe even for the United States. And so some of the decisions or policies in that sense probably not tariffs in the way Trump is doing them but you know the the system is probably working less well for them than it did maybe 20 30 years ago but another thing that I think the United States is doing is dismantling also political alliances right with NATO with Europe and there doesn’t seem to be uh any logic behind that and that seems to be different than what Britain was back then to some extent. I mean, I think the similarities are that Britain back then, like the United States today, didn’t get its priorities right. I mean, it it didn’t emphasize the kind of issues that could really be a threat to its own position and to global stability in a in a broader sense. extent it got itself entangled in a in a number of of unnecessary and rather futile wars um and of course a lot of dissension um at home. A lot of people back then believed that Britain was facing a civil war because of the situation in in Ireland and and the terrible way in which that had been been handled. But there was a there was a rise in sort of domestic tension overall in Britain that parallels in many ways what you have seen in the United States. So even though I agree with you that Britain didn’t have the kind of system of alliances and friendships globally that the United States has developed over the past three generations. That is that is as I point out to the book that is a critical difference between then and now. One that could hopefully be turned to our advantage if we know how to make use of it in order to create greater stability. though it doesn’t look like that during the the Trump administration at at the moment. I still see quite a lot of similarities um between that kind of behavior particularly at the strategic level and a lot of uncertainty in the world at large as to what was still regarded as the predominant power Britain then and the United States now would react if a real worldass crisis came along. So I think that’s the parallel u more than the sort of exact parallel in terms of in terms of alliance relationships on on that there are definitely some differences. Yeah. Well would you maybe explain how do we get from the global hegeimon the global superpower starting to basically rejecting the system that it and rules that it built itself. How do we get from there to then that enabling or leading to a great conflict? What is the connection there? Maybe that what was it back then and what it might look like today? So I think that’s very similar back then and today. It’s the uncertainty that is created about the power and purpose of not just the the the leading power but also about the world order the the the uh international arrangements that had been put in place before. And what comes out of that is very often, as was the case in 1914, a willingness in terms of rising powers to take risks, to act in ways that they wouldn’t have done if they were convinced that at least some fundamental elements of the previous world order were still in place. And this is the point I make in the book about alliances that u I think quite a number of of historians working on that era have gotten wrong. It wasn’t the existence of alliances in 1914 that led to war. It was the uncertainty that had been created about whether these alliances would work and how powers would position themselves in case there was a real worldass crisis in what was then the world’s most significant region. meaning Europe would actually come along. So I think that’s one of the biggest warnings for our own time is that you know the more the more quickly we move in and I think we are already in um a period of great uncertainty in terms of the directions that international affairs will take and the commitment that exists among leading powers to upholding the kind of world order that has existed since the second world war the more dangerous the world becomes. Um this was the dilemma in many ways that Germany faced in the summer of of of 1914 and I described that in great detail in the book. This idea that you know if a world crisis were to come along how should Germany react? Uh it wasn’t Germany in that sense that initiated the chain reaction that led to the war. But the problem was that a lot of people on the German side were thinking if there were to be a great clash between the leading powers, it might be better for Germany that it happened now rather than later. And I think that form of thinking came about because of the uncertainty about whether existing alliances would hold the alliance between France and and Russia especially and what Britain would do in case there was a there was a European war. I want to take a quick break here to make a little announcement. I love maps. Historical maps, geographic maps, all kinds of maps. I’ve got a bunch of them on my walls. And there’s just something about looking at that beautiful map that I find for some reason really satisfying. And because I also love geopolitics, I always wanted a map that would both look beautiful and actually have geopolitics as its focus to capture and visualize balance of power. And since that didn’t really exist, I decided to make one. It’s called Geopolitics of the Western Pacific. And it’s a physical map print that I created together with a professional designer. It shows the strategic flash points of the region from Taiwan to North Korea and the South China Sea and all the key bases, invasion routes, missile ranges, and everything else. And it’s presented in a way that’s actually beautiful enough to hang on your wall. I basically made it for myself, but if you’re also a geopolitics and a map nerd, you might like it as much as I do. So, if you’d like one for yourself, you can get it now using the link in the description. And now back to the video. And I guess we’re maybe not there yet, but in terms of the previous system and rules falling apart and all the great powers kind of figuring out what the new rules are today, we are getting there. When you I feel like it shows in a few different ways. You could look at Europe kind of discussing what it might look like, what it might do without the United States. Russia probably testing what the new limits are with the war in Ukraine. Um, and maybe some countries aligning or thinking about aligning more with China as the new coming power rather than the United States uh, previously. So I guess that’s maybe where we are on the timeline now. Yeah, I mean I see a lot of similarities in terms of how countries position themselves and how they behave. Um now let me be on the line none of these repositionings necessarily lead to war certainly not global great power war but they are part of destabilizing the whole system. So I’m I’m very careful in the book as you will know from you know in in distinguishing among saying um in my view what we shouldn’t say that no change is possible because of it would lead to instability that would lead to war. I mean international systems change all the time. International constellations change very often. I mean it’s in no way given uh to use an example from today’s most significant region in my view East Asia that the United States being separated by a great ocean from Eastern Asian affairs forever should go on being the decisive power in that part of the world. There is nothing given about that um at all. uh but the question is how does that rearrangement actually happen and that is the similarity I think with Europe uh before 1914 and and especially with regard to Germany’s position the establishment powers had not been able to find a role for Germany within Europe and I think very much the same can be said for China which has been growing even faster than what Germany did uh in terms of East Asia today eventually I think at some point China is going to be the predominant power in East Asia. But the question is when and how that happens. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let let’s let’s talk about that because you sort of in the book you describe a few different ingredients that you need in order to come to the recipe of a world war and the declining hegeimon destroying its own system is one of them. And then another there’s a few more, but another big one is the rising power and what that happens with that. And in before World War I, it was Germany. Today in your parallel, it’s obviously China. And in the book, you kind of make the argument that Germany back then the the other powers, especially Britain, didn’t really know how to integrate it into the global system and they chose to contain it instead, which Germany didn’t want to accept and so created this tension that led to the war, which I guess again seems quite similar to today. But what would what do you think would have been the way back then that would have maybe prevented the war of how to deal with Germany? And how would that apply to China today? What’s the lesson from back then that we can apply to China to prevent a war that might be on a horizon? So I I think there are lots of things that we can learn from what went wrong in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. I mean the most important one is that Germany was never in a position where it could take up a role in Europe commensurable to the new kind of power and dynamism that Germany had both in economic terms to begin with much like China up to now and then increasingly in military and and strategic terms. the emphasis was generally on lamenting the consequences of Germany’s rice. Um and then uh trying to trying to contain it and and try to find ways in which the international system in Europe could be turned against Germany and certainly Britain that was guilty of that up to a point. in France, Russia were in many ways more guilty than what Britain was um of this this complete uh inability to understand that things were changing on the ground much faster than their mindsets were. And I think that’s a similar uh situation that we have with regard to with regard to China today. to be more concrete about this. I mean, I think if you think about what actually did lead to war, which were mainly um strategic security issues or territorial issues, what Britain should have done back then, just like what the United States should do today with regard to China, is to try to engage um Germany, try to find ways in which uh Germany could be integrated into attempting to resolve some of the conflicts that were ongoing in Europe. instead of sometimes at least fanning the flames of those conflicts because one thought that they could be turned against um against Germany or against Germany’s allies. It’s also the general approach I think with regard to to economic issues. I mean there was no serious attempt at thinking through for oneself for British interests or or or or French interests or Russian interests what the economic rise of Germany actually meant in terms of what one had to do at home to strengthen one’s own economies. Um instead there was this continuous regret in terms of Germany’s rights. I mean my my Yale colleague uh Paul Kennedy who wrote this wonderful book now almost 50 years ago about the rise of Anglo-German antagonism. Professor Kennley puts it this way. He says that what the Brits were saying to the Germans was was basically you know if you could only stop growing little hunts then everything would be fine. If you if you would run around in Leoren and be of the same kind that you were before that wouldn’t be a problem. And of course, Germany wasn’t labeled wasn’t willing to do that just like China isn’t willing to to curtail its own growth because of difficulties that exist in other countries. So I think those are the mistakes that we are making with regard to that situation. And I guess another or or it seems to me that part of the argument of what you’re saying of how to work with China in order to prevent a conflict would be for the United States to do some concessions on its influence in China’s region. as you said, you you said that the United States is far away and it’s probably impossible for it to maintain the the level of influence in the Pacific uh with China’s growth forever anyway. And I think there’s a lot of I think that’s really an interesting argument because uh isn’t there or maybe for one has there ever been a case where a the current hegeimon the current superpower has voluntarily given up uh its own influence and gave it to the rising power in order to prevent a possible conflict. because it seems like a counterintuitive thing for how superpowers operate and very unlikely for for any superpower to do. Thank you for listening to the free part of this interview. 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