David Fromkin makes me think about the British mishandling the rise of Germany and what that means for our China policy

One of the great things about writing this blog is the reading suggestions made to me by readers. About a year ago, one of youse suggested David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?. I finally got around to it and am really enjoying it.

For some time, the unspoken text of some in the West on China has been to avoid making some of the mistakes the British and French made in the late 19th century as Germany became Europe’s leading economic power. In this view, the argument is that the British (primarily) stymied Germany instead of bringing it to the table where great power decisions were made.

But in reading this book, I began to wonder if we have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Fromkin, who also wrote the terrific A Peace to End All Peace, argues that Germany brought about its own fate: “the hostile encirclement that Germany so much feared was achieved by Germany itself.” German leaders moved toward war in the belief that it was inevitable, and that not only brought it on, they did so in the belief that “Germany ought to launch a war as soon as possible precisely because the chances of winning it would be less every year.”

To apply his observation to China: What, if by its own over-reaching, and through its cultural contempt for all things not Chinese, it is likely to provoke a reaction to its growing economic and military power? If that is a plausible possibility, it has huge implications for Western policy. Among other things, we’d need to consider whether the best policy is to give them enough rope.

A second thought: At the time it started World War I, Germany was the leading country in the world in technology, basic science, and perhaps in music. German often was the language of scholarly discourse. None of that applies to today’s China. Yet another observation by Fromkin does evoke China a bit: “An advanced country inside a backward governmental structure, broadly humanist yet narrowly militarist, Germany was a land of paradoxes.”