How to Think About Strategic Futures

The State is defined by law and by war: it is the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence, within and without, that marks it as a State.

—Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles 

 

Even as the book was in press, I had the pleasure of reading Philip Tetlock’s remarkable study Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? His data showed that linear forecasting by experts in the domains of politics and geopolitics has a dismal track record—it is almost as random in its success rate as that of expert forecasting in financial markets. However, his findings as regards the utility of scenario planning were hardly more reassuring. It can actually be counter-productive, he argued, by causing us to misread the relative probabilities of various dramatic scenarios.

The dominant danger, Tetlock concluded, regardless of the methodology we adopt, is hubris: the close-mindedness that leads us to dismiss dissonant possibilities too quickly, or not to perceive them at all. As a corrective to this pervasive human tendency, he wrote, our best hope is to cultivate a kind of metacognitive capacity for self-overhearing—for listening to ourselves think. He derived this idea of “self-overhearing” from Harold Bloom’s analysis of Hamlet in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Being as addicted to the study of literature as to that of geopolitics and history, I was fascinated that he should have arrived at this conclusion after so much strenuous data collection and statistical analysis. What it comes down to, he concluded, is that:

 

“We need to cultivate the art of self-overhearing, to learn how to eavesdrop on the mental conversations we have with ourselves as we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking core assumptions.”

 

I am sceptical of the readiness or capacity of human beings to do this with any consistency or reliability. But groups of human beings or strategic planners may be able to do so, if they set their minds to it. Let me illustrate, however, what I mean by the kind of linear extrapolation and unexamined assumptions that we need to be prepared to rethink—and to overhear ourselves making or defending—in our present circumstances.

In 1986, in a book on the weaknesses of the Soviet Union, much maligned by Cold Warriors who thought it was soft on communism, Paul Dibb wrote:

 

“The Soviet Union’s internal political system is not considered here, because no fundamental changes are to be expected … What has been built so painstakingly over the generations, with much sacrifice, ruthlessness and conviction will not be allowed to disintegrate or radically change. The USSR has enormous unused reserves of political and social stability on which to draw and in all probability it will not, in the next decade, face a systemic crisis that endangers its existence.”

 

This is a priceless illustration of the kind of errant forecasting that Tetlock studied in detail, and it has the advantage, for our purposes, of being home-grown. Dibb was, of course, in very good company in utterly failing to foresee the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Paul Kennedy wrote, in 1988, that the Soviet Union would not countenance the loss of East Germany or withdraw from Eastern Europe, because of Soviet fear of a reunified Germany and because “the men in the Kremlin still think in terms of imperialist Realpolitik” and had an aversion to withdrawing from anywhere. This was published in the very year that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and one year before it withdrew peacefully from the whole of Eastern Europe.

 

I do not make this claim lightly and I do not make it with the presumption that I can lay out a thoroughly reframed understanding of international security. But ever since my Quadrant essay in April 2001, “Twelve Questions for Paul Dibb”, I have been interested in seeing such a reframing done. I believe the work of Philip Bobbitt, since 2001, is so thought-provoking that it deserves to be more widely studied and absorbed into our thinking about these matters. He calls for and has engaged in scenario planning, but I shall come back to that. First let me sketch out why I think his work has so much to offer.

Consider a few of the striking developments of the past decade. We have seen:

• the eruption of global jihad;

• a rapid increase in Chinese wealth, power and assertiveness;

• the re-Kremlinisation of Russian politics under Putin;

• a widening proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, with Pakistan, Iran and North Korea of particular concern;

• growing uncertainty about the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and of counter-proliferation with regard to WMD in general;

• emerging problems with cyber security, including the aggressive use of deniable cyber-attacks on Western databases by Russia and China;

• the arrival of the Peak Oil problem;

• escalating concern about complex challenges of apparent climate change;

• anxieties with regard to the possibility of pandemic disease, such as H5N1 influenza, in a globalised world;

• the collapse of the Doha Round of free trade talks and the sub-prime-primed “Minsky Moment” in US financial markets;

• a widespread sense that the United States itself is in irreversible relative decline as a power and the tendency to liken it to the Roman empire; and

• the more and more evident deficiencies of the international institutions set up in the 1940s, following the defeat of the fascist powers, to help maintain world order, notably the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

All this can hardly have been what Francis Fukuyama had in mind in the early 1990s as “The End of History”. Yet this list is only a very preliminary reckoning with what has been going on. Let me, therefore, confine myself to three central claims:

1. In order to think more or less coherently and in practical terms about this array of challenges, we need a new kind of general theory in the geopolitical arena analogous to the “general theory of employment, interest and money” developed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression;

2. Philip Bobbitt has actually offered such a general theory, in The Shield of Achilles;

3. In working with his general theory, as with any theory, we will get the most return on our investment of time and effort by adopting a Popperian approach to the relationship between theory, reality and judgment.

Those of you familiar with the work of Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and Its Enemies and Conjectures and Refutations, among other works, will be aware that he rejected the concept of knowledge as the apprehension of certain truth, in favour of the idea that we advance our understanding of the world through making bold conjectures that are then tested against reality and revised as we discover our errors.

 

A great deal was changing in the world before the demolition of the Berlin Wall and it is those changes which both triggered that seminal event and opened the floodgates to much that we are experiencing now. We should not say, incidentally, that the Berlin Wall “fell”, because this suggests that it did so all on its own, whereas human agency was the critical factor. There has been widespread agreement since then that we need a conceptual reframing of geopolitics. It’s just that the various such reframings on offer have not, thus far, been very convincing. There has been such an avalanche of books on geopolitics over the past seventeen years that we can feel swamped by it to the point where we all but give up on a serious effort to master it all. But if we do that, we reduce ourselves to reflex reactions, confusion and ineptitude. We need powerful conceptual tools. We need, I suggest, a new and compelling general theory.

What, then, is the relationship between globalisation, the global jihad, the rise of China, the resurgence of authoritarianism in a wild, quasi-capitalist Russia, the dangers of cyber warfare, the challenge of WMD proliferation, the collapse of the Doha Round, the colossal “Minsky Moment” on Wall Street, the dangers of climate change, the view of the United States as a declining empire and so on? How do we make sense of all these phenomena? What is it actually intelligent to do, if we want to respond to them all without coming to grief?

It would be fatuous of me to declare that the answer is simple or that I am certain I have it. But as a student of these matters, I find the work of Philip Bobbitt more thought-provoking and original than any other attempt to make sense of our present circumstances.

To underscore the need for serious theory, consider, for example, the idea that the United States is in decline and can usefully be compared with the Roman empire. This is an attempt at theory by means of historical analogy. Even those whose knowledge of history is pretty thin have heard of the fall of the Roman empire to the barbarians and the coming of the Dark Ages. The very idea of the republic and the empire, as shadowy, portentous concepts, surfaces again and again in popular culture, most famously in the Star Wars films. Somehow, the analogy with Rome seems to provide perspective—but it is a fatalistic and ominous perspective that does little to enhance our sense of what it might be useful to do in all the circumstances.

Polybius, writing The Rise of the Roman Empire, in the second century BC, anticipated the empire’s eventual fall. He argued that constitutional reforms would be needed to postpone this fall, but he was somewhat vague about the design and implementation of such reforms and did not anticipate that the empire would last another 600 years. When the empire’s fall began, with the sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths in 410 AD, St Augustine made an attempt at a theoretical synthesis, in The City of God against the Pagans. Empires come and go, he wrote, but the true eternal city, the City of God, will not fall and we should place our hopes in it, not in Rome. He believed, in fact, that he and his contemporaries lived in the senectus mundi—the old age of the world—and that the End of the World was coming, if not imminently then within that epoch.

The problem with cyclical or metaphysical theories like those of Polybius and St Augustine is that they are both too vague and too fatalistic. They do not offer us enough traction for taking action that would alter the anticipated course of events, or enable us to grapple more effectively with the challenges we face. Yet that is what we require of theory in the physical sciences, or economics. It is, surely, what we need from theory when it comes to understanding geopolitics and the tasks of our time. It is what Bobbitt has attempted to provide with his general theory.

 

 

“There have been many studies of the development of warfare, even more of the history of international relations, while those on international and constitutional law are literally innumerable. But I know of none that has dealt with all three of these together, analysed their interaction throughout European history, and used that analysis to describe the world in which we live and the manner in which it is likely to develop. Indeed, few people can match Philip Bobbitt’s qualifications to write it: doctorates in both law and strategic studies, a respected record of publications in both, long experience in government and all informed by a deep understanding of history such as most professional historians would envy.”

 

The general theory advanced in The Shield of Achilles is that the state has its genesis not in law or in war, but in the symbiotic relationship between them. This symbiosis has resulted in an evolution of state forms since the fifteenth century. I use the word evolution deliberately. The process is not teleological, that is to say, goal-oriented or headed for a pre-determined destination; and it is characterised by punctuated equilibrium. While there may be some generic phenomenon called “the state” and recurrent tendencies towards approximate equilibrium in the balance of power between states, the specifics of both change from century to century, driven by the imperatives of adapting both law and strategy to one another. And this shifting and rebalancing is punctuated by cataclysmic epochal conflicts, which reshape the strategic and legal ecosystem of the comity of states.

Very roughly, Bobbitt argues, the state of the sixteenth century was a princely state (in which the state conferred legitimacy on the dynasty), that of the seventeenth century the kingly state (in which the dynasty conferred legitimacy on the state), that of the eighteenth the territorial state (in which the state undertook to manage the country efficiently), that of the nineteenth the state nation (in which the state set out to forge the identity of the nation). The state as we became accustomed to it in the twentieth century was the nation state (in which the state set out to improve the welfare of the nation). And the unending process of evolution is driving a mutation of the nation state into a new state form that Bobbitt calls the market state, in which the state is committed to maximising the opportunities of its citizens in a global economy.

The change from one to the next is, in every case, traceable to a dynamic interaction between war and law and has been institutionalised by major conferences of the great powers: Augsburg (1555), Westphalia (1648), Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1815), and not Versailles (1919), which was a mere truce in the Long War, but Paris (1990), which marked its end and the resolution of the epochal conflict between nation state forms that had marked the history of the twentieth century.

One way to think about this is by a simple analogy with the automobile. Over the past hundred years, automobiles have retained certain core features—four wheels, a steering column, an internal combustion engine, dependence on petroleum and water cooling and so on. However, no one will deny that cars have also changed enormously over that period of time, with massive increases in power, fuel efficiency, speed, steering control, comfort, safety, the development of GPS systems, CD decks and what have you. There is increasing talk of even more radical changes with a switch to fuel cell technology and the making of various kinds of “green” car. Bobbitt’s argument is that, over 500 years rather than 100, the state has undergone a series of changes and continues to do so—with major implications for how violence is used, how military forces are structured and trained, what laws govern both the domestic affairs of states and their relationships with one another.

It has been said that artillery and the printing press triggered the end of the feudal order; the telegraph and railways that of the territorial dynastic order. What Bobbitt argues is that these are not merely historical episodes of a curious nature, but clues to how history works. This is the central theme of Part II of The Shield of Achilles: “A Brief History of the Modern State and Its Constitutional Orders”. By way of illustrating his reasoning, consider the first and simplest instance of this, in his sixth chapter, “From Princes to Princely States, 1494–1648”:

 

“[The] huge cannon of Mehmed II that destroyed the fortress walls of Constantinople was difficult to transport and slow to arm. The French King Charles VIII, however, financed the development of a cannon so light that it could be easily transported … The catalyst for constitutional change occurred when Charles VIII invaded the Italian peninsula in 1494 with a horse-drawn siege-train of at least forty artillery pieces … Suddenly walls, towers, moats all were rendered obsolete. As a result, princes and

oligarchs made a pact with an idea: the idea was that of the State … a permanent infrastructure to gather the revenue, organize the logistical support and determine the command arrangements for the armies that would be required to protect the realm …”

 

In articulating the emergence of princely states, Bobbitt cites the thought and actual statecraft of Machiavelli as exemplary:

 

“[Machiavelli] urged a system in which a civil bureaucracy would replace the strategic and legal roles of vassals. Civil servants would provide a more reliable infrastructure. Perhaps the most important official reflection of Machiavelli’s statecraft is the statute of December 1505, which ordered the organization of a Florentine militia. This law was drafted by Machiavelli and the preamble announces some of Machiavelli’s fundamental views, especially the idea that the foundation of a republic is ‘justice and arms’, that is the intertwining of constitutional and strategic capabilities.”

 

From that point forward to the present, Bobbitt traces what he suggests is a long pattern of epochal wars, strategic and constitutional innovation and international treaties generalising models of constitutional law across the state system.

We are in the midst of another epochal shift, he argues, since the development of international communications, rapid computation and weapons of mass destruction, and we need to think hard and act adroitly if we are to avoid another cycle of wars. Indeed, he explicitly draws a parallel between our time and the 1910s, when Colonel Edward House, friend and mentor to Woodrow Wilson, foresaw the possibility of an epoch of violent upheaval, which he called a “typhoon of irrational revolution”, if the system of international relations was not fundamentally overhauled. Needless to say, the Wilsonian effort to bring this about, through the League of Nations, failed dismally. Bobbitt’s concern is that a similar failure in our time could have similar consequences.

 

In language which invites reflection on the discussion of interests versus geography in the informal strategic policy debate we have been having in this country over much of the past decade, Bobbitt wrote, in 2002:

 

“The nation state’s model of statecraft links the sovereignty of a state to its territorial borders. Within these borders, a state is supreme with respect to its law, and beyond its borders a state earns the right of recognition and intercourse to the extent that it can defend its borders. Today this model confronts several deep challenges. Because the international order of nation states is constructed on the foundation of this model of state sovereignty, developments that cast doubt on that sovereignty call the entire system into question.

“Five such developments do so: (1) the recognition of human rights as norms that require adherence within all states, regardless of their  internal laws; (2) the widespread deployment of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction that render the defence of state borders ineffectual for the protection of the society within; (3) the proliferation of global and transnational threats that transcend state borders, such as those that damage the environment, or threaten states through migration, population, disease or famine; (4) the growth of a world economic regime that ignores borders in the movement of capital investment to a degree that effectively curtails states in the management of their economic affairs; and (5) the creation of a global communications network that penetrates borders electronically and threatens national languages, customs and cultures. As a consequence, a constitutional order will arise that reflects these five developments and, indeed, exalts them as requirements that only this new order can meet. The emergence of a new basis for the state will also change the constitutional assumptions of the international society of states, for that framework, too, derives from the domestic constitutional rationale of its constituent members.”

 

Let me repeat the key phrases here:

• the constitutional order of the nation state is everywhere under siege;

• this brings into question the entire international system founded on the constitutional assumptions of the nation state; and

• a constitutional order will arise that reflects and exalts the five key developments that have brought the constitutional order of the nation state into question.

Bobbitt anticipated that one alarming symptom of this state of affairs would be global terrorism using the technologies of the market state—which he, therefore, dubbed “market state terrorism”—able to cause unprecedented damage to metropolitan states. But the larger significance of his general theory has been somewhat lost in the preoccupation with terrorism worldwide since 2001. It is that larger significance, however, to which I would draw your collective attention.

 

If the society of states addresses this symptom intelligently, he suggested, we might avoid descent into a cataclysmic epochal war between great powers vying for primacy in the emerging constitutional order of market states. That potential cataclysm is what he has his eye on, not terrorism alone and certainly not just al Qaeda. But such a cataclysm could be triggered by the confusion that market state terrorism could create between decaying nation states and emergent market states; and for that reason we need to take stock systematically of our current condition.

Writing in 2000, before The Shield of Achilles went to press and months before September 11, 2001, Bobbitt commented:

 

“When the best commentators look at the future, they seem to divide between two expectations: some, like John Keegan, expect that states will master the arts of peace and that war will wither away; others, like Martin van Creveld, believe that war will degenerate into civil chaos, fought by stateless gangs. One might say that the former see a future of law without war, and the latter a future of wars without law. My own view, of course, is that law and wars will persist because they are mutually supportive. And this is not the worst dynamic equilibrium: a state without strategy for war would be unable to maintain its domestic legitimacy and thus could not even guarantee its citizens civil rights and liberties; a lawless state at war could never make peace and thus would be trapped in the cycle of violence and revenge.

“The parliamentary nation state has emerged from the Long War as triumphant. Nevertheless, we should not expect that either this form of the constitutional order or the Peace that recorded its ascendancy will be eternal. Mindful of the past, we can expect a new epochal war in which a new form of the state—the market state—asserts its primacy as the most effective constitutional means to deal with the consequences of the strategic innovations that won the Long War. To shape, if not permanently forestall this war to come, the society of states must organize in ways that enable it to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to treat expeditionary interventions as opportunities for consensus-creating coalitions and to share information as a means of defence against disguised attacks. By these means, the next epochal war can be converted into a series of interventions and crises, instead of a world-shattering cataclysm or a stultifying and repressive world order.”

 

When, just before his book was due to go into print, the attacks of September 11 occurred, he wrote a postscript. He described what had just happened as “an historic opportunity” to take stock and come to terms with the dangers of the new era. He called this decade an Indian summer, remarking that the term:

 

“usually evokes a pleasant sensation of warm autumn weather that gives us a second chance to do what winter will make impossible. The origin of this phrase, however, is more menacing. The early American settlers were often forced to take shelter in stockades to protect themselves from attacks by tribes of Native Americans. These tribes went into winter quarters once autumn came, allowing the settlers to return to their farms. If there was a break in the approaching winter—a few days or weeks of warm, summery climate—then the tribal attacks would be resumed, and the defenceless settlers became their prey. Once again, the settlers were forced to band together or to become victims, attacked one by one.”

 

In the Indian summer of our current prosperity and strength, he urged, we should seek to overhaul the constitutional order of the nation state and its assumptions about international security, especially collective security, developing new legal and strategic frameworks for self-defence against terrorism—such as shared intelligence, shared surveillance information, new technologies for security such as nanosensors, cyber defences, bio-defences and missile defences, revised approaches to critical infrastructure security, including agreed processes for securing the global critical super-infrastructure on which so much is now dependent; and civil defence emergency procedures in the event of cyber attacks or biological warfare attacks, new international covenants regarding extradition, pre-emption and non-proliferation—so that nation states in the process of losing their grip and mutating into market states might not only defeat international terrorism, but avoid the kind of peer competition that could plunge mutating states into cataclysmic great power conflict of novel and terrifying kinds.

Seen in this perspective, al Qaeda is only the first of a new species of market state terrorism. The A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network is the harbinger of deadly market schemes to come, in the world created by WMD, rapid computation and global capital markets. The United States is not so much a declining empire as a liberal democratic nation state mutating into an entrepreneurial market state. China and Russia are communist nation states mutating into authoritarian mercantile market states. Climate change and the dangers of pandemic diseases, electronic globalisation of culture and identity politics are challenges of the new epoch that will require revisions to strategy and law, because they pose transnational dangers. The collapse of the Doha Round; the impotence of the United Nations; the financial crisis in the United States are all symptoms of the shift in world affairs that is ushering in the new order or disorder of market states—though, of course, they could portend regression and confusion.

 

However, we do need to give some semblance of order to our thinking, and not just any semblance will do—for, as the history of the twentieth century demonstrated, hundreds of millions of human beings can be carried along by ideologies and religious movements that give a specious and pernicious semblance of order to things. In every age, statesmen and leading thinkers, strategists and jurists, have sought to discern principles both to explain the forces at work in their world and to guide statecraft in handling them as intelligently as they might.

The single greatest virtue of The Shield of Achilles is its discussion of how these principles changed and the statecraft was adapted from state form to state form over the past 500 years. It does this, however, not simply by means of narrative history, but by means of a general theory that enables us to make the most sense out of the history. The value of such a general theory is that it forces us to test assumptions, to imagine scenarios, to contest forecasts and to make considered choices. But it is even more valuable if it impels us to think so conceptually and systematically that we deepen our understanding of reality by considering how it might be refuted. Note that I say refuted, not dismissed or disregarded.

In his last book, The World of Parmenides, Karl Popper enquired into how the conceptual breakthroughs in scientific cosmology and critical rationalism by the pre-Socratics, 2500 years ago, laid the foundations of Western philosophy and natural science. He centred the book on Parmenides, who deduced, from observation, conjecture and experiment, that the moon is a sphere and that it does not have its own light, but reflects that of the sun. Parmenides was prompted by these startling realisations to postulate a general theory of perception and reality. That conjecture was so powerful, but so paradoxical, that it impelled later philosophers, especially Leucippus and Democritus, to try to refute it and, in doing so, to develop the theory of atoms and the void, upon which modern natural science would later be based. Popper’s interest is in the origins of our intellectual disciplines and methods for theorising and, crucially, for critically revising our theories and beliefs.

In that Popperian spirit, we should not so much believe Bobbitt’s general theory, as use it to stimulate serious and systematic thinking about our own tacit theories of geopolitics. John Maynard Keynes remarked in 1936 that

 

“practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas … But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

 

Bobbitt’s ideas seem to me to be ideas of this nature—original, lucid, provocative and testable. Those who profess impatience with detailed conceptual analysis of the kind he offers are very likely to be the slaves of preconceptions which they fondly imagine to be simply the “realities” of the world.

Bobbitt himself was aware of various possible objections to his thesis and drew explicit attention to three of them in an appendix to The Shield of Achilles. These were the Eurocentrism of his case, the question of causality or teleology in his theory of history, and the utility of his central organising concept of the periodicity of epochal wars and constitutional evolution. His answer to the first objection is: “the State is a European political idea. The society of states first emerged in Europe at the time of the Renaissance and only in the late twentieth century encompassed the globe.”

His response to the second objection is that he does not believe he has discovered an historical law of general application. “Far from it,” he wrote in 2001; “Rather, I believe that at each juncture, things might have gone differently … This book tries to help us make choices, not forecasts.” In response to the third objection he wrote:

 

“it may appear that I am trying to shoehorn a complicated history into a rigid taxonomy … I tend to be a sceptical reader myself, one who suspends counterargument with difficulty. My only defence, if such it be, is this: if my general characterizations are useful, and if the reader finds himself adding examples to those periods and forms I have described, then I will feel my rather arbitrary

constructions have been worthwhile. If not, I invite amendment.”

 

As a market state, China is vastly more engaged with and important to the world than it ever was as a dynastic territorial state, quasi-state nation or communist nation state. Nor is it hard to see how the development of international communications, rapid computation and weapons of mass destruction helped to shape this evolution. What is not so clear is where this leaves our calculations about China in the years ahead. In this regard, there is a clear need for some sophisticated scenario planning and little use for linear projections.

But even conceptually, at what point would we be able to determine that China had ceased being a nation state and had become a market state? By what criteria can we decide whether it is emerging as an entrepreneurial, a managerial or a mercantile market state—the three variants Bobbitt delineates? He points to the United States as an emerging entrepreneurial market state and his models for the others appear to be Germany (managerial) and Japan (mercantile). But, even with respect to the United States, we need to take stock. Is the gigantic Paulson bailout a step in the direction of the USA becoming an entrepreneurial market state, or is it an interim stabilising measure, a massive regression, or a lurch in a different direction, for example into a managerial market state?

The somewhat anarchic form of capitalism prevalent in China and Russia and the melting away of much of the old communist social security apparatus might suggest the emergence of entrepreneurial market states; but political authoritarianism and economic interventionism would seem to point to the emergence of mercantile market states. Furthermore, Bobbitt’s general theory appears to imply that market states will, in general, be liberal democratic, but China most certainly is not and Russia has plainly regressed, under Putin, from its faltering steps in this direction. Does this mean that China and Russia are not yet market states and that they will become liberal democratic as their market state character fully emerges?

Both China and Russia are more and more clearly seeking to build or rebuild themselves into economic and military powers in rivalry with the United States. Bobbitt’s general theory would suggest that even should China, in particular, acquire sufficient power to be a genuine peer competitor of the United States, direct conflict between them would be too devastating for either to contemplate, just as was direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. How, then, would rivalry between them be played out on the world stage?

It would seem that such rivalry is likely to be played out through a perilous variation on the struggle between the West and the communist world after 1945—through new forms of arms race, confrontation by proxy, asymmetric warfare in contested psychological and geo-economic space, potentially catastrophic cyber-warfare and competition to see which is the most effective form of market state. We can see something of this already, in the talk of a “Beijing consensus” to rival the “Washing-ton consensus”. If China evolves into a more or less liberal democratic market state, will the danger be greater or less? Bobbitt does not speculate, but it would be a useful thought experiment for us to conduct.

More fundamentally, while the historical evolution of state forms which Bobbitt describes seems to throw considerable light on how conflicts arise and are resolved, it rather strongly suggests that states of any sort have never been very good at resolving their differences before they fight epochal wars. Yet this is what he urges us to attempt now. This has always been the hope of serious students of history: that they could master the lessons of the past as an instruction manual for the future. As the first great historian, Thucydides, wrote, 2400 years ago: “he that desires to look into the truth of things done and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable”.

My sense is that what Philip Bobbitt has done is something similar to this and none of the historical antecedents bulk as large in his own mind as those of the Long War in the twentieth century. He hopes that we can learn enough by looking at the patterns he describes to do better in the coming generation, faced with epochal challenges, than our forebears did in the 1910s or the 1930s.

Bearing in mind that we expect to cope with the current financial crisis better than we did with that of 1929, in large measure because we have thought hard about what we did wrong back then, perhaps there is room for a modicum of optimism—but with this caveat: that we need to think of geopolitics as we think of finance, in terms of patterns of instability and stabilisation measures. The Shield of Achilles was about the patterns of instability and the stabilisation measures adopted at crucial turning points in