What a profound honor to have Paul Kennedy on the ChinaTalk podcast. Kennedy is my favorite living historian and the writer who’s most shaped my intellectual development. His analysis underpins what you hear on this show every week.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an epochal work that traces global power transitions from 1500 to the present. It’s gripping, forest-and-trees scholarship at its finest.

Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, it also gives you a feel for the era through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political, and cultural dimensions of Anglo-German relations. There are fascinating US/China analogies that we’ll get into at some point in this podcast.

His two most recent works directly inform the military coverage on China Talk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and the systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire theaters in World War II. His latest, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, is a sweeping history of a radical transformation in the balance of military power, from the mid-1930s when America was just gaining prominence, to after World War II, when it had no other significant naval competitor.

The Parliament of Man: A History of the United Nations first got me interested in international organizations and gave me my senior thesis topic about the creation of the UN.

What Kennedy taught me more than anything is this: sweat the details, look at the individual players, and zoom out often enough to understand what truly shapes the long-term fate of nations.

Over the course of this episode, we pick up themes from all across his work:

Great Power rivalries of the late 19th-early 20th centuries and their echoes today,
Why potential antagonisms turn nice and why others turn belligerent,
The persistent struggles of liberal internationalists and why they rarely get the outcomes they want,
How China today is not Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
The surprising ways geography shapes global power dynamics,
How fear spreads among nations and why mutual suspicion is so hard to escape,
Why top powers blow it and lose their dominant place in the world,
How systems and innovation win wars.

And much more, including salutary lessons from the Dutch and Swedes on boring yet prosperous futures, how Churchill’s interest in gadgets influenced the course of the Second World War, and why transformative action from the UN remains unlikely in the near future.

Note: we recorded this in 2024.

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ChinaTalk

Paul Kennedy on Great Powers, Past and…