Donald Trump should know, the world cannot afford another Thirty Years' War | Comment |... - 0 views
www.thetimes.co.uk/...her-thirty-years-war-b0r7n69mw
history politics crisis 1648 trump china international relations
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Ever since Donald Trump imposed the first tariffs on Chinese imports last year, I have argued that the trade war between the United States and China would last longer than most people expected and that it would escalate into other forms of warfare.
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the propaganda war is now well under way, too, with Chinese state television digging out old Korean War films in which the Americans are the bad guys.
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As the former US defence secretary Ash Carter said at the recent applied-history conference at Harvard, in the corridors of power “real people talk history, not economics, political science or IR [international relations]”.
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The first question they ask is: what is this like? And, yes, this sudden escalation of Sino-American antagonism is a lot like the early phase of the Cold War.
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The Thirty Years’ War was as much about power as it was about religion, however. Unlike the Cold War, which was waged by two superpowers, it was a multiplayer game.
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today’s strategic rivalry is being played out in a near-borderless world, altogether different from the world of early John le Carré.
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Catholics and Lutherans had been given a certain amount of clarity by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which left it to each individual prince to decide the denomination of his realm without fear of outside interference. But that principle seemed under threat by the early 1600s.
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it had created an incentive for the proponents of the Counter-Reformation to replace Protestant rulers with Catholic ones. The war of religion had no respect for borders: Jesuits infiltrated Protestant England
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2019 isn’t 1949, not least because of the profound economic, social and cultural entanglement of America and China, which is quite unlike the almost total separation of the United States from the Soviet Union 70 years ago.
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The Thirty Years’ War was a time of terrorism and gruesome violence, with no clear distinction between soldiers and civilians.
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There was no deterrence then, just as there is none now in cyber-warfare. Indeed, states tended to underestimate the costs of getting involved in the conflict. Both Britain and France did so — only to slide into civil war.
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The implications of this analogy are not cheering. The sole consolation I can offer is that, thanks to technology, most things nowadays happen roughly 10 times faster than they did 400 years ago. So we may be heading for a Three Years’ War,
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What the Westphalian settlement did was to establish power-sharing arrangements between the emperor and the German princes, as well as between the rival religious groups, on the basis of limited and conditional rights. The peace as a whole was underpinned by mutual guarantees, as opposed to the third-party guarantees that had been the norm before.
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The democratic and authoritarian powers can fight for three or 30 years; neither side will win a definitive victory. Sooner or later there will have to be a compromise — in particular, a self-restraining commitment not to take full advantage of modern technology to hollow out each other’s sovereignty.