The Inevitability of Great Power Conflict

Ezra Klein (via Monsieur Poulos) reads an interview with McCain foreign policy guru Randy Scheunemann and rightly gets scared. I take issue with part of his great power conflict analysis, however (as does James):

One thing worth keeping in mind about great power conflicts is that they’re rarely inevitable. At times, France and England have been at war, and at times they’ve been allies. A lot of it has to do with how leaders interact with each other, and whether they aggressively court conflict or publicly seek a constructive relationship. If you court conflict, soon enough, the other country does, and both sides build up a narrative of slights and provocations — many of them quite real — that lead to war and discord. But it is a choice: You can decide whether you want a relationship defined by transgressions and stare-downs, or whether you want a relationship where the overriding narrative is of alliance and both sides work to play down points of disagreement. Scheunemann, here, is courting conflict, and as McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, that’s a pretty good indicator for how a McCain administration would look.

Yes, the American electorate will choose one candidate over another. And some small subset of the voters may in fact base that choice on the candidate’s foreign policy views. So in that very narrow present tense sense, we do face a sort of choice between confrontationalist nationalism and consensus-building internationalism.

But in the grand historical scheme of things, I’d argue that great power conflict is indeed inevitable. One should look at Scheunemann and McCain as merely the latest incarnation of the “hard-liner” type, one that will forever be with us, and one that will sporadically come to power in our nation and in others. No number of institutional frameworks will prevent this all too human tendency from bubbling up at the most inopportune times in history.

To admit this is not to be fatalistic—this election matters and I find the McCain team’s rhetoric unsettling. I just reject the suggestion that great power conflict is a recurring simple error in judgment (one that can be implicitly corrected in the enlightened future) rather than one of the main, enduring motors of history.