Lawfare Daily: Arne Westad on ‘The Coming Storm’

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and Professor Arne Westad of Yale University, author of “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History,” discuss 19th- and 20th-century power politics, the contemporary rise of China, and how the former can inform reactions to the latter.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	If a world-class crisis of the 1914 kind, sort of black swan event, were to come along today with tensions already running high,
0:11.0	I really worry about that aspect of personalized predominance or rule.
0:17.8	I think that was one of the things that really did go wrong in December of 1914,
0:21.9	was that a number of these people, because of the personalities, were not able to pull back
0:27.5	when they should have seen that it was in their interest to pull back.
0:31.6	It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm senior editor at Lawfare, Michael Feinberg, and with me today is Professor Arn Westad of Yale
0:40.6	University to talk about his book, The Coming Storm. The important thing I think today is to try to
0:47.6	get so most stability into the international system in general. This is true for the ongoing
0:52.5	wars at the moment with regard to Ukraine,
0:54.9	with the war in Iran. It's also true for what probably in terms of the overall picture is even
1:02.0	more dangerous for great power of confrontation, which is the situation with regard to Taiwan
1:07.4	or the situation on the Korean peninsula. Today we will be discussing China's rise, the West's response to it,
1:14.7	and what we can learn from prior eras of history about this potential conflict.
1:20.7	You raise very interesting parallels between the era where the world was just on the cusp of what eventually became known as World War I
1:31.7	and our contemporary times with a variety of hotspots, mainly in East Asia, that you argue could very well, without amelation turn into a similar global conflagration.
1:50.0	But what I'd like to do is start actually a little bit before you begin in both eras and examine
1:57.2	how our respective societies at those times got to where we are.
2:02.5	And I know you think there are a lot of similarities between sort of 1913, 1914, and 2025,
2:09.3	2026, but I'm curious if we could examine the eras that led up to those inflection points.
2:15.7	So I was wondering if you could sort of give an overview of how
2:19.0	you see international relations in the period from, let's say, the wars of German unification
2:25.6	in the mid-1860s up through 1914 might compare to, let's say, 1989 in the end of the Cold War up until today.
	...

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