Introduction

Abstract

The underlying structure, incentives and costs shaping international relations, state behaviour and the nature of power are profoundly different today to how they were in the past, in ways that are scarcely recognised and widely misunderstood. For much of history, world politics was marked by profound scarcity in resources, information and security. A series of historical revolutions has largely tamed this scarcity in ways few could have imagined. These revolutions, however, have generated new, potentially catastrophic challenges for the world – the problems of plenty.

In this Adelphi book, Francis J. Gavin argues that the institutions, practices, theories and policies that helped explain and largely tamed scarcity by generating massive prosperity, and which were sometimes used to justify punishing conquest, are often unsuitable for addressing the problems of plenty. Successful grand strategy in this new age of abundance requires new thinking. New conceptual lenses, innovative policies and processes, and transformed institutions will be essential for confronting and solving the problems of plenty, without undermining the expanding efforts against scarcity.

Notes

1 There is, of course, a spirited debate among political philosophers concerning the state of nature and human circumstances in early societies. For a fascinating anthropological view that argues hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society, ‘in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied’, a claim that denies that ‘the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means’, see Marshall D. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Abingdon: Routledge, 1972), p. 1.

2 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911).

3 Adam Tooze, ‘Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis’, Financial Times, 28 October 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33.