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.

Man living in ‘the state of nature’ provides a powerful analogy for understanding the international system. Many experts on global politics have long based their world views on the insights of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who suggested that this condition generates a war of all against all, as individuals struggle to escape the disorder and dangers of anarchy in a world of mistrust and scarcity.

What are the characteristics of the state of nature, and do they explain the international system? Imagine two different shipwrecks. The first shipwrecked crew ends up on a desert island with little edible food or easily accessed shelter, buffeted by volatile weather. The crew must compete, often viciously, to obtain the basic but scarce resources needed to sustain life. To stay alive and to marshal limited food-producing land and housing, they understand they must escape anarchy and establish order. But in a situation marked by scarcity and deep distrust, cooperation and generosity go unrewarded and collective action is nearly impossible. Predation is the rule, and imposing order on the island is coercive, bloody and non-consensual. Controlling fellow inhabitants and the limited usable land is the key to power, survival and success. The Hobbesian dynamics of this island are familiar to many analysts of geopolitics, order and international relations.

Now picture a different island, in a more temperate zone – a treasure island. Food and natural shelter are plentiful and there is space for all the shipwrecked crew.¹ The island inhabitants feel freer to share information and trade with each other. In time, however, a problem develops. Piles of recklessly discarded half-eaten food – fruit or the carcasses of easily captured, abundant animals – attract mosquitoes carrying a potentially lethal disease. Unlike the desert island, the treasure island is threatened less by a challenge brought by scarcity than a problem emerging from plenty.

Solving this challenge brought about by abundance requires that the residents of the treasure island cooperate on waste disposal. This is not easy – collective action is just as hard as on the desert island, and order-building remains difficult. The islanders are obsessed with who possesses more land and wealth, and few people want to sacrifice their individual habits and preferences for the common good. Individuals are tempted to threaten coercion and violence, though they soon realise that this does little to solve their most pressing problems. In the end, however, the inhabitants of the treasure island recognise that they can only survive if they reward those who develop the most innovative solutions and design mechanisms that attract consensus and establish fair, effective and enforceable rules to mitigate a potentially existential threat.

These examples show that nature and its ‘state’ is diverse, and divergent landscapes demand different responses for humans to survive and thrive. Nor is nature static: as any ecologist knows, habitats evolve over time, often in mysterious and transformative ways, shifting the incentives and behaviours of those living within them. Human choices also markedly alter these environments, depending on how political, social and economic order is established.

In the long run, neither island setting is necessarily safer than the other: the inhabitants of both face existential threats and collective-action problems. And many things can spark violence, organised or otherwise: the residents of either island may be as likely to be murdered in their sleep because of a quarrel over honour, a misunderstanding or a romance gone awry. While food and shelter are abundant on the treasure island, jealousies about who has more – in other words, concerns over relative gains – may intensify in this world of plenty. The characteristics of nature on each island, however, incentivise different political behaviours and order-building choices to achieve safety and success. The strategies that generate stability, prosperity and security on one island may bring disaster for the other. Self-help on one island, in other words, is suicide on the other.

Might the same be true for the international system?

Like nature, the international system is not static. This essay will argue that 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 similar to the desert island, with states, leaders and their populations tormented by scarcity. For most people, life was as Hobbes had described the state of nature: ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. As a result, the nation-states and empires best able to organise their economies, societies and politics to conquer territory and control populations, near and far – if only to avoid being conquered and exploited themselves – were those that thrived.

This process intensified during the late industrial age, particularly in modern Europe. Dramatic increases in population fuelled Malthusian and social Darwinian fears that without markets, colonies and pre-eminent offensive military strength to control more territory and populations, competing states and empires would be unable to access basic resources like food and fuel, or markets, putting their survival at risk. As a result, Western states organised, mobilised for and unleashed unprecedented levels of imperial conquest, murderous war and revolutionary disruption that killed tens of millions of people worldwide in the first half of the twentieth century.

Even as the world was riven by these catastrophic conflicts, however, the international system was in the process of being transformed, and with it, how national interest should be assessed and power defined. Five tectonic shifts were particularly consequential. Firstly, an unexpected and voluntary demographic compression unfolded in the developed world, with birth rates falling precipitously; as median ages increased and population growth slowed, objective pressures for conquest decreased. Secondly, an economic–technological revolution emerged that massively improved agricultural yields and the availability of food, dramatically boosted industrial productivity and transformed finance capitalism, while improving housing and health, and making accessible, affordable fuel bountiful. Thirdly, an information revolution took place, whereby increased literacy and technological change dramatically expanded the amount of and access to knowledge about the world. Fourthly, leaders of the developed world created domestic and international governing institutions and practices, which, amongst other benefits, generated greater domestic stability and socio-economic well-being, eliminated great depressions, and provided personal as well as collective security, creating a global order that prized and worked to protect sovereignty and, in time, human rights. Finally, groundbreaking new military capabilities, especially thermonuclear weapons, prohibitively increased the costs and risks of great-power wars of conquest.

These revolutions combined to reduce the long shadow of famine, disease and misery that had long fallen upon the human experience, while massively increasing total wealth and information, and weakening core drivers of conflict, therefore immeasurably improving quality of life in the developed world. As population growth has flattened and populations have aged, food, resources and markets have become more abundant, and disintermediated flows of information have exploded. Both the cost of and the decreased pay-off from conquest have made the idea of fully mobilised, total wars of empire increasingly illogical and self-defeating. The nuclear revolution and transformations in national and global governance have amplified these effects. As a result, knowledge, technology and innovation have increasingly replaced land as a primary source of wealth, prestige and power, and the tools of attraction have became more effective than coercion.

This is no Whig version of international relations, however, nor does this essay suggest, as Norman Angell did before the First World War, that the logic of trade, finance and interdependence should generate lasting peace and stability.² Other causes of conflict and violence persist. Wars, once started, can develop their own terrifying logic. Scarcity still afflicts lowincome countries, and corners of high-income ones. Time lags, unspoken assumptions and what this essay labels ‘historical anamnesis’ – the inability to properly recognise and accept when circumstances are improving – often cause the leading powers to act against their own interests and the incentives of the international system, behaving as if scarcity were still the norm. By remaining trapped in the past, great powers increasingly misunderstand or mischaracterise what the historian Adam Tooze and others have called the global ‘polycrisis’ – multiple crises converging, interacting and amplifying each other.³

One set of crises, however, looms above the rest. The developed world’s success over scarcity has generated fresh dangers, which I label the ‘problems of plenty’. Since the end of the Second World War, a remarkable age of abundance in the developed world has generated previously unimaginable wealth, increased security from conquest and allowed for vast knowledge of the world. This process, however, has also transformed the international system into one that more resembles the treasure island. The current world order produces great material output, generated by increasing global exchange, but distributing it amongst and between populations is contentious. This enormous prosperity has spawned the grave risks of climate, ecological, migratory and public-health catastrophes. The emergence of new technologies, developed largely in the private sector, has solved innumerable problems, while also creating frightening new ones. Surprisingly, an unlimited amount of data and information, no longer intermediated by legacy institutions, generates different though equally fraught dangers as scarce information controlled by religious institutions or the state. The age of abundance has promoted tolerance and radical individuality, while undermining social cohesion and weakening any sense of common purpose. Governing norms and institutions developed for a different era have been exposed as ill-suited to contemporary problems, generating a crisis of political legitimacy while stoking polarisation. The problems of plenty are fostering planetary risks and dangers as concerning as, if not more than, the imperial wars that plagued world politics during the age of scarcity, threatening disaster and even risking a return to the brutal conflict, disruption and scarcity of earlier periods.

Since the end of the Cold War, explanations of the nature of the international system and identification of the best grand strategies to navigate it have been fiercely contested. The terms of the debate, however – liberalism vs realism, primacy vs restraint, civilisational factors, even terms such as ‘geopolitics’, ‘great-power politics’ and ‘Cold War II’ – risk missing the fundamental drivers, dynamics and dangers of the current and future world. The most popular theories of world politics are rooted in a logic of scarcity that no longer applies, while decision-makers pursue policies in ways that were appropriate in the past but are potentially ruinous to the effort to meet the current challenges of plenty.

Indeed, the institutions, practices, theories and policies that helped explain and largely tamed the world of scarcity by generating massive wealth and undertaking punishing conquest are often unsuitable for addressing the problems of plenty. The very image of state power – a centralised bureaucratic government, mobilising a unified national society and converting its mass industrial economic capabilities into offensive military capability to territorially expand – is largely misplaced to meet these new planetary challenges. To be clear, this does not mean that military power will disappear as a key feature of international relations, or that other causes of conflict – concerns over reputation and status, long-running territorial and political disputes, regional tensions, terrorism, the need to protect global norms or states acting against their own material interests – will not persist. While war will not disappear, however, the planetary threats brought by plenty are more pressing, more threatening, indeed, more existential than the traditional geopolitical challenges that currently dominate both academic and policy discussions. 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.

Caveats and road map

This essay offers three key arguments. Firstly, while war has been a persistent, deadly part of the human experience – and will remain so in the future – its shape, course, causes and frequency have changed dramatically over time, generated by an evolving mix of individual, local and structural forces. Scarcity and fears of future scarcity in basic economic resources, information and security make conflict both more likely and more deadly. A particularly murderous and aggressive form of imperial war and conquest emerged during the late industrial age, from the final decades of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, first in Europe and then globally. This expansive imperial conquest, ideological fervour and global war were driven in large measure by historically unique and ultimately transitory systemic pressures related to scarcity and fears of future scarcity. Secondly, over the past three-quarters of a century, the developed world has largely tamed scarcity, generating unimaginable abundance, technological change, increased security and sociocultural transformation, albeit unevenly, while avoiding the kinds of imperial, great-power wars of conquest that plagued world politics in the past. As a result, the drive for empire and conquest has faded, and the things that constitute power and national interest have been transformed. Today’s international system is shaped by new and potentially existential dangers – the problems of plenty – that are nothing like those of past centuries. Misunderstanding these challenges risks catastrophe. Thirdly, the institutions, policies and conceptual lenses developed in the age of scarcity are ill-suited to meet the potentially catastrophic challenges of the era of plenty.

A few caveats are in order. Any effort to describe and assess the evolving nature of the international system over centuries and continents is bound to do violence to historical nuance, specific circumstances and context, while generating many exceptions to the larger argument. People faced ruinous climate disasters, pandemics and technological disruptions in past centuries, while avoiding total war for decades at a time. Conflict and war – even the threat of great-power war – will likely remain consequential factors in world politics. It can often be difficult to distinguish between problems of scarcity and plenty. At times, plenty and scarcity persist less as opposites, rather coexisting and feeding into each other, while at other times, the dangers caused by plenty threaten to return many parts of the world to the conditions of scarcity. Scholars and analysts engage in deep, contested arguments about many of the contentions below, which deserve far greater exploration than the space available allows.

Furthermore, fixing the historical timeline and causal arrows for the transition from scarcity to plenty is not always clear-cut, for at least three reasons. Firstly, this transition in the developed world was not sudden, like a lamp immediately illuminating a darkened room. The changes – including increases in food and energy production; demographic compression; improvements in sanitation, education, medicine and public health; the rise of tolerance and the rights revolution; better governance; greater personal, communal and global security; the thermonuclear and satellite revolutions; and the surge in the production and dissemination of information – unfolded at different times and over different intervals, appearing, on occasion, erratically, and at other times suddenly and explosively. And like scarcity, different strands of plenty generated interactive, cumulative and even exponential effects, boosting the consequences of abundance. Secondly, the emergence and consequences of plenty are typically only recognised in retrospect, after long time lags, if they are understood at all. Thirdly, scarcity still affects large parts of the globe. In other parts of the world, only some aspects of plenty have taken root. There is no guarantee that scarcity will not return to the developed world, or that the scarcity that marks the low-income world will not generate conflicts that pull the developed world in.

Critics might reasonably ask: do Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and China’s threats over Taiwan not demonstrate that great-power conflict has not disappeared? This is an important question, which will be discussed further below. Two points are worth stating in advance. Firstly, Russia’s behaviour, along with the United States’ disastrous post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, are the exceptions that prove the rule, revealing that invading and trying to occupy sovereign countries, even weaker ones, is often self-defeating in the age of plenty. Secondly, it is important to recognise that there are disparate causes of war. In particular, we must distinguish between irredentism – the finite desire of a state to reclaim territory it believes it has lost – and imperial conquest – an expansive, often unlimited impulse to continue to add territory and empire, a behaviour that marked the age of scarcity. While they may seem similar, they are driven by significantly different factors and forces and demand different grandstrategic responses. Whether China’s threatening behaviour towards Taiwan and its neighbours is motivated by irredentism – as is suggested below – or, as many believe, expansive imperialism, is a critical question.

This brings up a second important question: was the taming of scarcity and the rise of plenty driven by structural forces or state choices? It is true that many of the tectonic forces described in the pages that follow, which transformed human life and with it the international system, had little to do with grand strategy in a narrow sense, with many beginning before the Second World War, if not earlier. Identifying deep structural forces does not absolve states, and especially leading powers, from consequential, critical choices; quite the contrary. Sometimes global actors will be able to change, reroute or mitigate powerful underlying forces, whereas at other times they will need to anticipate, adapt and adjust. The key is to recognise and frame the challenges and choices brought by plenty. Pursuing grand strategy as if the world were still shaped by the forces of scarcity risks the kind of catastrophic missteps that could plunge the world into world war while accelerating existential planetary risks that could doom humanity.

The book proceeds as follows: the first section will focus on the past. ‘War and conquest in the age of scarcity’ will outline the profoundly varied circumstances that shaped human life and explore how, in this world of scarcity, these factors often drove great-power wars of conquest. It will also highlight how the unique but toxic combination of European industrialisation, social Darwinism and Malthusian population fears helped usher in decades of imperialism, world war and deadly revolution between the late nineteenth and midtwentieth centuries. The second section will assess how the present world came to be. ‘The taming of scarcity and the end of empire’ will chronicle the profound structural changes and policy choices that ameliorated the pressures of scarcity over the last three-quarters of a century, altered human life and transformed international relations, dampening many of the drivers of imperial conquest and global war. The third section – ‘The problems of plenty’ – will detail how the reduction of scarcity tragically produced the planetary challenges that threaten the future of international relations and humanity. Five categories of potentially catastrophic challenges emerge from there being ‘too much’, as opposed to ‘too little’: production, transmission, information and communication, identity and choice, and expectations. The fourth section – ‘Unspoken assumptions, time lags and historical anamnesis’ – will explore why these profound changes in the international system and the nature of power are often ignored or misunderstood while they are unfolding, and explain phenomena that appear to contradict the thesis, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increasing tensions and risk of war between China and the US.

What grand strategy should the most important player in the international system, the US, develop to meet the challenges of plenty? Exploring this question will be the focus of the fifth section, ‘American grand strategy in a world of plenty’. There are obvious reasons to be sceptical, even wary of America’s role. Many of the problems of plenty possess structural roots and are insensitive to traditional policy interventions. The United States’ politics are deeply polarised, and some believe it is a declining power. Its often-failed efforts regarding climate change, COVID-19, technology and inequality arguably offer little promise, particularly as its behaviours and policies have been a leading cause of the problems of plenty. There is, however, another perspective. The US, in unexpected ways given its history, helped shape a post-1945 global order that contributed to taming scarcity and accelerating plenty. It also possesses important qualities, ranging from innovation and resilience to adaptability and cultural appeal, which were luxury attributes in a world of scarcity but may provide advantages in tackling the problems of plenty.

If the US is to successfully construct grand strategies and lead a worldwide effort to tame the problems of plenty, it will face difficult choices. It must reorient its policies, conceptual frameworks and institutions to deal with these complex issues, without abandoning the more beneficial aspects of an international order that helped mitigate scarcity. Indeed, it should work to spread the benefits of abundance more widely and fairly, while at the same time identifying and reforming those practices and policies that fuel the problems of plenty. This will not be easy, as much of the institutional architecture built to tame scarcity helped create and accelerate these challenges. Nor can the US resolve the problems of plenty alone. Powerful new actors from the private and non-governmental sectors must be engaged. To deal with these planetary challenges, US leaders will have to increasingly harness the powers of attraction, collaboration and innovation – tools that will be far more effective than leveraging its considerable tools of coercion and violence.

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.