Declinism, or the belief that a country or society is in a state of significant, possibly irreversible decline contrasts with (the, I am making this up, neologism) “ascentism”, or the belief that one’s ascent is inevitable, pre-destined, unavoidable, even divinely ordained. It is not difficult to see how such beliefs, if shared by a country’s senior policymakers, will tend to have real-life consequences, for beliefs are surely bound to affect strategic and sometimes tactical decisions.
The related rise and decline model or narrative/ metaphor/ model is very popular, perhaps because of its intuitiveness. Biological processes and the second law of entropy point suggest that things “rise” and “fall”. Jacques’ Seven Ages of Men speech makes this point very memorably in the case of humans. Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire makes this point powerfully in the case of political entities. Regardless of what drives decline (and ascent) – and there are many potential explanations even in the socio-political realm (Tainter 1990, Kennedy 1987, Diamond 2011) – the belief in decline and ascent informs and is bound to affect foreign policy decisions, whether or not such beliefs are actually warranted in reality.
Decision-makers may view their country’s decline and/ or an opponent’s rise as equivalent to the closing of a “window of opportunity”, thereby in principle creating an incentive to strike the rising power militarily, geoeconomically or diplomatically. Interestingly, preventive (as opposed to pre-emptive) wars appear to be relatively rare. More frequently (though I have not come across any reliable statistics), the declining state becomes more risk-taking or willing to engage in military action – even in the face of long odds – when its position is already precarious or outright unfavourable, for fear of facing even more difficult circumstances down the line. This may explain, or help rationalise, why the Japanese leadership decided to attack Pearl Harbor. (The Japanese attack can also be explained with the help of the “sunk cost effect”. The US demanded that Japan pull out of China in exchange for sanctions relief and improved relations. Prospect theory suggests that decision-makers are prepared to run great risks to recover costs and/ or restore the status quo ante. Much depends on how a foreign policy decision is framed, of course, prospect theory suggests.) It may also help explain why Wilhelmine Germany was willing to run the risk of a broader European war in 1914 by providing its Austro-Hungarian ally with a so-called “blank cheque” in its stand-off with Serbia. German policymakers felt that Germany was being “encircled” and that French and Russian military and/ or economic modernisation would make it soon impossible to win what was likely going to be a two-front war on the basis of the very offensively-oriented Schlieffen plan.
When a country is in decline or perceived to be in relative decline, the costs of not acting are often perceived to outweigh the costs of taking risky action. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why deterrence sometimes fails, as it did in 1941 or in the case of 1973 Yom Kippur War or the 1982 Falkland War (Jervis, Lebow & Gross Stein 1989). A country would often be better off opting for retrenchment rather than a high-risk policy with potentially devastating consequences. (Again, here it would be useful to have a representative sample of cases where countries opted for risky policies options rather than strategic retrenchment and compare the outcomes systematically.) Japan would surely have been better off not attacking the US, and Wilhelmine Germany would have been better off avoiding World War One – again, in retrospect. (Yamamoto, known to be a gambler and a betting man, for one was clear-eyed about the prospect of Japanese strategic success in case of war with the United States.)
Add power transition theory to the mix and the risk of military conflict goes up in case decline is taking place in the context of a roughly even military balance – on the assumption that power transition theory is empirically valid. A central hypothesis of power transition theory is the following: “An even distribution of political, economic and military capabilities between contending groups of states is likely to increase the probability of war; peace is preserved best when there is an imbalance of national capabilities between disadvantaged and advantaged nations” (Organski 1958). Incidentally, this may explain why dominant powers rarely launch preventive war and almost always seem to wait until it is too late and declinism begins to play a more salient role in the previously dominant state’s foreign policy. A rough military balance of power combined with the perception that things are changing in your opponent’s favour creates significant incentives to pursue a risk-taking strategy, including military action.
Wilhelmine Germany perceived the European balance of military power to be shifting against her (and her allies) in the years leading up to World War One (Hamilton & Herwig 2004, Copeland 2013, Lebow 2018). This was true at least in the sense of making it very unlikely that the offensive Schlieffen plan would be successful and that the failure of the plan would lead to a war of attrition that Germany could not win. At the same time, Austria-Hungary’s struggle to maintain its position in the Balkans in the face of Russian backing for Serbia was seen by Berlin as weakening its main ally and, by extension, the its own geopolitical position. Allowing Austria-Hungary to fight and lose a war against Russia over Serbia would have been very detrimental to German interests. From this it does not follow that Germany’s best option was to provide unconditional support for Vienna. On the contrary, it should have reined in its ally and hope that Austria-Hungary’s position in the Balkans would stabilise while avoiding a military confrontation with Russia. Following the logic of power transition theory and how beliefs in declining states inform or affect foreign policy decisions, it is nonetheless not surprising that Germany effectively encouraged Austria-Hungary to take an uncompromising stance, even if this risked a broader European war. Better risk going to war now than in 1917 or 1920. Germany had every incentive to prevent a further weakening of its main ally, and If war was inevitable, better have it now than later (aka closing of window of opportunity). This is certainly how Germany’s military leaders perceived the situation.
Naturally Germany should never have had to find itself in this impossible geo-strategic position. At this point, however, the European powers were locked into zero-sum security competition with little prospect for accommodation and reconciliation given tightening alliances, including increasingly inflexible war and troop deployment plans (“war by timetable”) (Taylor 1974). In fact, all parties feared losing their allies they had to come to depend on and therefore were inclined to back them more forcefully than they would have done, had the military balance not been so precarious (aka fear of abandonment). Both the geopolitical Grosswetterlage (untranslatable, but close to general meteorological situation) and the existence of only one (unfortunately offensive) military plan deprived the German leadership of the desirable political-strategic flexibility necessary to adopt a less aggressive diplomatic posture. Going to war in 1914 proved an egregious mistake, not least because such a war was always going to be perceived as a bid for German continental hegemony that would necessarily draw Britain into the war, regardless of whether Germany was going to violate Belgian sovereignty or not.
What about the ascending power? The rising power has time on its side and, if the theory is correct, should seek to dissuade the declining power form launching preventive war. At the same time, the ascending power will have an interest in establishing status, prestige and “reputation”, for all three matter in international politics. All three are closely related to the concept of credibility. Credibility often allows states to realise their objectives at a lesser cost than would otherwise be the case. However, establishing credibility typically involves costs. And in order to establish credibility in the eyes of the dominant, but declining power, the ascending power needs to be willing to incur costs in the face of the dominant power’s opposition. Establishing status while reassuring a dominant power that perceives itself to be in decline is a difficult balancing act.
Conventional wisdom has it that China became more assertive following the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis allegedly led some Chinese policymakers to regard the United States as a declining power and China as irreversibly ascendant. (It is impossible to attribute causal force to the US crisis. All we have is correlation and at best anecdotal evidence of senior Chinese policymakers voicing such views.) The fact that China did become more assertive is more difficult to refute. That said, China has a long history of border disputes with its neighbors as well as a history of recurrent wars – and Taiwan has always been a critical issue from Beijing’s point of view, at least rhetorically. That said, China was not willing or able to forcefully or credibly challenge the United States, its neighbors or the regional status until recently. Today Beijing is much better positioned to do so, and it has sound reasons to pursue many of the objectives it is pursuing – though how sensible this pursuit is strategically is another question altogether given the opposition it engenders (Luttwak 2012).
Staying on the issue of perceptions and beliefs. China often refers to the so-called “century of humiliation”, while the United States talks about leading the “free world” (or its rhetorical equivalent, such as Joe Biden’s “Alliance of Democracies”). Such narratives are rarely the drivers of policy or strategy, and much more frequently instruments aimed at mobilising domestic political support and establishing international legitimacy. This does not mean that such rhetoric does not matter; just that it is typically subservient to strategic interests. Wilhelmine Germany’s “place in the sun” or am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen is not wildly different from America’s “manifest destiny” or “free world” rhetoric or France’s mission civilisatrice. (The fact that Luxembourg is, to my knowledge, not given to similar rhetoric supports this claim.) This is not to suggest that policymakers do not ever believe in such concepts and narratives. Rather, the logic of international politics nudges a state’s policy in such direction even absent justificatory narratives. Interestingly, China does not seem to tout such high-minded ideals. Then again, claiming to provide material economic benefits rather than cultural benefits may just be a variation of this familiar theme, whereby rhetoric accompanies policies without driving it. In reality, it is the combination of, first, security and, second, economic interests that drives policy and strategy, not grand narratives or let alone altruism. Again, this does not mean that nobody among the senior leadership believes in such narratives – just that the logic driving policy is more readily and easily explained by expanding interests and in particular the quest for security (Posen 2014).
Sometimes beliefs and cognition matter in international relations – and can be demonstrated empirically to do so. At other times, they are largely epiphenomenal. It really depends what aspect of international politics one seeks to explain. Joseph Stalin’s belief that Nazi Germany would not invade the USSR in the summer of 1941 in spite of overwhelming intelligence pointing in this direction is an example of where prior beliefs and perception mattered. (An alternative explanation has it that Stalin’s “failure” to anticipate the attack was due to his desire not to be seen as provoking Germany to attack.) Surely, American decisionmakers’ assumptions and beliefs led them to fail to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. On the other hand, the primacy of power and interests is nicely illustrated by presumably apocryphal reply by Stalin after being informed by Molotov that the Vatican objected to the Soviet diplomatic position: “How many divisions?”.