As I've pointed out elsewhere, World War II was directly a product of the Great Depression. Years of economic hardship undermined fragile political systems in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, allowing the rise of authoritarians who promised to bring better times by defeating the foreign enemies that supposedly oppressed them. Unconstrained by public concerns about government spending, they were able to pour resources into armaments in a public works program that restored full employment and prosperity even as it increased military strength. In the meantime, the western democracies were less effective in mobilizing public resources to restore economic health and as a result were not as strong as they could have been. The result was that a coalition of comparatively smaller and weaker nations – Germany, Japan, and Italy, principally – was able to come uncomfortably close to defeating an alliance of nations, led by the United States, that had much greater population and potential economic strength.
Could this all happen again? I really do not think we can feel comfortable that it is impossible. With little public consensus in support of anything approaching an adequate stimulus effort, the United States is probably doomed to two years or more of deepening economic decline, followed by years of slow growth. In the meantime, many other countries are likely to suffer even deeper depressions. Just as in the 1930s, this will almost surely undermine some governments, particularly in places where the government's basic support is very much a function of economic health.
We might imagine, for instance, that both China and Russia could fall under the control of those who believed that the time had come to assert their dominance over the decaying West. Even if both countries were to grow normally, China is projected to surpass the United States in economic strength in the not too-distant future. If aggressive regimes in China and Russia were to maintain the pressure for economic growth while America floundered, we could very easily find ourselves facing aggressors whose wealth and population were substantially greater than ours.
Could we somehow match the strength of a Sino-Chinese coalition through some Herculean effort? Would that be enough to prevail? And what sort of world would be left to us even if we did?
This is not a firm prediction, not by any means. The odds are that we will all somehow get through the coming depression without a major war. But we ought to think very carefully about how our policies might affect the risks. Even a very small risk of a cataclysm is too much.
Copyright © 2009 by William D. O'Neil
9 February 2009