CSF 2026, Day 1, Keynote Dr Francis Gavin

Okay, it is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker. Professor Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni and Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for the Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, effectively known as SAIS. Prior to SAIS, he was a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Texas Strauss Center for International Security and Law and affiliate with the Security Studies Programs at MIT and he is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of numerous books and there's a couple of them that you high I highlight right there. Um, his most recent book, Thinking Historically, a guide to statecraft and strategy, which coincidentally is an underlying theme for your 10-month course here. Uh, one recent essay that I recommend and I think you'll hear a little more about is the future of world order written by Frank back in February. It gives you a clear way to think about the terms world order and international systems, which I certainly appreciated and learned a lot about. He earned [snorts] his BA in political science at the University of Chicago, his masters at Oxford and his PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Please welcome Professor Frank Gavin. >> What a great honor to be here. Um, I love coming to the Naval War College. I've come here for a couple of activities like this and the quality of the students, uh, the intellectual engagement. In fact, this book that I wrote, Thinking Historically, is one that is often inspired by the curriculum I hear at the Naval See at the Naval War College. You're doing something in your curriculum under people like Michael and under my good friend John Mar that is very, very rare, um, but really, uh, extraordinary. And that that's what the book is about. The book is about how to use the past well, how to make better choices and consequential decisions in the face of complexity and deep uncertainty about the future. Um, there's another book I wrote, uh, came out at the same time. It was just sort of random called Wonder and Worry. And it's a compendium of my writings over the past decade based on three interconnected themes, the state of the world, the role of the United States within that world, and how best to study and talk about these questions. And I've been thinking more and more about the first question. How to understand the current state and the future of world order, and that's what I'm going to focus my comments on today. Any analysis of world order and its future is only as good as its underlying assumptions. So, here are three of mine. Assumption one involves clearly defining terms. World order does not mean the same thing as the international system, though these terms are often used interchangeably. Nor is world order the same thing as theories of international relations. The international system describes how the world works. What are its role rules and features, identifying its principal drivers, dangers, constraints, actors, and opportunities that shape global affairs. Some suggest it is shaped by unchanging structural forces, whereas others believe the international system shifts over time and can be altered through political interventions. Order on the other hand is constructed, negotiated, and or imposed. Sometimes through coercion, more often through negotiation, cooperation, and attraction. It is cumulative and complex. Um it is a cumulative and complex political institution institutional cultural and normative response to the international system. World orders have the dynamic forces of the international system are channeled and structured into a recognizable form through the choices made by the key actors. It is the consequence of conscious activity as opposed to passive acceptance. A theory of international relations on the other hand combines your view of how the international system works with your view on what ordering strategies, if any, generate the best results. Different theories of international relations provide different answers for how pliable and manipulable and through what means and tools the international system is to human political intervention or ordering activities. In other words, you can have a world with no true global order, one shaped by the whims of the international system. That is how most of humanity lived for most of the time. You can have theories of international relations that insist that the international system is static and defined by powerful structural forces and that order building produces at best marginal results in rare circumstances or only regionally or only after Herculean effort focused upon the existential issues surrounding war and peace. Or you can have ordering strategies that you believe can contain, redirect, shift, or create forces that make up the international system, even changing its fundamental nature. One theory of international relations can also lead to order-building activities and priorities that are at odds with how the international system actually works, undermining the legitimacy of that order. As I will discuss, that is what I believe the situation is that we face today. My second assumption, what we call world orders actually a series of extraordinary, often unseen, interconnected, interwoven, designed, and reinforcing set of arrangements, regional and partial orders, largely developed after the Second World War, though some have deeper roots, involving a whole range of activities and issues we rarely focus on, indeed take for granted, from development to climate to technology to even values. These partial orders encapsulate often mundane but critical activities, ranging from banking, finance, accounting, investment to travel and flight safety to intellectual property and consumer standards, and so on. They emerge from, are buttressed by, and reinforce converging sociocultural practices and norms, as well as the behaviors and interests of the private sector and intergovernmental actors. In other words, world orders can be cumulative. We often focus, understandably and particularly in a place like this, on the security order first and the large macroeconomic, trade, and monetary order second, and we overlook the rest. But the nuts and bolts of world order, the thick set of rules, relationships, networks, practices that allows us to fly around the world safely and with relative ease, to take out our phones to call home or play a preferred artist on Spotify without a second thought and to use our credit cards globally filled with products from any number of countries reflects the nuts and bolts of these deeply interwoven, highly networked regional and partial orders. It is historically unprecedented, wildly successful, very popular, and probably more resilient than we think. This is the taken for granted of a densely networked and interconnected order that functions on multiple levels. Even the contested security order is not one monolithic thing. Arguably its most successful component, the set of arrangements around weapons of mass destruction and especially nuclear weapons with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and associated agreements at its core is obviously related to but distinct from and has a different history and logic than the broader security order emerging from the United Nations and the actions, treaties, alliances, and institutions of the great powers. This matters for two reasons. First, most of the debate about the resilience, health, and future of world order focuses on the big sexy issues of security and macroeconomic arrangements, often labeled the liberal or rules-based world order, believed to be largely created and if once and no longer led by the United States and its allies. The debate about order and its future shape understandably focuses primarily on the contentious issues surrounding China's geopolitical rise and claims to Taiwan, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, America's security occasionally erratic security and tariff decisions, the size and composition of the UN Security Council, the rules and practices of the IMF and World Bank, the World Trade Organization and its disappearance. There are sharp and divergent views among and between nations about whether the security and macroeconomic order is healthy, dying, or shifting, and whether it should be revived, transformed, or replaced. But despite these overarching disagreements, few want to see these functioning partial orders disappear. People still want to fly safely and with ease, use their phones, scroll social media, and make purchases without concern. Russia, China, and the United States, and most other medium powers ranging from South Africa to Brazil, do not want the nuclear security order to collapse, regardless of other disagreements. Even North Korea actively participates in part of the UN climate order. The second question related to this is how much of these partial orders that almost everyone appreciates, but takes for granted and never thinks about, is related to and dependent upon the health and resilience of the larger security macroeconomic order. I don't know the answer to this, but I think this is an incredibly important question. Can the former survive if the latter is threatened? Might the popularity of the former help save the latter? These are open, debatable questions. My third and most contentious assumption is that I believe the greatest challenge to and the source of much of our anxiety about the current world order is that it is poorly suited to today's international system. The wildly successful order constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War was a response to four enormous existential issues. First, preventing financial and economic turmoil from cascading into debilitating great depressions that have been a regular feature of the global economy since the trade and financial revolution emerged in early modern Europe and accelerated with the Industrial Revolution. Second, reducing global misery while developing the economies in the parts of the world that had not participated in the great takeoff produced by the Industrial Revolution that had been concentrated largely in North America and Western Europe. Third, managing the transition the traumatic dissolution of Europe and Japan's empires while creating safe and stable conditions for the emergence scores of newly sovereign states. Fourth and most important, inhibiting the kinds of fully mobilized and often genocidal great power wars of conquest and empire emanating largely from Europe and Japan which dominated world politics from the late 19th century through the middle of the 20th century and culminated in the Second World War which killed 80 million people or 3% of the world's population. The post-war order has been extraordinarily successful at meeting these tasks and indeed changing the fundamental nature of the international system. While this could of course always change, great depressions and fully scaled mobilized global wars of conquest have receded from view, formal empires in the dustbin of history, prosperity and well-being increased massively and while uneven spread globally and the sovereignty of scores of new nations is largely secure. The Malthusian worldviews, millenarian ideologies, revolutionary impulses, and the martial spirit that many of the political outlooks of the late 19th through the middle of the 20th century have greatly dissipated. Order builders from the middle of the 20th century would have been surprised and overjoyed beyond belief by this result. Even the builders of the United Nations only expected it to last for a decade or two. The reasons for this historically unprecedented success are many, but I believe one of the keys is what I've called the taming of scarcity. For most of humanity's life in this planet, people were tormented tormented by terrifying scarcities in basic resources, security, and information about the world. Over the past century or so, we have enormously increased the amount, quality, consistent delivery delivery, and availability of food, fuel, shelter, safe transport, security, medicine, combined with massive improvements in sanitation, education, and information about the world. All will experience profound changes in governing effectiveness in the provision of public goods, business efficiency, financial innovation, technology, and a rights revolution that has utterly transformed the human experience. Unimaginable levels of wealth have been created, misery and want reduced, literacy massively expanded, the Malthusian curse destroyed, health comes dramatically improved, and life expectancy globally in the last century has doubled. Doubled. Plagues, famines, fires, pogroms, wars, and a myriad of other disasters that regularly visited the lives of most humans in most places in most times are no longer the rule, but instead the rare exception that generate justified outrage outrage and political response. A byproduct of this extraordinary success, however, has been what I call the problems plenty. Material abundance has generated existential climate and ecological threats, prosperity has produced infuriating inequality, the dark underbelly of globalization has unleashed the challenges of mass migration, pandemics, drugs, cybercrime, and human trafficking. And perhaps most shockingly, the digital telecommunications revolution has generated a dystopian world of misinformation, alienation, conspiracy, and polarization. Our current world order and the political and intellectual apparatus that supports it was constructed to tame scarcity. Aided by concurrent, extraordinary, and mutually reinforcing economic, technological, managerial, political, and socio-cultural revolutions over the past century, to say nothing of the nuclear revolution, the order has accomplished this goal far better than anyone could have imagined, and we need to remember that. Indeed, the problems of plenty as generated by the post-war liberal order are what the legendary political scientist Roger Needham labeled a success disaster. >> [clears throat] >> A product of a service so successful that it overwhelms the organization that created it. Needham suggested that the worst failures of those that occur because everything happened just as hoped. As a result of the success disaster, this has left the order woefully inadequate to deal with the challenges these triumphs have unleashed. The failure of the global order to deal effectively with the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed over 20 million people worldwide, the same figure roughly as as many people died on the battlefield of the First World War, starkly revealed its inadequacies. It appears equally ill-suited to confront the vexing problems of climate crisis, emerging technology, inequality, immigration, and other problems of plenty. Imagine the nightmare of a purposeful or inadvertent combination of iatrogenic AI and genetically engineered bio-agent of some sort. Perhaps more worryingly, our current order also fails to understand um and come to terms with the deep polarization, resentment, and alienation that increasingly shapes our politics both here and abroad. Citizens around the world are alienated, angry, and fearful despite living in an age of economic, medical, informational, and technological wonders. And orders that feel fail to meet their challenges that most worry people soon lose legitimacy domestically and internationally, which I suggest is a key contributor to our current anxiety and apprehension over order. In short, I assume that current world orders a result of choices. It's cumulative and involves many activities beyond war, peace, and macroeconomic stability and growth. Despite unprecedented success, it is in many ways ill-suited to our contemporary and future challenges as it is built upon ordering strategies and its accumulated architecture for a bygone era. Given these assumptions, which I anticipate are not shared by everyone in this room, how do I imagine the future of world order a decade or two from now? As a historian, I am typically allergic to this kind of question. We can't agree on what happened in the past. How could we imagine >> [laughter] >> predicting the future? But I imagine a meeting like this on June 1st, 1914. Using the past as a guide to the future, an assembled group like this of thinkers and students might identify vexing dangers, troubling fears, and deep anxieties, but they could also point out that Europe had enjoyed a century of extraordinary growth, technological progress, cultural flourishing, and political opening with reasonable hopes that those trends would not stall or reverse. There were, of course, wars and revolutions, but the cataclysms that rocked the continent in the quarter of the century after the French Revolution seemed in the past. International conferences in Geneva and The Hague established humane laws of war and expanding mechanisms for international arbitration. Sitting in June 1914, they could look at their recent history and see two Balkan wars that had not escalated to wider conflict and indeed there were signs of a détente emerging among the European powers. Indeed, in June, late June itself, the same week that the Archduke was assassinated, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II warmly welcomed a squadron of the British Navy led by the battleship named for the British king to Kiel. And even if war came, it was not expected to undermine the fundamental drivers of European progress and period order. Indeed, on June 28, 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was just a day of bad luck produced by a highly unlikely, highly contingent series of events and it is a very easy counterfactual to imagine it ending with the successor to the Habsburg throne still alive. Literally, if his driver had made a left turn instead of a right, which is what he was supposed to do. If that had happened, if the Archduke had had a more competent chauffeur, would there still have been a First World War? Might we live in a world today where the United States kept the world at arms' length, radical political philosophies remained contained to Central European coffee houses, with European empires still intact? Or would the powerful tectonic forces lurking near the surface of the international system have found other opportunities to explode? How you wrestle with these questions reveals how you feel about the play and interaction between structural longer-term forces, a complex, interactive world of political choices marked by radical, unmeasurable uncertainty about the future, and more immediate contingency, context, chance, and agency. That's basically what you're doing in your classes when you think about the future. It also reveals that dramatic changes in order are less likely to emerge in a linear, easily mapped way, but instead results from explosive events that can generate profound, punctuated equilibrium types of effects, such as World Wars or the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, that's my cop-out. I don't know what's happening in the future, but allowing that we can have no idea what these explosive events or the odds of them happening might be, nor can we know what choices a wide range of actors will will face, what do I think are the underlying forces that will frame the future of the international system and shape any future order? So, I have four potential scenarios, but before that, I just want to offer a couple insights about how I think about the current debate over the future order is. Um first, on the United States. There's much commentary about America's erratic and polarizing policies and politics, how its relative power is slipping, and we're moving to an order marked by multipolarity or non-polarity. While obviously somewhat true vis-à-vis China, I think one can overdo claims of American decline. Think of the changes that have happened in the United States since 2000 or 2008. Not only has the United States retained its overwhelming military power, but its dominance in finance, technology, and popular culture has increased, while, which no one would have predicted in 2000, the United States became an energy superpower, again showing how you can't predict the future. It continues to grow and produce innovation at an impressive clip. Looked at over a longer historical horizon, news and headlines that outrage us today are often less out of line with the United States history than we often acknowledge. I like to tell my students by far the nastiest presidential election was the first contested one between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It was unbelievably unpleasant. Um, they somehow remained friends. America's past is marked by its rough and tumble, loud, occasionally violent, and risk-tolerant nature driven by animal spirits often shocking to others for both good and ill. And while China's growth is historically unprecedented and it faces its own steep pathologies, vulnerabilities, and challenges in the year ahead. Two other trends I want to highlight. The first is demographics. While not a profound insight, at a basic level demography is destiny. The size and composition of a population shapes a state, its society's interests, values, and behaviors. And while fecundity is many things, it is clearly a vote on the future. And the world has largely decided to stop having as many babies as we thought. This is part of a widening and global gender gap that is also a profound change from the past. And I think it's going to have enormous consequences even if though I don't know what they are. This leads to a second larger trend. Much of the anxiety, concern, and worry surrounding order appears to be driven less by material interests that shape most of human history and more by non-material issues of individual and collective identity, historical belonging, meaning and purpose, even teleology. We live in an era of historically unimaginable wealth, knowledge about ourselves and the natural physical world, extraordinarily extraordinary technological advances, and security from natural and human threats that tormented humanity since millennia. Yet people are deeply angry and anxious. Thucydides reminds us that war is caused by fear, honor, and interest in that order. And we now live in an era where fear and honor matter for more far more than we understood, perhaps even more than material interest dominating both domestic and international politics, and maybe the key force shaping the contest over order in the years to follow. Given these assumptions and caveats, what are some plausible futures that are worth exploring? For the sake of argument and dis- discussion, I offer four. Um to be clear, uh none of them end up well. And I realize, well, there should have been a fifth happy scenario, but what fun is that? All right? So, and I actually am generally an optimist, so I was surprised at how negative these were. Scenario one, trundling along. As I suggested earlier, despite its fractures and inadequacies, the interconnected undergirding of our current world order is both popular, resilient, and in many ways self-reinforcing. In this scenario, the future order looks roughly as it does today in 10 to 15 years. This does not mean there won't be pressures or that the overarching order is wildly popular. Why will this order persist? Despite the widely viewed um widely shared view of its underperformance and outdatedness, leading states may recognize that it is better than the alternatives. It's like living in an old, creaky, hard-to-maintain house that you continually complain about, but you cannot afford or being older lack the will to undertake a complete teardown or move to a new house. In many ways, it's comparable to the order of the 1970s that was exposed by a changing international system marked by economic volatility and subpar performance, a weakened and distracted America less committed to its alliances, civil and interstate war, widespread domestic disconnect, the discontent, and increased resource competition. These worries were enough to weaken the order, but not bring its collapse. And even during that troubled decade, the order persisted and indeed even saw occasional reform and innovation. Scenario two, entropy and division. In this scenario, American-led alliances atrophy, even collapse. The trading order becomes clunky and inward as states double down on national autonomy and attempts at mercantilism. Openness and democracy continue to decline. And while outright great power war and the ruin it brings is avoided, the globe is divided into regional groupings and spheres of influences. Perhaps the nuclear nonproliferation order collapses as states ranging from Poland and Germany to Japan and South Korea and Australia and Vietnam seek their own secure deterrent. Economic growth slows as trade and financial flows wither. This order is cranking inward-looking, not unlike the older, shrinking populations it reflects. It is less pluralistic, marked by jingoism and nationalism, uh turbulent, dominated by monopolists and high tariffs, seems at times violent, and mirrors some aspects of the world of the 1890s. This order, however, is is marked by two ironies novel to the future. First, technologies such as additive and micro-manufacturing, cultivated cell-centered food, synthetic production, and renewable energy, automation and robotics fueled by artificial intelligence lessens the importance of differential wages and comparative advantage, which was the key driver of globalization. And in this environment, national and even decentralized economies may be able to exist, may be able to exit the global economy and focus internally with less economic and political damage than in the past. Second, this economic autonomy married to shrinking, aging, grumpy populations and wider nuclear proliferation may actually make great power war less likely. This order is not pretty or hopeful and it's far removed from the promises of the post-Cold War era, but it possesses a certain unexpected stability and even safety. If it had a meme or a theme, it would be get off my lawn. Scenario three, great power reduce. The conventional wisdom holds that we're in a new era of great power and geopolitical rivalry. Even some have called it Cold War II, a trend that could intensify in the decade ahead. Now, as I've discussed and I'm a kind of alone on all this, but I believe this framing is overstated based on the mistaken view that the international system of 2026 to 2040 is driven by the same forces that drove international politics between 1890 and 1950. Demographic compression, the massively decreased need for and decreased need for and value of territory and formal empire, the shifting sources of power, and the waning of Malthusian and social Darwinist outlooks or other millenarian ideologies, plus the nuclear revolution, militate against the kinds of fully mobilized wars of aggression that darkened the past. This does not mean, however, that devastating war cannot emerge in the next decade or so. Irredentism and the desire to correct perceived historical wrongs continues to drive politics and policies. As mentioned, honor and fear, as much as interest, um drive conflict in the past and will in the future. Misperception and miscalculation can mark even the most information-rich environment. And indeed, our obsession with deterrence, the idea that we can ascertain an adversary's material interests and shape their calculations, may blind us to the more powerful, if less utility-maximizing motivations that actually drive state behavior in war. War is more than a bargaining failure. And once conflict begins, it's hard to know how and when it will end. And I don't need to tell all of you that a great power war would be devastating. The interconnected partial orders so prized around the world would be very unlikely to survive. And major wars always bring unexpected and catastrophic second- and third-order effects, including hunger, disease, violent revolution, and repression, and even the return of the problems of scarcity. Scenario four, the worst one, and the one I think people are thinking about the least. The planetary problems of plenty. War, if nothing else, is produced by a legible political process, the result of choice and agency. The decisions causing it unfolding quickly, but typically in a linear fashion. The problems of plenty, fast-spreading lethal pandemics, a climate catastrophe, a crisis emerging from a technology gone awry, can explode without warning, logic, or obvious origin point. For these reasons, such planetary crises can generate even greater fear, panic, conspiratorial thinking, and scapegoating than even the most horrific armed struggles. It may be unclear who or what the adversary is, whether it is internal or external, what the best response is, and who should bear the cost. This makes it hard to build the kind of policy consensus and legitimacy for the domestic mobilization and international cooperation that wars can often inspire. Imagine the Earth's temperature rising quickly, say 3 or even 5° over a period of months. Devastated agriculture leads to famine, pestilence, mass migration crises, as well as another novel pandemic, perhaps more transmissible and lethal than the COVID-19 virus. That world could resemble the horrors that visited the globe between the 1610s and the 1680s. And as the historian Jeffrey Parker has chronicled, the climate crisis, falling temperatures, unleashed which unleashed famines, disease, and misery worldwide, produced war, revolution, um and repression. This is when Hobbes wrote his Leviathan right in the middle of all this. And as much as 1/3 of the world published but perished. It also highlights another nightmare scenario of scenario four. Failure to deal with severe crises plenty can return the nightmarish world of scarcity, including the worlds of scenario three. To be clear, these are not predictions. They are only offered for discussion uh with you and leave out countless other possibilities, including, I should suggest, and I actually instinctively think these are more true, happier ones. Um but with [snorts] that, I look forward to your reactions and your questions. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.