Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

The Coming Chinese Commonwealth?

Thinking a bit further ahead, there are things scenario planners call predetermined elements—and they are sometimes far more important than the out-of-the-blue wildcards and black swans, for they are about largely unstoppable megatrends that are truly mega. The most obvious example of a predetermined element in our era is the rise of China as an economic, political, and military superpower—something that is curiously both well-known and poorly understood.

My good friend Josef “Joe” Joffe of Hamburg, who combines the editor and publisher role at one of Germany’s most prestigious newspapers (Die Zeit) with a part-time academic appointment at Stanford, has carefully studied periods in history when new powers rise. It’s delicate, and indeed dangerous, as the existing players must learn to accommodate the new powers, while the rising stars must learn to use their new strengths responsibly and for the common good of the world. Joe likes to call this last bit “teenage driver’s syndrome”: New powers like to flex their newly developed muscles, and sometimes the result is a serious accident.

What’s dangerous about all this is that we, as human beings, don’t have a very good track record. The great rising powers of the early twentieth century were Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan. The status-quo powers did not work especially hard to accommodate them and integrate them smoothly into the world system, and likewise Germany and Japan did not always use their ...