This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 21, 2020 - September 27, 2020

Our present scientific and cultural worldview is founded on the premise that history is a great teacher, since we project the future based on what we know from the past and the present. But as Mark Twain remarked, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Philosopher George Santayana whimsically said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But which part of history is the right pattern that we need to follow? Near history or ancient history? In the latest Foreign Affairs magazine, Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan looked at this issue to assess the Trump administration. As the editorial commented, after four years under Donald Trump, the “country’s enemies are stronger, its friends are weaker, and the United States itself is increasingly isolated and prostrate”.

Initially, I thought the appropriate decade to compare the current era would be the 1930s, when the US had just experienced the 1929 stock market crash and entered into the Great Depression that also engulfed Europe and the rest of the world.

Prof McMillan went back earlier to the pre-First World War period, when the rising powers of Germany, Japan and the US threatened the hegemonic power of the British Empire. No one had wanted war, but the assassination of Austrian-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 triggered an alignment of powers in Europe between Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, and Britain and France on the other.

The Russian monarchy, already teetering on the brink from the unsuccessful social revolution of 1905 and its loss to Japan in the Russia-Japan war that year, collapsed in 1917 due to military losses and failed reforms. The US and Japan emerged stronger after the First World War, as Britain became exhausted from her war efforts. They were already planning whose navy would command the Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s.

However, it was the inflation and huge costs from the unbearable war reparation burden on Germany after World War One that brought down the Weimar Republic by the early 1930s and allowed the Nazis to form the government in Germany. McMillan’s lesson is that it is “when a number of disruptive factors come together that those wielding power can bring on the perfect storm”. Japan was the rising power, Germany under the Nazis sought former glory, Britain and the other European powers were in decline, and the only power strong enough to restore balance was the US. That led to the Second World War.

Since the Thucydides Trap was revived as an explanation for the US-China rivalry, it may be useful to go back further in history on great power contests. The Thucydides trap came from the Peloponnesian wars (431-405 BC) between the two small city/states of Athens and Sparta. However, it was the earlier Greco-Persian war (499-448 BC), when Greece united to fight off the westward push by the Persian empire, that shaped the future of Europe.

The Greeks defeated the superior Persian army by using her naval forces. That created the Mediterranean as the maritime basin, where Western civilisation grew distinctly from the East. Henceforth, maritime power became a deciding factor in state contests. The power that emerged was Rome, a city that is better remembered for her military conquests than her philosophy.

Stanford Prof Walter Scheidel has edited a superb book on Rome and China, comparing and contrasting two great powers that ruled half the world between 500 BC and 400 AD, but cut off from each other because trade between them was controlled by powerful Central Asian and Middle Eastern states. Both the Romans and the Qin Kingdom (which unified China in 221 BC) respectively grew from the barbaric Western parts of the Mediterranean and Chinese civilisation cradles. Around 700 BC, Greek civilisation was already flowering, whereas Chinese civilisation prospered in the Central plains to the coast around the Spring Autumn period (770-480 BC).

The Romans learnt from the Greeks and, through a series of conquests, took over the whole of Italy, then defeated Carthage (264-146 BC), expanded into Spain and Gaul (France) and finally conquered Greece in 146 BC, effectively ending the Ancient Greek period in 30 BC with the defeat of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemy dynasty in Egypt.

Roman history is different from Chinese imperial history in that there are two distinct periods, Republic Rome from 500 to 27 BC, and Imperial Rome from 27 BC to 641 AD. Republican Rome was ruled relatively democratically, whereas Rome after Julius Caesar and his heir, Emperor Augustus (27 BC–14 AD), became autocratic, wielding power from the centre.

Prof Scheidel therefore identified a period of “Great Convergence”, whereby warring states were unified by “barbarian” successor states, and then taken over and managed by a centrist regime. This happened with the Western Qin state fighting the other six Eastern states during the Warring States period (403-221 BC), ending up with the creation of China in 221 BC. This was similar to the Romans taking over Europe and the Near East. For example, Scheidel estimated that for the last 2,220 years, the Chinese “core” was unified for 936 years or 42% of the time, whereas even at the height of Republic Rome, its empire was unified for only 3½ centuries, or 18% of the time.

From 600 AD, however, the Roman empire became more fragmented, as Roman power was lost to the Persians and Arabs in the East. The political fragmentation of Europe, where power began to be shared among monarchs, lords, local gentry and semi-independent towns and clergy, never achieved the reunifications that occurred in China. Hence, from 600 AD onwards, the Western European political structure diverged from the Chinese and earlier Roman imperial systems.

Indeed, it was the intense competition within Europe that propelled it out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance, creating new institutions (universities, trading companies, banks and stock exchanges) that laid the foundations for the scientific and industrial revolutions. The Europeans invented capital-intensive production, superior to the labour-intensive methods of the East. From these strengths, the maritime powers of Portugal, Spain, Holland and Britain were able to sail forth to conquer new lands and challenge the inward-looking empires of the Ottomans in Central Asia, the Moghuls in India and the Qing Dynasty in China. These empires did not evolve modern institutions that could withstand both internal decay and external invasions. The Great Divergence between the West and the rest began, therefore, with the European Renaissance, as described by historian Kenneth Pomeranz (2000).

A historical parallel pattern can now be observed. Even as old Europe fought among themselves, the New World to its West developed under the US, taking over as global hegemon after Europe exhausted itself after two world wars. The US models itself after the Romans, with its global legions, Roman columns in every state capital, and even the use of the Senate as a major political institution.

But Pax Americana spread science and technology as much as ideas of democracy, freedom and equality. The result is that the rest of the world has caught up in terms of institutions and innovation, leading again to the economic convergence between the West and the Rest, as described by Nobel laureate Michael Spence (2011).

Are we now witnessing again a period of divergence, as the current debate is about decoupling of global supply chains, technology and general cooperation?

History will not be able to give us clear answers, but we do know that the cycles of convergence and divergence are always present in an uncertain world.

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

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