1 DIPLOMAT Magazine June 2021 Will the South China Sea Spark the Next Global Conflict? In Asia’s maritime heartland, all the ingredients of a global cataclysm are conspiring against the post-Cold War period of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. By Richard Javad Heydarian “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,” warned Prussia’s Otto von Bismarck in the thick of fin de siècle insouciance. Lo and behold, the Iron Chancellor’s foreboding at the turn of the new century proved eerily prescient, as “some damned foolish thing” on the margins of empires seamlessly transformed the improbable into the inevitable. What initially began as the Balkan Wars over the last vestiges of Ottoman territory in Europe quickly transmogrified into the First World War following the surreal assassination of Austria’s heir-apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by the teenage Bosnian-Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. The fateful event, which at first seemed like a relatively manageable tragedy in the greater geopolitical scheme of things, set in motion a catastrophic wave of belligerent posturing and military mobilizations by a whole host of rival powers, where ascendant hawks ached for a glorious war. “Once the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for calling up, equipping, and transporting [millions of] men began turning automatically,” wrote Barbara W. Tuchman in her classic account of the fateful weeks in mid-1914 that would change the fate of humanity. A major culprit was the bundle of impersonal historical forces that structured the early 20th century global order. The unexpected leap from relative tranquility to total war was possible, Tuchman wrote, because “Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others.” And it didn’t help that the decision-makers – from squabbling ministers to the blood-related monarchs in St. Petersburg and Berlin to Paris, Vienna, and London – effectively sleepwalked into conflict by failing to “to prepare for the harder alternative” rather than foolishly “act[ing] upon what they suspected to be true,” namely the perilous delusion of early, easy, and decisive victory in an event of armed confrontation. The First World War, which claimed tens of millions of lives and wiped centuries-old empires from the face of the Earth, was the singular event that defined what Eric Hobsbawm famously described as the “short 20th century.” After all, in Fritz Ster’s words, it was the “first calamity,” with the even more devastating Second World War and the ensuring Cold War as its geopolitical derivatives. Upon closer examination, it’s also clear that the structural conditions that enabled the First World War are eerily reflected in our contemporary geopolitics. As Christopher Clark put it, the early 21st century international order features “a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.” In many ways, the South China Sea disputes are today’s version of the early 20th century Balkans, where “some damned foolish thing” can trigger a devastating global conflict without precedence and beyond our wildest imagination. It is here in Asia’s maritime heartland, where all