Gideon Rachman is one of the best-informed and most sensible columnists writing on foreign affairs these days, and he's one of the reasons you ought to subscribe to the Financial Times. (Compared to the FT oped page, Wall Street Journal opeds on foreign affairs often read like a weird combination of yellow journalism and worst-case planning, with a shot of Mad Magazine thrown in).

It therefore pains me to have to take issue with Rachman's recent column warning of rising tensions in East Asia, and all the more so because he quotes two respected colleagues, Joe Nye and Graham Allison. His concern is the possibility of some sort of clash between China and Japan, precipitated by the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands exacerbated by rising nationalism in both countries and concerns over shifting balances of power. These are all legitimate worries, although it's hard to know just how serious or volatile the situation really is.

The problem lies in Rachman's use of the World War I analogy -- specifically, the July Crisis that led to the war -- to illustrate the dangers we might be facing in East Asia. The 1914 analogy has been invoked by many experts over the years, of course, in part because World War I is correctly seen as an exceptionally foolhardy and destructive war that left virtually all of the participants far worse off. Moreover, popular histories like Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August (which is said to have influenced John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and A.J.P. Taylor's War by Timetable have reinforced an image of World War I as a tragic accident, a war that nobody really intended. In this version of history, the European great powers stumbled into a war that nobody wanted, due to miscalculations, rigid mobilization plans, extended alliance commitments, and poor communications. 

This interpretation of 1914 has been especially popular during the nuclear age, as it seemed to provide a bright warning sign for how great powers could blunder into disaster through misplaced military policies or poor crisis management. And given Rachman's concerns about the possibility of a Sino-Japanese military clash over the disputed islands, and the obvious costs that any serious clash of arms would entail, it's not hard to see why he's drawn to the 1914 case.

The problem, however, is that this interpretation of the origins of 1914 is wrong. World War I was not an accident, and the European great powers didn't stumble into it by mistake. On the contrary, the war resulted from a deliberate German decision to go to war, based primarily on their concerns about the long-term balance of power and their hope that they could win a quick victory that would ensure their predominance for many years to come. 

As Dale Copeland lays out in the fourth chapter of his masterful book, The Origins of Major Wars, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethman-Hollweg used the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria as a pretext to launch a preventive war -- something Germany's leaders had been contemplating for some time -- and he cleverly manipulated the July Crisis in an attempt to pin the blame for the war on others. Not only did Germany's leaders give Austria-Hungary a "blank check" to go after Serbia (which had backed the terrorist group that had assassinated the Archduke), they egged the reluctant Austrians on at every turn. German leaders also knew that a Balkan war was likely to trigger Russian military mobilization -- as it eventually did -- and that this step would give them the pretext for war that they were looking for. The war, in short, was not an accident, at least not in the sense that Rachman means.

This is not to say that errors and miscalculations were not at play in 1914. Russia and Great Britain failed to figure out what Germany was planning in a sufficiently timely fashion, and Germany's leaders almost certainly exaggerated the long-term threat posed by Russian power (which was their main motivation for going to war). German military planners were also less confident of securing the rapid victory that the infamous Schlieffen plan assumed, yet they chose to roll the iron dice of war anyway.

But the key point is that the European powers did not go to war in 1914 because a minor incident suddenly and uncontrollably escalated into a hegemonic war. The real lesson of 1914 for the present day, therefore, is to ask whether any Asian powers are interested in deliberately launching a preventive war intended to establish regional hegemony, as Germany sought to do a century ago.

The good news is that this seems most unlikely. Japan is no position to do so, and China's military capabilities are still too weak to take on its various neighbors (and the United States) in this fashion. And in the nuclear age, it is not even clear that this sort of hegemony can be established by military means. If China does hope to become the dominant power in Asia (and there are good realist reasons why it should), it will do so in part by building up its military power over time -- to increase the costs and risks to the United States of staying there -- and by using its economic clout to encourage America's current Asian allies to distance themselves from Washington. It is not yet clear if this will happen, however, because China's future economic and political trajectory remains highly uncertain. But deliberately launching a great power war to achieve this goal doesn't seem likely, and especially not at the present time.

There is one feature of the East Asian security environment that is worrisome, however, though it bears little resemblance to pre-war conditions in 1914. Today, conflict in East Asia might be encouraged by the belief that it could be confined to a naval or air clash over distant (and not very valuable) territories and thus not touch any state's home territory or domestic population. All Asian countries would be exceedingly leery of attacking each other's homelands, but naval and air battles over distant islands are precisely the sort of military exchange one might use to demonstrate resolve and capability but at little or no risk of escalation.  That's the scenario that I worry about, but that is not what happened back in July 1914.

I'm in Beijing, attending a conference on Sino-American relations. Lots of interesting comments so far, but what has been most striking (to me, at least), is the willingness of the American participants to tell our Chinese hosts what their foreign policy ought to be. I think the Chinese government has made a number of foreign policy mistakes in recent years -- mostly by throwing their weight around prematurely -- but it's not like American foreign and national security policy has been an untrammeled success for the past decade or so. In our case, a bit of humility would be so unexpected that it would leave our counterparts completely baffled.

This trip is the third time I've circumnavigated the globe (Boston-Newark-Singapore-Beijing-Chicago-Boston). That's no great achievement in this day and age, but I mention it because I've been reading a fascinating book: Joyce E. Chaplin's Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. I'm only up through the voyages of James Cook, and the central lesson of the early attempts at circumnavigation is that it was fatal to most everyone who tried it. Magellan, as you probably know, led the first circumnavigation but didn't survive the trip, and  survival rates were typically less than 20 percent. Today we feel bad if we have to fly economy.

The book also reminds me how recent our awareness and understanding of the globe really is. Homo Sapiens has been around for maybe 50,000 years, but knowledge of the full expanse of the globe and the ability to traverse it in its entirely has only been known since the 16^th century. In other words, humans have been aware of the full extent of our shared planetary home for only about 20 generations, or less than 1 percent of the human experience. Small wonder that all these far-flung peoples still have trouble getting along.

What's the most powerful political force in the world? Some of you might say it's the bond market. Others might nominate the resurgence of religion or the advance of democracy or human rights. Or maybe it's digital technology, as symbolized by the Internet and all that comes with it. Or perhaps you think it's nuclear weapons and the manifold effects they have had on how states think about security and the use of force.

Those are all worthy nominees (no doubt readers here will have their own favorites), but my personal choice for the Strongest Force in the World would be nationalism. The belief that humanity is comprised of many different cultures -- i.e., groups that share a common language, symbols, and a narrative about their past (invariably self-serving and full of myths) -- and that those groups ought to have their own state has been an overwhelmingly powerful force in the world over the past two centuries. 

It was nationalism that cemented most of the European powers in the modern era, turning them from dynastic states into nation-states, and it was the spread of nationalist ideology that helped destroy the British, French, Ottoman, Dutch, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian/Soviet empires. Nationalism is the main reason the United Nations had fifty-one members immediately after its founding in 1945 and has nearly 200 members today. It is why the Zionists wanted a state for the Jewish people and why Palestinians want a state of their own today. It is what enabled the Vietnamese to defeat both the French and the American armies during the Cold War. It is also why Kurds and Chechens still aspire to statehood; why Scots have pressed for greater autonomy within the United Kingdom, and it is why we now have a Republic of South Sudan.

Understanding the power of nationalism also tells you a lot about what is happening today in the European Union. During the Cold War, European integration flourished because it took place inside the hot-house bubble provided by American protection. Today, however, the United States is losing interest in European security, the Europeans themselves face few external threats, and the EU project itself has expanded too far and badly overreached by creating an ill-advised monetary union. What we are seeing today, therefore, is a gradual renationalization of European foreign policy, fueled in part by incompatible economic preferences and in part by recurring fears that local (i.e., national) identities are being threatened. When Danes worry about Islam, Catalans demand autonomy, Flemish and Walloons contend in Belgium, Germans refuse to bail out Greeks, and nobody wants to let Turkey into the EU, you are watching nationalism at work.

The power of nationalism is easy for realists to appreciate and understand, as my sometime collaborator John Mearsheimer makes clear in an important new paper. Nations -- because they operate in a competitive and sometimes dangerous world -- seek to preserve their identities and cultural values. In many cases, the best way for them to do that is to have their own state, because ethnic or national groups that lack their own state are usually more vulnerable to conquest, absorption, and assimilation.

Similarly, modern states also have a powerful incentive to promote national unity -- in other words, to foster nationalism -- because having a loyal and united population that is willing to sacrifice (and in extreme cases, to fight and die) for the state increases its power and thus its ability to deal with external threats. In the competitive world of international politics, in short, nations have incentives to obtain their own state and states have incentives to foster a common national identity in their populations. Taken together, these twin dynamics create a long-term trend in the direction of more and more independent nation-states.

Obviously, nations and states don't always reach the goal of a unified "nation-state." Some nations never succeed in gaining independence, and some states never succeed in creating a unified national identity for themselves. And not every cultural or ethnic group thinks of itself as a nation or aspires to independence (though one can never be sure when some group might begin to acquire "national consciousness" and head in that direction). Nonetheless, the past hundred years has seen a steady rise in the number of states and the emergence of strong national movements in many of them, and I see no reason to expect this trend to be reversed.  

Once established, a nation-state is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. Nation-states are hard to conquer and subdue, because the local population will usually resist outside invasion and continue to struggle against a foreign occupier. Successful national movements tend to spawn imitators, leading to further demands for statehood. Despite its occasional shortcomings (and the obvious examples of "failed states" like Somalia, Yemen, or Afghanistan), the national state is likely to remain the most important political entity in world politics for the foreseeable future.

Because American national identity tends to emphasize the civic dimension (based on supposedly universal principles such as individual liberty) and tends to downplay the historic and cultural elements (though they clearly exist) U.S. leaders routinely underestimate the power of local affinities and the strength of cultural, tribal, or territorial loyalties. During the Cold War, we persistently exaggerated the strength of transnational ideologies like Communism, and underestimated the degree to which national identities and interests would eventually generate intense conflicts within the Marxist world. Osama bin Laden made the same mistake when he thought that terrorist attacks and video-taped fulminations would ignite a mass movement to re-establish a transnational Islamic caliphate. And anyone who thinks that a rising China is going to tamely submit to U.S. or Western notions of the proper world order fails to appreciate the degree to which nationalism is also a central part of the Chinese worldview, and far more important than any lingering "communist" ideals.

Unless we fully appreciate the power of nationalism, in short, we are going to get a lot of things wrong about the contemporary political life. It is the most powerful political force in the world, and we ignore it at our peril. 

There are plenty of depressing stories in this week's news-lethal ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan, gushing oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the usual mishigas in the Middle East, etc . -- so I thought today I'd highlight a small bit of good news. 

A few weeks ago, Singapore and Malaysia reached an important agreement resolving a longstanding dispute over Malayan Railway (KTM) land in Singapore.  The dispute dates back to Singapore's unilateral declaration of independence from the Malay Confederation in 1965, and involved the fate of a railway terminal and other properties owned by KTM.  As Mushahid Ali and Yang Razali Kassim describe in this brief commentary, KTM has agreed to move its terminal from Tanjong Pagar (a prime real estate location in central Singapore) to a spot near the strait that separates the two countries, just across from the Malaysian city of Johor Bahru.  A joint holding company (60 percent Malay ownership, 40 percent Singapore) will then develop the abandoned KTM properties (and presumably make a bundle).

This agreement seems like a small matter, but given the sometimes troubled history of the two countries, it is a significant step forward in their relationship.  According to Ali and Kassim, the agreement also "opened up the possibility of a resolution of other outstanding issues," such as price of water supplied to Singapore by Malaysia.

There are three broader lessons we might draw from this relatively obscure but positive development.   The first lesson is that the United States is not always the "indispensable nation" and not every diplomatic issue requires the United States to get involved.  As near as I can tell, the United States played no direct role in helping resolve this issue.  Instead, Singapore and Malaysia figured out for themselves that remaining at loggerheads wasn't doing anyone any good, and they've worked out a deal that will leave both better off.   This sort of thing happens all the time in world politics, but we Americans tend not to hear about positive developments like this one unless some U.S. politician or diplomat is trying to claim the credit.

The second lesson is that generational change matters.  Singapore's decision to withdraw from the Malay Confederation in the mid-1960s left a legacy of bitterness, and made compromise and cooperation difficult even after more-or-less cordial relations had been established between the two countries.  The obstacles that the first generation of Malay and Singaporean leaders faced in resolving this sort of dispute now appear to be of much less concern to leaders on both sides.  Which raises the interesting possibility that conflicts that seem intractable at present could become much easier to resolve once elites who have an interest in confrontation are gradually replaced by successors who simply don't care as much about scoring points against a former adversary.   (It doesn't always work this way, of course; sometimes conflicts get worse over time and successor generations become more intransigent and extreme than their predecessors were.)

The third lesson has to do with the central role of security.  Cooperation and compromise between Malaysia and Singapore were difficult during the first few decades after independence, because Singapore's long-term future was still uncertain and its relationship with Malaysia was particularly fraught.  Today, by contrast, its independence is well-established and relations with its neighbors (and the United States) are positive. 

Malaysia has done very well in recent years as well, despite some degree of internal political turmoil.  With both sides feeling relatively secure, compromise on issues like the KTM rail properties no longer carried large political consequences and agreement became much easier to reach.  The lesson, if it weren't obvious, is that mutual security is the foundation of far-reaching international cooperation.   Feel free to bear that in mind whenever you think about resolving other seemingly intractable international conflicts.

I watched the Men's final at the French Open tennis tournament yesterday, and I was struck by the dominance of: 1) Roger Federer, who won his 14th Grand Slam tournament handily, and 2) the English language. The announcer at *Roland Garros* Stadium reported the scores en francais and French TV apparently got the first courtside interview with Federer after the match (while NBC took a commercial break), but Federer and Swedish runner-up Robin Soderling gave their acceptance speeches  in English (with a French translation for the crowd). One imagines the spirit of Charles de Gaulle whirring rapidly in his tomb, not to mention the "Immortals" in L'Academie francaise.

It’s possible that Robin Soderling (the Swedish runner-up) spoke to the crowd in English because he doesn't speak French. But Federer reportedly speaks fluent French, German, and Swiss-German, as well as English, so why wasn’t he addressing the local crowd in their native tongue?

My guess is that this was dictated by the global TV market, and by the growing position of English as the lingua franca of contemporary globalization. The tournament was being watched all over the world, and English is the language that would be understood by the greatest number of potential viewers world-wide.  

Americans sometimes view the dominant position of English as another component of America's "soft power," but that view is simplistic chauvinism.  With English becoming a "universal" language, no single country will own it or be able to regulate its content. Instead, it will continue to evolve as most languages do, incorporating new words, spellings, and grammatical practices from an wide variety of sources. If they haven't started already, American xenophobes are going to start complaining soon about the corruption of "standard English" by all these foreign influences.  For an interesting collection of views on this topic, check out the "Freakonomics" discussion here.

Of course, this whole discussion may be moot, given the damage that email, text-messaging, and Twitter feeds are already doing to civilized discourse.  Or does that comment make me sound like a technophobe?

*P.S.: Bonus points for anyone who knows who Roland Garros was without looking up the link. Answer: Garros was a French aeronautical pioneer, who developed an armored propeller that allowed the use of a forward-firing machine gun for aerial combat during World War I. His system predated the more effective synchronization device later perfected by the Dutch/German Anthony Fokker. Garros was captured by the Germans in 1915, later escaped, and eventually shot down and killed in 1918. The stadium for which he is named occupies the site of a tennis academy that he attended.

JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty Images