The Problems of Plenty

An interview with historian Frank Gavin

Now and again I like to talk to leading historians and students of international relations to talk about their craft, the state of their field, and their more recent projects. Here are previous interviews with Margaret Macmillan and Joe Nye. This time I spoke to Frank Gavin, with whom I share, amongst other things, an interest in nuclear history.

We were able to discuss his latest book The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era published in the Adelphi series for the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Francis J Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, will be published by Yale University Press, 2025. 

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Lawrence Freedman: You started off as an economic historian and then moved into the diplomatic and military spheres?

Frank Gavin: I was a diplomatic historian trained by Mark Trachtenberg and Walter McDougall. looking at the balance of payments issue in the post war period. This forced me to learn some economics and get involved in economics history. And then basically by following the documents I was led to a variety of other issues, including nuclear policy.

LF: So what got you into the nuclear stuff? I've spent most of my career on it, so I can't tell you it's an odd choice to make, but it's an acquired taste.

FG: Absolutely. I keep trying to tell people I've been trying to break up with nuclear weapons for quite some time and nuclear weapons won't let me break up. Basically, when I started looking at the balance of payments issue, the United States in the 50s and 60s and 70s was haemorrhaging golden dollars. This wasn't how I had learned the history of post-war, International Monetary relations. I'd heard about this wonderful Bretton Woods system.

So I started looking into it. I saw that not only was the system set up in such a way that meant that the United States lost dollars in gold, but when American policymakers looked for the best way to fix this problem, they focused on the dollar and gold cost of stationing hundreds of thousands of troops abroad. And in fact, when they looked to try to fix this problem in the 50s and 60s, their first solution was to reduce the number of American troops and their dependents in West Germany.

When I read about these efforts, particularly under Kennedy and Johnson, I recalled that I had learned, when I took Strategic Studies classes, that this was exactly the time that the flexible response doctrine was being introduced, and this was supposed to emphasise conventional forces. And so this is a puzzle and a curiosity. And as I went into it, I started to realise that flexible response was largely misunderstood. To the extent that America decided not to reduce its troops, it had very little to do with flexible response. It had more to do with concerns about whether West Germany wouldn't seek its own independent nuclear capability.

This then got me into the whole question of nuclear non-proliferation and the origins of that policy, which then got me into looking at nuclear strategy. Because if you are going to extend deterrence and keep other states from having their own nuclear weapons, you have to give them something. And what the United States offered to give them was a pretty terrifying nuclear strategy focused on counterforce and pre-emption. And all of this was at odds with the way I'd learned the story.

So through a simple story of learning about the dysfunctions of the International Monetary system, I got into alliance relations, which got me into nuclear non-proliferation, which got me into nuclear strategy, which is a long way to way of saying it's what's fun about being a historian because you just follow the documents.

LF: A lot of the people who appear in your documents were around when you were doing your research. Do you think it makes a difference when the people you're writing about are there to correct you? 

FG: I'm sure you've had to deal with the sort of practitioner who says ‘you don't know what you're doing because you weren't on the inside.’ The first piece I wrote out of all of this was called the ‘myth of flexible response.’ And I sent it off, as one does, to International Security. And I got a review back and it was handwritten and they forgot to take out the initials at the end. It was “CK”, which was clearly Carl Kaysen. I recognised his handwriting from the documents. Carl was a brilliant economist, a very smart guy, who would never fail to remind you that he was a very smart guy. Basically he said that whoever wrote this has no idea what they're talking about. And I was a young scholar and devastated. And I thought, well, am I missing something here or am I totally wrong?

Around this time, I was working on the presidential tapes project that Phil Zelikow was running at the Miller Centre. One of the great things about the tapes is that you realise that with all these diverse issues, whether it's International monetary relations, alliance relations, concerns about the German question, nuclear strategy, and troop withdrawals, you'll have an expert in charge of each. But it's only at the top that these issues are all tied together.

So President Kennedy, day after day after day, in 61 and 62 through 63, might have eight meetings. One might involve tax cuts, another the crisis with US steel, and the Test Ban Treaty, Berlin, and the balance of payments. Then different people would be in different meetings. So Carl Kaysen would deal with his portfolio and he would come in for one or maybe two of those meetings. Only at the top was some consideration given to all these issues. So in a president or prime minister's mind, the German question would be related to the balance of payments, which would be related to tax cuts, which would be related to Berlin, in a way that a mid-level person might not see.

It's sort of the reverse of the bureaucratic politics model. I started seeing that these issues got tied together in a way that many mid-level people would not see, but was understood at the top where grand strategy was made.  

LF: This is the privileged position of the historian: not only do we know what eventually happened, which, of course these characters could not know, but we can get a chance to look down and see the whole of government in operation and not just one bit. That also raises another question. You've described how as an economic historian you saw the relationship with military things, but a lot of the time those connections are not made. The people who know about the economic stuff and those who know the security stuff barely talk to each other. It requires some effort to overcome that division.

FG: Yes. And you see this in the secondary literature on these questions. There was tremendous work on the history of international monetary relations, often among our international political economy friends. Then you would see great work on nuclear strategy. Then you would see great work on transatlantic relations or the German question. But you rarely see them tied together. And part of this is because political scientists are more likely to say I am going to slice one issue out here, which they do without making the horizontal connections. Although we think of history taking place vertically as time passes, historians can also see things horizontally, recognising all that is going on at the same time.

This can give you a sort of empathy with policymakers. A favourite examples is how American nuclear non-proliferation policy is transformed in the fall and winter of 1964-65, after China detonates a nuclear device, President Johnson sets up a Commission that lays the foundations for an absolutely brilliant nuclear non-proliferation policy. This is one of the reasons why we only have nine nuclear weapon states today. These same people at the same time were the architects of America's military escalation in Vietnam. You realise that they didn't lose 20 IQ points when they went from one meeting to the next.

And in some weird ways these policies were connected. China detonates a nuclear device. You want to demonstrate for non-proliferation purposes that you are not going to let a nuclear state like China bully a non-nuclear state, and that affects your thinking towards Vietnam. But of course scholars look at these two issues separate from each other. The Vietnam people will say, well these people didn't know what they were doing: the non-proliferation person will say, this is a pretty impressive policy. But it’s the same people at the same time wrestling with difficult horizontally connected issues.

LF: You made an interesting point about political scientists. They do have a problem in that once you start expanding from your narrow area to take in other areas there are just too many variables. There are too many things to track. Do you think this gives historians an advantage over political scientists because while they may not be scientifically robust they can explain things better?

FG: It's a classic phrase - ‘Some of my best friends are international relation theorists’ - but I kind of grew up with IR theory. It's an enormously powerful lens to help make sense of the world. It exposes underlying assumptions about research, design, causality and agency. But. and I'm being just a tiny bit flip here, 90 percent of IR theory comes down to three historical questions: What caused the First World War? Was Hitler unique? And how did nuclear weapons affect international politics? Those are all historical questions. And our IR theory friends have gotten the World War One question completely wrong. They're still in kind of Fritz Fischer land from 1968 or whatever.

This is where I had the great fortune of being trained by Mark Trachtenberg. You can use some of the advantages that IR theory and political science provide, which is a certain level of precision. But, taking a historical perspective, you see not just these horizontal connections but also complexity, contingency, chance, circumstances. You become very suspicious of importing historical lessons from the past in total to the present, which you see these days with what people believe to be lessons from the Cold War, the 1930s or Wilhelmine Germany. And, to my mind, doing great violence both to this history, which is far more complex, and to the current set of circumstances which may or may not be relevant to whatever that past tells us.

LF: Let's move on to your Adelphi paper, which is a bit of a departure from your previous work. What motivated you to take on such a big topic, and what would you say is the main theme?

FG: I would say there were three big motivations. The first was that I was deeply distressed by our response to COVID. (As you know I always associate you with the pandemic because I remember in early March seeing you in my office. We had a conference planned for in April. I said ‘I'll see you in April’ and you looked at me and said ‘I don't think you know how serious this is. We may never see each other again.’ You were the first person that made me realise how big a deal this was.)

The COVID-19 global crisis killed upwards of 20 million people, which is the equivalent of a World War, and was a failure of international cooperation and national domestic responses. Liberal democratic states did poorly; authoritarian states did poorly. Yet global public health was the low hanging fruit of international political cooperation. We knew this was coming. We knew what to do and we failed miserably. That problem looked similar to others that we will see coming down the road, be it new emerging technology, the climate crisis, anything involving the ‘Global Commons.’ I was struck that this was a wake-up call. Yet, once it eased, our governments and our friends who study these questions went back to normal.

This led to the second point, which was that everyone was getting into great power politics as if we were suddenly back in 1898 or something like that. I don't deny that international politics and state actors presents challenges. But I was disturbed by the fact that the ease with which people began to look at the world through an old lens. With Russia's horrendous invasion of Ukraine there was almost a sense of, well, we know what this is. It looks like World War Two. We have the models to deal with this. This gives us a focus because we have no idea how to deal with these other sets of global problems. The return of great power politics seemed to excuse serious study of these other challenges, which to me were sort of catastrophic.

The third point was that as a historian I was struck that we use established models to understand international politics without accounting for the profound changes we've gone through, including the doubling of life expectancy. It seemed to me unimaginable that wouldn't have consequences for issues of war and peace. That got me into studying and thinking about these issues and inspired me to dive into looking into how a world of scarcity had changed to one of plenty, and how that might change perspectives on how international relations works.

LF: So let's just explore this division between scarcity and plenty. An obvious argument is that you and I live in worlds of plenty, and our countries are responsible for many of the problems you identify. But an awful lot of people don't. And while it's true that there are a lot of problems to be addressed that result from factors such as climate change this means that a lot of international politics is still about the tension between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’

FG: Absolutely. And I don't mean to diminish the trying and vexing circumstances that many people in the world live under. The difference between the world we live in today and the past is that scarcity was an actual physical limit. In the 19th century there was nothing you could do necessarily to produce more food, more fuel, more clean water, more housing. Whereas today we have it completely within our means to solve these scarcity issues. When those scarcity issues exist it's often the consequence either of some political issue or of us not doing more to alleviate these issues of scarcity. So scarcity today is the result of political circumstances, not a hard physical limit as it was in the past.

In the past, human beings could not get access to the basic resources they need in a consistent way that was predictable. That problem theoretically is now gone. It is not applied universally. It should be part of the political agenda for the developed countries to make sure scarcity is eliminated. I think it'd be a far easier task than people imagine. But, even in those places in the world that face scarcity, there have been improvements. The poorest country in Africa is arguably Burundi, and in the last 25 years, their life expectancy has gone up from 47 to 62, which is still not enough.

If you look at life expectancy curves, the increases pretty much everywhere are extraordinary. In China, which was unimaginably poor, life expectancy has actually surpassed the United States. Or South Korea. In the 1950s it was poorer than Nigeria and now is one of the most vibrant, rich economies in the world. You realise that the tools to tame scarcity are available. The physical limits, which tormented human beings throughout almost all of its history are now gone.

LF: Is this a bit like an argument that might have been made early in the 20th century -  that we have it in our power to eliminate war. We know what to do. We have the mechanisms. But the problem is we don't do it because politics gets in the way. And while great power politics now is very different from great power politics then, states are still the key actors in international affairs, and they never quite see the problem in the same way, or it's very rare that they do so. Aren't you caught still between an internationalist perspective which says that we ought to be able to sort all these problems out and national perspectives which say yes in principle, but we've got to look after our own people first?

FG: So it's a great question and it's, as you can imagine, one of the big critiques that I've gotten. European and global politics from the late 19th century to, say, the middle of the 20th century reflected very particular historical circumstances. These drove Imperial conquest. During that period, there was a need for territory to feed populations that were seen as growing geometrically. Those wars of imperial conquest generated many of the disasters both on the European continent and globally. We're now shaped by very specific historical circumstances. Its not to say that war will go away. But there is less risk of a particular kind of war, the kind that shaped the international system from, let's say, about 1870 to about 1950, where you marry the industrial capability of Western States and Japan with this Malthusian fear and social Darwinist overlay as their populations exploded. If they did not have land and territory to feed their people they would face extinction.

These circumstances were changing underneath in ways that were not recognised. Taming scarcity involved unbelievable increases in agricultural and economic productivity. At the same time there was an unexpected demographic compression where people just stopped having as many kids as expected. This was combined with a variety of other forces including improved governance and massive increases in information about the world. This meant that the historical forces that drove imperial plunder make literally no sense today. And that doesn't mean states won't pursue it. Even if Russia had won, or end up winning, they would be no stronger. Taking the Donbass in 1900 would have added wheat, coal, defence in depth, a supplicant population, and a world that didn't care. None of those things are true now. Globally, wheat is plentiful, coal is plentiful. It's not a supplicant population.

Russia's behaviour demonstrates that there are other factors involved that drive states to conflict that have not gone away. It's just that a very particular form of war, of unlimited imperial expansion, makes no sense now for states to pursue. This leads to questions about how to think about the China challenge. I've just been reading Richard Frank's terrific but haunting book about Japan's war against China in the middle of the 20th century. Then Japan could move into China, into Southeast Asia and conquer those territories.

Its hard to imagine now that a geopolitical empire could pull that off. China is actually facing a declining population. People live in cities. They don't need more land. So while they may have other motivations which I talk about in the essay that might trigger war, that particular historical model of a European or Japanese empire that seeks expansion both in its near abroad and through colonies because it fears its survival hinges upon access to territory, that it's easy to subjugate populations and dominate markets, no longer applies.

LF: Let me just pick up one of the tensions because you mentioned demography. China’s got big demographic problems. South Korea may  have a vibrant economy but its also got an incredibly big demographic problem because nobody's getting married or having kids anymore. In Japan, even in Europe, you're seeing the same. So in the world of plenty, the youngsters are enjoying their lives but not bringing on the next generations.

Meanwhile, in the in the world of scarcity, people are getting desperate. That is where wars are taking place, such as Sudan. And so their people are trying to get to the world of plenty. This produces one of the big tensions in contemporary politics, which is the attempted movement from poor to rich areas. The rich areas actually need them but they don’t want them. This leads to the argument that this can only be managed by dampening down the conflict in the poor areas. It doesn't alter the fact that people in the rich areas are becoming scarcer.

FG: Even though the problems of plenty were created by developed Western states they hit hard most on states trying to make the transition. So climate change, public health, and inequality affects these states more. And they are at the earlier stages of the demographic transition. They are still above replacement rate. In 2100 Chad's population will be larger than Russia’s, but even there some of the larger historical forces at work: the population is increasing but the amount of fecundity is decreasing.
You highlight another problem of plenty - the inequality both within states and between states.

The states that have this wealth need people who are drawn in through migration or the efforts to migrate. This is the most divisive political issue globally right now in developed states. The rise of populism in the US and Europe is bound up with the politics of migration, which is a problem of plenty because that generates the magnet that attracts people. It is the most divisive and unsettling area for political discussion. Its also one of those issues with which international relations does not deal deftly. Countries in East Asia don't have traditions of immigration yet are ageing even more rapidly than European and America. There are other interesting effects. Younger populations are more productive but also more warlike. The ageing issue creates a different set of variables that we don’t spend much time thinking about.

LF: Let me bring the discussion back to what we do about it. Our part of the world has achieved things that were once unimaginable, allowing us to live to good ages and enjoy life. But it's creating enormous problems both for us and others. Is what you have written a manifesto, a call to recognise the challenge and suggest what we can do about it? Or is it largely about how we need to view the international system which should lead to a better analysis but not necessarily decent remedies. You have outlined the problem with which we now have to deal but at a time when multilateralism appears to be in decline. In the end, are individual states going to have to work out how to handle these issues in their own ways, or do we need new forms of multilateralism?

FG: I would say it's both. It's a manifesto and I’ve tried to think of some specific policy consequences. I did a piece for Foreign Policy in which the model I used was of an alien who comes down to Earth every 50 years to assess the situation. In 1974 the alien would note all this great new technology. And people living longer. The two most populous countries in the world, India and China, are at subsistence level. There is also this authoritarian state, the Soviet Union that appears to be doing really well. Western Europe faces all sorts of challenges and the United States appears to be a decline.

Yet 1974 was much better than 1924. And in 2024 I'm looking at the numbers, and you live longer. You have this great technology. All the information in the world can be accessed by anyone in this tiny little device for free. On the one hand, under the lingering shadow of our Marxist training, we've done really well. We have great wealth, but we could distribute it better. We've got great technology, but people are miserable. People feel this deep sense of enmity and of anger. That needs to be studied and understood. The alien would say, why is everyone so sad? I don't have a full explanation but we have deeply bitter, angry politics and some of this has been caused by plenty.

This this gets me to the biggest pushback and interaction I have had in the US. This was on policy towards China. Some of my very thoughtful friends in this administration who think about China all the time, look at me and say, ‘what am I supposed to do with this?’ For them China is this overarching threat. And what I say in the essay is that China does terrible things - repression, the Uyghurs, the crackdown on Hong Kong, coercive threats in the South China Sea and Taiwan, its economic policies. It is not a good actor. But what I say is:

First, there's one specific threat that can cause World War Three, which is this very difficult challenge of Taiwan. This leads to the question whether China wants Taiwan as an irredentist objective, or is it the beginning of some 1930s like bid for geopolitical hegemony? And if it wanted that, could it get it? And if it tried to get it, would that not bring about its ruin? I want to live in a world where a democratic entity which has pursued all the right policies, isn't threatened by bullies. But if Taiwan were suddenly to be taken over by China, it would not be an existential threat to the United States. It's a very challenging problem, but they need to ask, is this an irredentist problem, that is similar to what happens whenever you have divided two states, whether its the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, or Kashmir. Those conflicts are going to persist and they're going to be going to be dangerous. They're not the same thing as Hitler's Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or even Mao's China. This doesn’t mean it can't lead to war or that we shouldn't defend Taiwan. It means you need to characterise it correctly.

Secondly, the problems of plenty, the climate and pandemics, represent the only truly existential threat. We know another pandemic will come and imagine one with more lethality. And don't we have an obligation - both China and the United States - to find some way to work together on these issues even while the other competition persists. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a far deeper, more bitter ideological and geopolitical political battle that almost ended with a thermonuclear exchange. Yet they worked together to solve two of the greatest problems that plagued humanity. First, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, where they came together in 1968 with the UK to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, as a shared responsibility.

At the same time, they worked together at lower levels to eliminate smallpox, a disease that had killed twice as many people as all the wars combined in the 20s century. In 1965, two million people a year died of smallpox. That happened because these two bitter enemies could work together to eliminate the disease. So if these two powers, whose geopolitical and ideological competition was an order of magnitude worse than anything that exists between the United States and China today, could figure out a way to work together why not these two powers now?

If somehow the United States figures out a cure for cancer and at the same time China figures out a cure to the climate crisis would we really not want them to share this with each other and Europe and everyone else? There's only one existential crisis, which is the climate crisis. And as terrible and tragic as the war in Ukraine is and as threatening and terrifying as Cross Strait relations are between the United States and China, so that they demand attention, neither is existential unless we let them become so.

These other problems, the problems of plenty, are planetary issues that are potentially existential, and at the very least we should spend some of our intellectual and policy energy trying to figure out how to resolve them.

LF: That seems a great point at which to conclude. Thank you very much.