Professor Odd Arne Westad | China and the Coming Storm: Are We Repeating the Mistakes of 1914?

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to a seminar, "China and the Coming Storm: Are We Repeating the Mistakes of 1914?", by Prof Odd Arne Westad (Yale University). This seminar is organised by the FASS Research Division and the Department of Chinese Studies.

Date: 13 February 2026 (Friday)

Time: 4:00pm – 6:00pm

Venue: To be confirmed

Please register via: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/EbyXVKCFxa

Registration will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Successful registrants will be informed by email once the venue is confirmed (likely by early February). In view of possible venue capacity limitations, unsuccessful registrants will be waitlisted and updated if seats become available.

Abstract

If history offers lessons, now is the moment when they must be heeded. The first great-power war of the twentieth century was not the product of inevitability, but of a lethal combination of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and political miscalculation. Today, as China’s rise reshapes the global balance of power, the world once again faces the danger that similar dynamics could push major states toward catastrophic conflict.

Most people alive today have come of age in a remarkably stable international order, shaped first by Cold War bipolarity and later by U.S. predominance. This order was never peaceful, but it was broadly predictable. That predictability is now eroding. To understand the risks of this moment, this talk turns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period marked by the rise of new powers, the anxieties of established ones, intensifying nationalism and populism, and widespread disillusionment with globalization. The parallels with the present are striking. By placing China’s rise within this longer historical perspective, the talk argues that major war is not inevitable, but that avoiding it requires deliberate political choices: restraint, historical awareness, and a renewed commitment to managing great-power competition before it hardens into irreversible confrontation.

Speaker Bio

Odd Arne Westad is a Norwegian historian specializing in the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history. He is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He has published widely on modern and contemporary international history, including The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2006), which received the Bancroft Prize, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (Basic Books, 2012), and The Great Transformation: China from Revolution to Reform (Yale, 2024, co-authored with Chen Jian). 

Discussant Bio

Kishore Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. He was with the Singapore Foreign Service for 33 years (1971-2004), where he served twice as Singapore's Ambassador to the United Nations and as Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Ministry from 1993-1998. He was also the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from 2004-2017. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of nine books, including Can Asians Think? His research interests are in the resurgence of Asia, ASEAN, public policies in Singapore, global geo-politics and global governance.

Schedule

4:00 pm: Introduction by A/P Zhou Taomo, NUS Department of Chinese Studies

4:05 pm: Lecture by Prof Odd Arne Westad

5:05 pm: Dialogue between Prof Odd Arne Westad and Prof Kishore Mahbubani

5:35pm : Question and Answer