- In 2007, at the peak of Sino-American optimism, French philosopher René Girard predicted in his final book Battling to the End that a trade conflict between the United States and China would escalate into a major clash. Trump’s 2025 tariffs and China’s vow to “fight to the end” have made Girard’s prediction strikingly prophetic. This summary explains how Girard foresaw this trade war and why he believed it would ultimately lead to real, potentially apocalyptic, war.
How Girard Foreseen the Trump-Era Trade War
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Girard’s non-economic view of capitalism and human nature
- Standard economics assumes humans are rational utility-maximizers: free trade makes everyone richer in absolute terms, so peace follows prosperity. This was the core promise of the liberal international order that brought China into the global trading system.
- Girard argued instead that humans are fundamentally driven by social and mimetic desires: prestige, status, and relative standing. People care less about how much they have in absolute terms and more about how they compare to others.
- In this framework, the ancestor of capitalism is not barter or bargaining but war, specifically the gentlemanly wars of 17th- and 18th-century European aristocracy. When warriors went out of fashion, aristocrats went into business. The martial language still used by modern CEOs and the status-signaling function of luxury goods both reflect this underlying reality.
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Similarity, not difference, drives conflict
- The conventional assumption is that conflict arises from civilizational difference (Plato vs. Confucius, freedom vs. harmony, capitalism vs. communism). Girard argued the opposite: the US and China are fighting because they have become indistinguishably similar.
- Both are large, technocratic, secular, highly populated states with global leadership ambitions and tech sectors pursuing the same goals. An outside observer would identify China as the country most similar to the US.
- Girard’s insight is that mimetic rivalry intensifies among equals. People are not jealous of those far above them in age or status, but of near-peers who are slightly ahead. This is the “narcissism of small differences.”
- Rivals exaggerate tiny differences to justify aggression. Historical examples include the filioque dispute between Orthodox and Catholics, or the self-conceived ideological differences between England and France during the age of empire, when both were functionally rival colonial powers doing the same thing.
- Because free trade made China and the US more similar, it created the conditions for rivalry rather than harmony, even as both countries grew richer in aggregate.
Why Girard Believed Trade Wars Lead to Real Wars
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Girard’s theory of law and the monopoly on violence
- Girard’s anthropology holds that all surviving civilizations must develop mechanisms to prevent reciprocal violence from spiraling out of control (cycles of revenge killing).
- Early societies managed this through violent rituals that discharged collective aggression onto a relatively innocent scapegoat: the Jewish genocide in WWII, the Greek pharmakos tradition of expelling a person from the city, Aztec human sacrifice, or carnival-like disruptions of social order.
- In societies with law, these rituals disappear. Girard hypothesizes that law takes over this function. To understand law’s essence, he examines the closest ritual analogue to law: a practice among the Chukchi, an Arctic hunter-gatherer band.
- If someone from one clan kills someone from another, the offending clan’s leader must offer a member of his own clan to be killed as debt-balancing.
- Crucially, he cannot choose the actual guilty party. The killer has too much social energy rallied around him; killing him would trigger an even worse cycle of vengeance. Instead, an innocent person is offered to absorb the aggrieved clan’s violent impulse.
- What distinguishes law from this ritual is that law can punish the guilty. This is only possible when a third party holds a monopoly on violence over all disputing parties. In modern society, if you take vengeance into your own hands, the state imprisons you. Law’s power does not come from impartial justice but from this monopoly on force.
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Trade wars lack a monopoly on violence
- A trade war is a dispute between sovereign entities where no third party holds a monopoly on violence over both. International organizations like the UN are impotent because they lack enforcement power, as illustrated by the UN’s meaningless resolution against Russia’s invasion of Russia vetoed it, and even without the veto, the resolution had no force.
- This is why domestic commercial disputes do not spiral into violence: the state has a monopoly on violence and can enforce judgments. Trade wars gather all the pride, national energy, and mimetic impulses of rivalry into a domain where no such monopoly exists.
- Girard concluded in 2007 that “the dyke will break” at trade wars, meaning the boundary between economic and military conflict is fragile precisely because the structural condition that makes law work, a monopoly on violence, is absent.
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The apocalyptic third step: real wars lead to the last war
- Girard’s book is titled Battling to the End (after Clauswitz) because he believed the escalation does not stop at real war. The nature of modern war, transformed by technology and culture, means that 21st-century wars risk becoming the final war, an apocalyptic endpoint. This third step falls outside the scope of the episode but is covered in the speaker’s linked lecture series.