Christopher Caldwell writes in the Claremont Review of Books:
Westad astutely notes that the Industrial Revolution was, in its own way, an information revolution avant la lettre. The speed with which fast trains allowed countries to mobilize troops, and with which telegraphs could report mobilization to foreign governments, turned mobilization itself into a de facto act of war. In a similar way, the introduction of A.I. onto battlefields may draw us into unanticipated blunders, the way stock-trading algorithms have produced periodic “flash crashes” over the past generation. More information doesn’t always mean you make better decisions—it may mean you have to make decisions more quickly, which often means lousier decisions.
Though it was not Westad’s intent, no one will close The Coming Storm without thinking of President Trump’s strike on Iran. Leaders of countries that were falling behind in 1914—as Britain was falling behind Germany, and Germany felt it was falling behind Russia—had incentives to take risks. They assumed it would be better to fight today than tomorrow. This was a calamitous miscalculation. While they were not looking, a much faster mechanism of automatic escalation had been built into the system, and they were too short-sighted to see it.
Caldwell’s review does what his reviews always do. He uses a respectable European source to dress paleocon positions in continental clothing.
The structural argument runs like this. Britain in 1914 was a financial empire that had hollowed out its manufacturing, run up trade deficits, lost rule-making leverage abroad, and faced a working class displaced by globalized labor competition. America in 2026 is the same picture. Therefore Trump’s tariff politics is not a personal tic but a predictable response of a declining hegemon, with Joseph Chamberlain as a respectable predecessor. Therefore neocon foreign policy is the disease, not the cure. Therefore China is less of a threat than the consensus claims because its demographic collapse and military inexperience leave it weaker than it looks. Therefore the Iran strike repeats the 1914 mistake of a falling power taking risks it thinks will be cheaper today than tomorrow.
The whole argument routes through Westad. Caldwell never has to make the paleocon case in his own voice. A Yale historian makes it for him. This is the Caldwell house style. He cycles between the New York Times Magazine, Claremont, and the Financial Times, and the work that lets him hold all three perches is the work of laundering Claremont-aligned positions through sources liberal readers recognize as legitimate. Houellebecq, Bjorn Lomborg, now Westad.
The ecumenical surface flatters multiple coalitions at once. Reagan and Obama get paired as presidents of restraint. Trump gets credit for stepping back from Biden-era commitments and gets hinted criticism for the Iran strike. Westad gets used to validate populist economics without Caldwell ever endorsing them in his own name. The reader infers what he is supposed to infer based on which coalition he sits in.
The Britain-America structural parallel is selective. Britain in 1914 was a creditor empire whose pound sterling reserve status rested on a current account surplus and London’s role as the world’s net capital exporter. America is a debtor empire whose dollar reserve status rests on capital inflows and the safety of its assets relative to the rest of the world. The two cases share imperial overstretch and trade deficits and differ on the financial structure that lets them sustain those deficits. Caldwell collapses the cases by emphasizing what they share and skipping what they don’t.
The Kennedy citation does more work than it should. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers came out in 1987. Within four years the Soviet Union had collapsed and Japan had begun a generation-long stagnation, and the predicted American decline ran in reverse for two decades. Kennedy’s predictive record on the empire he was discussing is poor. Citing him as if Westad’s variant inherits his authority papers over this.
The German-rise story comes in the paleocon register. Germany succeeded by exploiting British free trade and stealing patents. The sources of German economic strength in the late 19th century, the technical universities, the chemical industry, the cartelized banking system, the apprenticeship structure, drop out. The story Caldwell tells is the story that justifies tariffs. The fuller story might complicate that justification.
The China section is worth reading for what it omits. Westad’s view of China gets mined for the demographic collapse and military inexperience and not for the industrial base, the manufacturing share, the rare-earth chokeholds, or the Belt and Road financing structure that makes 120 countries China’s primary trading partner. Caldwell takes the parts of Westad that minimize the China threat and skips the parts that magnify it, because magnifying the China threat justifies the imperial commitments he wants to discredit.
The class-strike parallel is the weakest piece. Britain in 1912 lost 40 million workdays to strikes. American work stoppages in recent years run far below that on a per-worker basis. Caldwell wants to read 1912-style class conflict into present American conditions because it makes Trump’s populism look like a structural response rather than a political accident. The data doesn’t support the parallel.
The deepest move is the framing of financialization. Caldwell writes that keeping the social peace requires handling money in a way that experts consider stupid. The line is the heart of the Claremont position. The technocratic class is the problem. The financiers and economists who run the imperial machine extract rent at the expense of the domestic working class, and the political project of the populist right is to take the machine back from them. The line scans as bipartisan critique, with Obama and Clinton both named, but the political vehicle for the project is one party, not both.
Missing from the piece is any account of why a financial empire produces a class structure that resists redistribution. Caldwell notes that Obama and Clinton couldn’t redistribute despite their rhetoric, and treats this as oddness or weakness. The paleocon explanation is that the donor class captured both parties. The structural explanation is that an economy whose comparative advantage runs through finance and intellectual property generates returns concentrated in college-educated coastal labor markets, and the median voter coalition needed to redistribute against those returns is hard to assemble. Caldwell gestures at the first explanation and avoids the second.
Caldwell’s prose moves. The bin Laden opener does what it is supposed to do. The Trump-Art-of-the-Deal grace note in the second paragraph rewards the careful reader. The Chamberlain set piece is professional. What the piece does not do is let Westad be Westad. Westad is a Cold War historian whose body of work argues that American interventions in the Third World were costlier and more harmful than American self-understanding admits. Caldwell uses him to validate a critique of liberal internationalism without engaging the parts of Westad’s project that don’t fit the paleocon frame, the parts that sympathize with anti-colonial movements, that read American hegemony as an extractive structure, that find moral fault in interventions a Claremont reader might celebrate.
The Iran strike close is the most honest moment. Caldwell hints that Trump has done the 1914 thing, a falling power taking risks it thinks will be cheaper now than later. He does not say so directly because the Claremont coalition is not yet ready to hear it said directly. He routes the criticism through Westad’s pre-strike book and lets the reader do the work.
