Week signals: Déjà vu all over again
Plus: watch points for the US, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
This week:
IN REVIEW. When history rhymes badly, the lessons we never learn, and five signs before midnight.
UP AHEAD. Talks in Geneva, dealings in the Gulf, India and Pakistan, and mid-terms in the Philippines.
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The Week in Review: The 1930s are calling
The week began with a spasm in Asian currencies. It ended with a new pope, a US-Houthi ceasefire, and a dramatic escalation in the conflict between India and Pakistan.
It was also the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. Marked on 8 May in the west, and 9 May in the former Soviet bloc (for – as my colleagues Damien Bruckard and Philipp Ivanov wrote on Thursday – the “banal reason that Nazi Germany surrendered late in the evening in 1945 in France which – with the time difference – was early morning in Moscow”), it was a week when more people than usual were thinking of a fragile global order.
It was unsurprising, therefore, that many commentators asked again if we were reliving the years leading up to World War II. From the president of Taiwan to the Atlantic Council, chilling and not entirely spurious comparisons were made between then and now. And while we continue to think that today’s world is more likely to repeat the mistakes of the early 1910s, it’s worth considering if the 1930s is a decade we should also be looking to.
Of course, there are big differences.
This week’s wobble in Taiwanese life insurance is not a repeat of the collapse of Vienna’s Creditanstalt in 1931 (though forex mismatches also played a role).
Pope Leo XIV may have been a cardinal for a short amount of time, as Pius XI (pope from 1922 to 1939), but a Chicagoan, not a Milanese, his background is less conventional by papal standards.
Britain’s garrisons at Aden and Suez protected the Red Sea in the 1930s. The Houthi, while they ran the same parts of Yemen under Imam Yahya, signed a treaty with London in 1934.
And contrary to Donald Trump’s assertions, Delhi and Islamabad weren’t fighting in the 1930s, though the concept of Pakistan (a backronym invented in 1933) and the war would ultimately lead to partition in 1947.
But zoom out, and other parallels exist.
Populist leaders occupy several key capitals. Revanchism on the continent of Europe, and the islands of East Asia (not to mention North America), is back in vogue. The world is not mired in depression, but tariffs are rising, and income inequality is high. The enforcers of multilateral rules – then the League of Nations, now the US and UN – are distracted by their own internal disorder. New conflicts, civil and cross-border, are proliferating without the restraints of an external hegemon. Antisemitism is once again an organising principle of many worldviews.
And while history may rhyme but not repeat, the past is certainly prologue. What are some of the indicators to watch for in case the rest of the 1930s are doomed to repeat?