With The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era, Francis Gavin has written an elegant and thought-provoking extended essay on the challenges facing the modern world, offering reflections on how to formulate an adequate grand strategy for not only the US, but also the western world in general. His essay is cast in terms of a dichotomy between a world of scarcity, with a general and deadly competition for resources, and a modern world, which was produced by technical change, the Industrial Revolution, and the energy revolution and is characterized by abundance and the problem of managing the excess and waste produced by consumption and over-consumption. He argues that whereas the appropriate doctrine of the old world was realism, characteristically defined in Hobbesian terms, today’s world requires a different vision of institutional adaptation and cooperation.[1] The result is Gavin’s thoughtful and optimistic manifesto for our times.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 114
Francis J. Gavin. The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era. Routledge: The Adelphi Series, 2024. ISBN: 9781032805573.
Review by Harold James, Princeton University
30 January 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE114 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Daniel R. Hart
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Masami Kimura
With The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era, Francis Gavin has written an elegant and thought-provoking extended essay on the challenges facing the modern world, offering reflections on how to formulate an adequate grand strategy for not only the US, but also the western world in general. His essay is cast in terms of a dichotomy between a world of scarcity, with a general and deadly competition for resources, and a modern world, which was produced by technical change, the Industrial Revolution, and the energy revolution and is characterized by abundance and the problem of managing the excess and waste produced by consumption and over-consumption. He argues that whereas the appropriate doctrine of the old world was realism, characteristically defined in Hobbesian terms, today’s world requires a different vision of institutional adaptation and cooperation.[1] The result is Gavin’s thoughtful and optimistic manifesto for our times.
For Gavin, the main danger is what he calls “anamnesis” (e.g., 62). He defines the term as when policymakers and analysts remain trapped in an obsolete model of the world, based on the dominance of scarcity, in which territorial conquest is a rational strategy to add otherwise unobtainable resources.
Gavin asserts that recasting the outlook, or recasting grand strategy, is in the real world a very tough proposition (62-73). If it were simply a matter of outdated Hobbesian views, the world should be easy to change. He repeatedly terms the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine as the exception that proves the rule, and argues that it, “like America’s wars in the greater Middle East,” was a “poor grand-strategic decision based on profound misreadings of the nature of power and the incentives of the contemporary international system” (63). One cannot at least for some time know that this is right. It was undoubtedly a gamble intended to preserve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s domestic rule, just as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian monarchies in 1914 bet on a short victorious war.[2] Some of the territorial acquisitions might have made sense in an old world that was based on seizing manufacturing resources (the heavy industry of the Donbas) or agricultural production. The rationalization given by Putin in such programmatic essays as “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is, however, quite different. The war was intended to create a large pan Slavic empire, which did not extend to Ukraine alone, and also to destroy the alternative world view in the European Union, in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in the United States.[3] Ideological conflict is not really explained by Gavin’s model, and abundance might also provoke the formulation of new, and weirder, ideologies.
For Gavin, conflict is inherently inappropriate and absurd; rational policymakers should formulate grand strategy that focuses on the big systemic issues, which are planetary. Thus, in Gavin’s view, the focus of both major US parties (and one echoed by many in Europe) on the threat posed by Chinese competition is thus ridiculous. He writes that China, like Russia, has pursued a failed grand strategy that “alienates countries near and far” (80). This is debatable. There is a great deal of sympathy, brought largely by the availability of Chinese investment, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Brazil and South Africa continue to work closely with China in its attempt to construct a new monetary order for a genuinely multipolar world that would no longer be dependent on the US dollar.[4]
Gavin does not agree that there is a new Cold War, as such a construct would be merely a product of anamnesis. And his book contains a nostalgic note for some cooperative aspects of the fading or late Cold War. The way that the Soviet Union and the United States were able to cooperate over the elimination of smallpox is contrasted with the modern inability to face and resolve collective action problems over health and climate (84-87).
Anamnesis may be too simple a concept. The world today is not just about super-abundance: humanity faces problems of scarcity which are not dissimilar to those of the past. The scarcity of the past was largely about food and energy. Today, water, a key part of the human life cycle, is a problem, as is energy. Scarce resources are a limitation that generate immense political angst. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and dislocated transportation. It focused everyone’s attention on bottlenecks. The consequence is that those who controlled bottlenecks were tempted to use them to impose their interests and their vision of the world on others: Russia with gas supply, China with rare earths, and Algeria with gas. It may be possible in this sense to draw a line between the supply problems of 2020 and Russia’s idea that it could use European dependency on Russian gas to force an acceptance of its wish to recreate a historic empire. 2020 also bred an increased awareness that China controlled rare earths and minerals—gallium, germanium—that are crucial for the green transition.[5]
One should not be carried away by the optimism produced by an age of apparent abundance. Gavin claims that people are now living longer. In most of the world that is true—but not in the states that were the drivers of the modern world, the United States and United Kingdom. There what Anne Case and Angus Deaton memorably termed “deaths of despair” have reversed the century-long demographic trend.[6]
Gavin argues that people are better governed than at any time in the past. But elsewhere he plausibly posits that a revolution of expectations that “has helped drive an increasing loss of faith in governance and in markets” (61). He also holds that “great depressions appear to be a thing of the past,” but the world came remarkably close to one in 2008, and it cannot be excluded that rapid technology-driven financial innovation will create more destabilization (45). The way that the world’s policymakers dealt with the crises of 2008 and 2020 was to build up more debt: but the accumulation of debt poses an almost insoluble financial problem.[7]
Finally, Gavin asserts that there is as much information as is needed to manage collective problems. While there is indeed a surfeit of data, organizing it, and using it systematically, is extremely difficult. It may be that radical advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will resolve the problem, making statistics more usable and more capable of informing effective policy, but this has yet to happen. Information and data are still scarce. There is here, as in many other aspects of life, a reality about continuing scarcity and hence about continuing competition.
At the outset of his argument, Gavin cites the great British economist John Maynard Keynes speaking in bleak wartime London in 1942 with a promise about the future to the effect that “anything we can actually do we can afford.”[8] This was untrue then, as Keynes repeatedly pointed out: Britain could not go all out for military production without curtailing civilian demand. This is just as wildly untrue today: all infectious disease could be eradicated, in the same way as smallpox was eliminated, but the cost is overwhelmingly high. Or does “could actually do” really mean “afford to do?” The skeptical question Keynes raised is still relevant: “That’s all very well, but how is it to be paid for?” Modern reality is thus rather more complex than the anamnesis model. It is about overcoming current problems of scarcity that may produce the political imagination to advance into a genuine age of surplus, prosperity, and peace. But we are surely not there yet.
Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University, a Professor of History and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, and an Associate at the Bendheim Center for Finance. He is the official historian of the International Monetary Fund. In 2004 he was awarded the Helmut Schmidt Prize for Economic History, and in 2005 the Ludwig Erhard Prize for writing about economics. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate. His recent books include Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Economic Globalization (Yale University Press, 2023), The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization (Yale University Press 2021), Making a Modern Central Bank: The Bank of England 1979–2003 (Cambridge University Press 2020), and The Euro and the Battle of Economic Ideas (with Markus K. Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau) (Princeton University Press, 2016).
[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan.
[2] Harold James, Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Economic Globalization (Yale University Press, 2023), ch. 3.
[3] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” President of Russia, 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
[4] “The BRICS Summit 2023: Seeking an Alternate World Order?” Council of Foreign Relations, 31 August 2023, https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/brics-summit-2023-seeking-alternate-world-order.
[5] European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Transition Report 2023–24, Ch. 3, https://2023.tr-ebrd.com/.
[6] Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020).
[8] John Maynard Keynes, “How Much Does Finance Matter?” The Listener, 2 April 1942, 3.