Avoiding the ‘Guns of August’ 2026

Donald Trump has done more than any other 21^st century U.S. president to “pivot” to Asia and the western Pacific, yet recently his administration has been criticized for going “soft” on China. There is no question that the rhetoric of the second Trump administration is, in Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby’s words, “quiet and respectful . . . towards China,” but “quiet and respectful” are sound tactics of diplomacy. Building more warships, modernizing our nuclear forces, winning the AI race, using geoeconomic pressure, strengthening our alliances in the western Pacific—those are actions that speak louder than words. The goal in Cold War II with China, after all, is to counter China’s geopolitical ambitions without going to war. It is to avoid the “Guns of August” 2026.

One hundred twelve years ago this month, what George F. Kennan called the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20^th century emerged from the failed diplomacy of Europe’s great powers. Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Guns of August recounted the diplomatic missteps of the great powers in the first decade and a quarter of the 20^th century that led to the cataclysmic First World War in 1914. Tuchman portrayed the leaders of the great powers of Europe almost stumbling towards a war that none of them wanted. But as David Fromkin pointed out in his magnificent book Europe’s Last Summer, Austria-Hungary deliberately went to war against Serbia, and Germany had planned for war against Russia and France since at least 1905. Those two wars brought Great Britain and its empire, Italy, and ultimately the United States into what became a global conflict.

The same thing happened in the late 1930s-early 1940s, as Victor Davis Hanson explained in his book The Second World Wars, when a Sino-Japanese War, a German-Soviet war against Poland, a Soviet war against Finland, and a Japanese war against the U.S. and Britain merged into the Second World War. In both instances, separate regional wars grew into global wars with catastrophic consequences.