This episode explains how French philosopher René Girard predicted the current US-China trade war in his 2007 book Battling to the End, and why he believed trade wars in the 21st century will escalate into real wars and potentially an apocalyptic “last war.”
Girard’s contrarian prediction at the peak of Sino-American optimism
In 2007, the prevailing view was that free trade would make China richer, more like the West, and therefore more harmonious; Girard argued the opposite: that the very mechanism expected to bring peace would become the catalyst for war.
He wrote that a US-China conflict would follow, beginning not necessarily on the military level but through trade, which “can transform very quickly into war,” and foresaw a major clash in the coming decades.
The Financial Times headline “China vows ‘Fight to the end’ after Trump threatens an extra 50% in tariffs” illustrates the fulfillment of this prophecy.
Question 1: How Girard foresaw the trade war — a non-economic view of capitalism
The standard economic view treats humans as homo economicus — rational utility-maximizers for whom free trade creates absolute gains; Girard sees capitalism and human nature as driven by mimetic desire for relative status, prestige, and social standing.
For Girard, the ancestor of capitalism is not barter but the “gentlemen’s wars” of 17th- and 18th-century Europe; he noted it is “little wonder that the European aristocracy went into business as soon as heroes and warriors went out of fashion.”
Modern examples: luxury goods (Kanye’s white t-shirt) and career choices are often motivated by what they signal about relative status, not absolute material utility.
Because humans care more about relative standing than absolute wealth, the liberal order’s promise — even when fulfilled materially — fails to produce peace; America fears its relative status is threatened by a rising China, while China, now richer and more similar, desires even more.
The core insight: The US and China are fighting not because they are too different, but because they have become “indistinguishably similar” — two forms of capitalism converging in technocratic, secular, highly populated states with analogous tech ambitions and self-conceived global leadership roles.
Similarity, not difference, catalyzes conflict because mimetic rivalry traffics most readily among equals; this is the “narcissism of small differences” (e.g., jealousy toward a peer slightly ahead, not a mentor decades ahead).
Rivals exaggerate minute differences (e.g., filioque dispute between Orthodox and Catholics, or England vs. France’s rival self-justifications as “freedom” vs. “absolutism”) to justify aggression, masking the true driver: mimetic doubling.
Question 2: Why trade wars lead to real wars — law, violence, and the missing monopoly
Girard traces law’s origin to violent ritual: surviving societies needed to stop reciprocal violence (blood feuds) from spiraling, so they discharged it cathartically by expelling a relatively innocent scapegoat (pharmakos, Aztec sacrifice, carnival, or the Jews in WWII).
The Chukchi clan ritual illustrates the threshold: if a clansman unjustly kills, the leader must kill an innocent member of his own clan to balance the debt — because the guilty party has become a focal point of social tension whose punishment could trigger worse vengeance.
Law becomes possible only when a monopoly over violence exists: the state punishes the guilty because private vengeance is itself punished; Mao’s “political legitimacy comes from the barrel of a gun” captures this realpolitik.
Trade war is a dispute among entities with no third party holding a monopoly on violence; international organizations (e.g., the UN) are impotent without enforcement power — law’s apparent impartiality masks its dependence on coercive force.
Therefore, trade wars gather mimetic pride, national energy, and status rivalry at precisely the point where no sovereign can impose a binding resolution, making escalation to kinetic war structurally likely.
Girard’s apocalyptic third step: real wars in the 21st century, amplified by modern technology and cultural shifts, lead to the “last war” — the meaning behind Battling to the End (French title: Achever Clausewitz).
