The war in Ukraine, the escalating crisis in the Middle East and increasing geopolitical competition between the US and China are undermining the idea that “The Long Peace” — the period from the end of the Second World War to the present day, marked by the absence of major wars between the great powers and an overall trend of declining violence — is an irreversible trend. 

A brilliant new exhibition at the British Museum on The Silk Roads provides a stark warning that interdependent economies and cultural reciprocity are not guarantees of perpetual peace, by highlighting that the period commonly known as the Dark Ages was a multicultural world linked by the global movement of people, goods and ideas. A longer view of history shows us that periods of stability are followed by periods of uncertainty and violence as empires rise and fall.

In the 1990s, it was thought that the Long Peace was a unique result of the geopolitical stability of the bi-polar world of the Cold War. Though civil wars and lesser conflicts occurred throughout the period, the USSR and US avoided direct conflict, instead fighting a series of small-scale regional proxy wars against poorer countries. There was an absence of direct conflict between any of the largest economies by gross domestic product (GDP), and conflicts involving smaller economies also decreased. When, under American hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of international wars continued to decrease from a rate of six per year in the1950s to one per year in the 2000s, and the number of fatalities decreased from 240 reported deaths per million to less than 10 reported deaths per million, attention shifted to a series of factors seen as unique to the world that Pax Americana was seen to shape. 

One of these factors was the worldwide increase in the number of democracies. The defeat of Nazism and communism, and the steady growth of human rights and wealth, seemed to demonstrate that liberal government was inherently more effective than dictatorship. After the end of the Cold War, many believed that liberal democracy was becoming universal. A utopian strand of Western thinking promoted the belief that it was the best form of government for all people everywhere — and that all people could secure it. 

The post-9/11 wars were framed by the US and her allies as an apocalyptic struggle that would forge the new American century of liberal democracy, where personal freedom and free markets were the end goals of human progress. With the failure of these utopian wars, the US and its allies came to eventually realise at great cost that the cultures in which they were attempting to implant liberal democracy had no interest in such alien ideologies. 

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, new dictatorships have emerged in Russia and China, where communism and free markets have both been rejected.

By a combination of coercion, manipulation and force, a bellicose Russia and its morally corrupt military are attempting to regain lands that were once part of its empire but see their future elsewhere. By using food and energy supply chains as weapons of war, Russia is projecting famine and poverty across the world. 

China is established as a high-tech panopticon, which, through exports of technology, threatens freedom in the West and has provided tools for autocracy in exchange for natural resources across the Global South. It is employing similar tactics as Russia to recover land it sees as rightly its own, including Taiwan, the home of the microprocessor industry so much of global technology relies on, stopping short of full-scale military invasion, for now. China is walking a delicate line between fostering an anti-US military partnership between Russia, North Korea and Iran, and avoiding sanction regimes and political disapproval of its economic partners in the West. Chinese economic challenges will likely cause near-term internal instability, which could change President Xi’s timelines for achieving his ambition Taiwanese reunification.    

Religious autocracies that persist across the Middle East and South Asia are using ancient arguments over religious technicalities to justify conflicts about power and resources. Arguably, Africa and Latin America have seen the most progress towards democracy in recent years, but this progress is not irreversible and Islamic terrorism, the legacy of colonial cartographers, Russian mercenaries and the corrupting influence of Chinese natural resource investment are undermining fragile and still nascent democratic institutions. 

Future pandemic, accelerating climate change and resource scarcity will further undermine democratic norms. Global institutions seen to uphold the post-1945 world, such as the United Nations Security Council, are increasingly ignored by both the Global South who see them as relics, used by the old colonial powers to assert a moribund world order, and by the old colonial powers when they do not suit their agenda. The USA, meanwhile, has been riven by a struggle for the control of thought and language between increasingly tribal groups, with an increasing proportion of the population feeling disillusioned with a world they are told they disproportionately profit from.The Long Peace, in other words, can no longer rely on the progression of liberal democracy. 

Another major factor cited as a reason for the Long Peace is the deterrence effect of nuclear weapons. The willingness of the US and its allies to use their militaries to shoot down non-nuclear Iran’s rockets heading towards Israel and their decision not to directly assist Ukraine in shooting down the daily ballistic assaults on its military and cities by nuclear Russia, suggests nuclear deterrence is still a factor. With the number of states with nuclear weapons now ruled by autocratic, and in some cases, narcissistic and even sociopathic leaders, who have eroded checks and balances, should this give us confidence in the longevity of peace?

A third factor is the economic incentives towards cooperation caused by globalisation and international trade. This is in part based on the assumption that this is at unprecedented levels. This is where the British Museum’s current exhibition provides a challenge. 

Rather than a single trade route from East to West, the Silk Roads were made up of overlapping networks linking communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, from East Asia to Britain and Scandinavia. They were in use for millennia, but this exhibition focuses on a defining period AD500-1000 (although “Silk Roads” was not used until the late nineteenth century when they were named so by the uncle of the First World War flying ace the Red Baron, geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen).

The exhibition begins in the Far East with a copper buddha made in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, that was found thousands of miles away in a grave in the tiny island of Helgo, Sweden. It follows the vast trade networks through forgotten empires like the Tang, Tibetan, Sogdian, and Sasanian, through to Northern Europe and Dark Age Britain. On the way we see miniature wooden pagodas, Frankish whalebone caskets, ceramic statues of camels, and fragments of colourful wall paintings of elephant back riders fighting with mythic predators from the “Red Hall” in the Palace of Varakhsha (whose ruins are in Uzbekistan). These objects are collected from abandoned forts, synagogues, mosques, pagan burial mounds, the Hall of the Ambassadors in Samarkand, the lost Library Cave in northwest China, and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. 

Towards the end of the exhibition, objects from Britain are displayed. Recent analysis done on silver vessels on loan from the Museum of Scotland, has traced the lidded cup’s black inlay to a silver mine in present-day Iran, and its flaming pillar motifs resemble Zoroastrian fire altars in Sasanian art. One of the most fascinating artefacts is a coin minted by Offa, ruler of the Mercian kingdom central England (AD 757-96). On one face is the Latin phrase OFFA REX. This is found between an Arabic inscription beginning, “There is no God but Allah.” Islamic gold dinars of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur were prized across international markets. In minting this copy, Offa may have been motivated more by a desire to emulate Abbasid power and wealth rather than piety for a foreign god. Scientific analysis undertaken for the exhibition on a shoulder brooch found at Sutton Hoo traced the purple-red garnets that form two boars on it to India, and the tiny orange-red gems forming the bristles of the boar to Bohemia and Sri Lanka.

Far from an isolated, inward-looking, outpost at the ends of the Dark Age earth, the Anglo-Saxon Britain of Offa and Sutton Hoo was an outward looking, global Britain, connected by trade and the exchange of ideas to empires thousands of miles away. It is a stunning collection of treasures that critics have praised for shedding light on a world that was more interconnected and cosmopolitan than often painted. However, by doing so the exhibition illustrates that this is no guarantee of survival for the civilisations involved and prolonged periods of peaceful exchange can regress into periods of warring geo-political fragmentation. Many exhibits are from great empires which do not exist today. They all fell through internal disintegration and civil war or foreign conquest by a more dominant military power.

The Silk Roads carried prosperity but also death, violence, disease and disaster

To create the conditions for the Silk Roads to thrive, great empires provided stability through military might. The Tang dynasty in China, where the exhibition begins, was established out of the defeat of the Sui Dynasty. After the period covered by the exhibition, the Silk Roads faded during the fall of the Roman Empire, only reviving in the 13th and 14th centuries under the security of the Mongol Empire, which was built on the violent conquest of Genghis Khan. The decline of a fragmenting Mongolian Empire in the mid-1300s was hastened by the spread of the bubonic plague along trade routes. The Silk Roads carried prosperity but also death, violence, disease and disaster. These periods of stability were not dependent on any single form of governance, but were dependent on the military dominance of great powers to provide security. When the balance of power between great empires shifted, insecurity and instability followed, and trade, instead of preventing conflict, was itself disrupted.  

While the risk of global conflict is increasing, the break-up of the USSR and the opening up of the Chinese empire has provided an opportunity for people, goods and ideas to once again traverse these ancient Silk Roads. The place names dangling from the ceiling of the exhibition, meant to conjure feelings of both the geographic and historic distance, are becoming the focus of the development of new Silk roads. So far, the main activity has been through the Belt and Road Initiative, the massive China-led infrastructure and development project that was originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure, and has expanded to Africa and Latin America, significantly broadening China’s economic and political influence. The plan was officially announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013 in Kazakhstan. Invoking the spirit of the ancient caravans crossing Asia by camel, Xi proposed a strategic partnership between China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, consisting of major investments in transport, gas, oil, and electricity. 

One criticism of the exhibition came from historian William Dalrymple, who suggests the “seductively Sinocentric concept” of the Silk Roads is problematic, underplaying the role of India in trade and cultural influence. Silk was never the main commodity imported to the west from the east. Instead, it was exceeded in value by imports of Indian pepper, spices, ivory, cotton, gems, teak and sandalwood. In this period, India was the centre of the Buddhist world and the main destination of Buddhist pilgrims seeking their holy places. According to Dalrymple, the Roman Empire and China were only vaguely aware of each other, and almost never in direct contact. 

Western foreign policy makers are again being seduced by a Sinocentric view as China builds partnerships across the wider region. There are new Silk Roads focused on linking China to Europe, such as the Yuxinou International railway. This follows the routes Sogdian traders traversed 2000 years ago as it runs from China to a distribution centre in Duisberg, Germany. It carries millions of laptops, clothes and other non-perishable goods in one direction and electronic parts, car parts and medical equipment in the other on a journey that takes 16 days (which is faster than the sea route). New routes, such as the Yuxinou, have resulted in the re-emergence of China’s Western provinces. Hewlett Packard has moved production from Shanghai to Chongqing. Foxconn has shifted investment from Shenzhen to Chengdu — once the gateway to the old Silk Roads. However, China’s Belt and Road initiative also focuses on partnerships with countries along the route. 

Pipelines carry the crude reserves under the Caspian Sea and gas from the huge Karachaganak natural gas reserve on the Russia-Kazakhstan border and the Turkmenistan natural gas reserves (fourth largest in the world). Train lines also carry rare earths needed by high-tech industries, including beryllium and dysprosium, as well as uranium and plutonium from Kazakhstan, in addition to gold from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan (their mines are second only to those of South Africa). China is seeking cultural influence through Confucius Institutes (the first of which appeared in Uzbekistan). On a recent trip to Kazakhstan, arriving in Almaty I saw a welcome sign for employees of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company with links to the Chinese government. The arrivals board was similar to the one I saw days before in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, multiple flights to China and Russia but also India, Turkey and the UAE. There was one solitary flight to Europe (Frankfurt) from Almaty.

Kazakhstan in particular has embraced Western commercialism; evidenced by the Audi and Porsche dealerships on the road from the airport and vast shopping malls I saw in Almaty. Several British universities and boarding schools have opened or are in the process of opening campuses, but there is no evidence of the countries adopting wider liberal democratic principles. Both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are effectively police states. They are majority Muslim countries, yet the form of Islam permitted is a tightly controlled moderate version, avoiding the tyranny of religious extremism but not replacing it with choices of liberalism. The streets are safe, clean and quiet. There have been no overt protests over Gaza. Officially both are neutral over the war in Ukraine. Caught between East and West and with their old Russian rulers to the north and the chaos of Afghanistan to the south, the countries of the Caucus do not want to be drawn into geopolitical rivalries but maintain good relationships with all. This may be a quixotic task. China is building deeper ties than perhaps any other power. 

At the end of the exhibition, as you leave the gift shop full of goods made in China, you can walk through gallery four to the museum exit. This contains exhibits from Ancient Egypt, a civilisation that ebbed and flowed over 3000 years. The last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, Cleopatra VII, died closer in time to us today than the rulers who built the pyramids. After her death Egypt was subsumed into the Roman Empire. The exhibits, including a statue of Ramses II, were mostly collected by emissaries of the British Empire. The Long Peace has been compared to the relatively long stability of the thousand-year Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, or the Pax Britannica, a century of relative peace during British hegemony between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War at the end of the almost 400-year British Empire. The end of both these periods resulted in large-scale conflict. 

What seems permanent to one generation appears as hubris to the next

If past trends are a guide to the future, the American Empire will not last as long as those that came before. Ramses II was known as Ozymandias to the Greeks, the same Ozymandias from Percy Shelly’s poem. In the poem a traveller comes across a pedestal of a great statue sculpted with the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But all that remains of the great statue are its stone legs and lying nearby in the “lone and level sands,” a half-buried head. What seems permanent to one generation appears as hubris to the next. There is little reason to believe that the end of Pax Americana will be any different to the violent ends of the empires preceding it. 

Shifting patterns of war, disease, climate change and resource scarcity will re-order and fragment our world. A growing cast of autocrats are rallying their troops around nationalistic and religious ideologies to take advantage of the ensuing chaos and serve their own desires for legacy. Vietnam veteran and author of the science fiction novel The Forever War, Joe Haldeman, pondered, “Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.” While the technology we are developing enhances us rather than replaces us, we will remain human animals. While that is the case, peace will be the temporary interlude between war, regardless of the beauty of the treasures currently on display.