It is hard to grasp quite how deeply our world is changing. It is the job of writers and journalists to look for clarity in the mists of the changing reality in which we find ourselves and try to give it shape. When so much in the present is chaos and confusion, looking to the past becomes essential, not simply as a goal in itself, but as a means to gaining some understanding of the present.
Robert Kaplan, foreign policy thinker and journalist, combines investigation of the present and the past to produce analysis of clarity and insight. His latest book is an eagle’s eye survey of geopolitical examination twinned with literary reflection, embodying the best of the humanistic tradition of our civilisation. There are flaws, stemming from Kaplan’s membership of an elite class midway through a new circulation, and this leads to some misdiagnoses. Yet the higher vantage point and critical depth of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis means it has much to recommend it. As Kaplan himself notes, “social theorists may be judged by the questions they stimulate rather than by those they answer.” In this regard the book is a success.
Kaplan’s view of foreign policy and America’s role is formed by the Realist school of foreign policy. This school was articulated in ancient days by Thucydides, in modernity by Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, and more recently by Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Rienhold Niebuhr among others. This holds that foreign policy is played out on an international stage without an overarching leviathan sovereign. Foreign policy is a tragic endeavour of trade-offs between incommensurable goods, never fulfilling the desires of the heart. It is a ceaseless effort to maintain the requisite amount of social, political and cultural order while staving off the most chaotic form of tyranny, which is anarchy.
For Kaplan, “order must come before freedom, because without order there is no freedom for anyone”, and “the opposite of anarchy is hierarchy, from which order derives.” In his eyes, “order, no matter how complex the social organism, rests upon some kind of chain of command, or multiple chains of command. Hierarchy is everything.” Man’s limited reason and tendency to be governed by passion means that historical awareness is essential, as the distributed rationality of the past can guide present action: “prediction is impossible. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.” Kaplan lauds the stabilising effects of the old empires, which he correctly notes were not a creation of the white supremacist West for their own benefit, but were in reality a fact of historical life. Attendant on this is his support for the monarchies of old Europe, which for all their faults were far better than the dictators and tyrants that followed their death and the collapse of the empires they governed.
This sets the ground for why Kaplan takes his title from the Eliot poem of the same name: our present chaos “approximates the inner logic of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which will take on a new and deeper meaning as the years pass”. Kaplan analogises our global crisis to that experienced by those in the wake of the Great War, where old certainties about society, politics, culture and even religion were blown apart and had to be pieced together again. As Kaplan writes, the poem was a product of the breakdown in high modernity and heralded the artistic pathologies of modernism that were themselves the product of a civilisational mental and metaphysical breakdown. It “was famously all about the ‘breakdown of forms’; the intermingling of epochs, languages, and traditions and the destruction of unitary cultures that had been rooted in the soil.”
In the poem’s uncanny discontinuities and sense of alienation it nevertheless speaks to our inner reality — our feeling of homelessness making it feel like finding a home. This is “on account of the crises of the world today at the geopolitical level and postmodern life at the micro-level.” The result is that “national culture has been eradicated but international culture is still too superficial to take its place, as occurs in the world’s great cities today. This is the Waste Land.” It is in light of this feeling of living in the broken shards of a common life that Kaplan surveys the international scene with bleak but restrained seriousness.
There are three main themes to the book’s thesis. First, that we are currently experiencing a period he calls “global Weimar”. Second, we are experiencing this period because of the decline — at different rates — of America, Russia, and China. Third, the West, conceived of as the geopolitical product of the postwar years, is in decline. All of this may sound like familiar territory, something someone who hymns the glories of the “rules-based international order” has been diagnosing and lamenting for the last decade. However, Kaplan’s view of geopolitics and the role of strategy and statesmanship in forming and managing it means these arguments are far from tired rehash of worn-through clichés.
First, Weimar. For Kaplan, the use of Weimer as a comparison is not because he thinks Trump is Hitler or that America/Europe is about to become Fascist, as “Hitler was not inevitable”, and we do not face anything like the overlapping crises and ideological brew that enabled him. Rather, for Kaplan “global Weimar” is used as a metaphor for the instability and turbulence of our current order, with no centre of authority with the sovereignty to decide any state of exception or normality. For Kaplan, “the entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.” According to Kaplan, “Weimar is now a permanent condition for us, as we are connected enough by technology to affect each other intimately without having the possibility of true global governance.” However, even though “Weimar ended with Adolf Hitler … the globe-spanning Weimar of the 21st century will almost certainly not end that way. But if history is any guide, it will be plagued by other, lesser sorts of revolutionary chieftains, probably many, given the state of our world.”
These “revolutionary chieftains” set the stage for the second part of the book: the decline of America, Russia, and China. This phrase was coined by Henry Kissinger, and describes leaders who are “the epitome of the dark side of human nature, men who lead revolutionary states.” Such men and states “appear which boldly proclaim that their purpose is to destroy the existing structure [of world order] and to recast it completely.” Before such men, the status quo powers stand mute and impotent, reacting while these men shape the new global environment.
One of course thinks of Vladimir Putin with his fantasies of restoring Russia’s Tsarist glories, and Xi Jinping rebuilding China after the “Century of Humiliation” to regain the Middle Kingdom’s ancient birthright via a Leninist vanguard. One also is forced to think of President Trump given that, whatever the merits of parts of his programme and the valid reasons for his election, his is a revisionist foreign policy of dismantling the postwar security order, twinned with attempts at reshaping the global trade and currency order. Hemispheric doctrine rules the day again, and America’s fin de siècle imperialist phase is recapitulated for the digital age of social media virality.
Kaplan’s point is that all these symptoms are those of declining and indeed dying powers. America is declining slower, but its indebtedness, polarisation, mass immigration, and general cultural crack-up means its descent is undeniable. Russia and China are literally dying on their feet — the question is how much damage can they do with the time that is left to their shrinking populations and ageing leaders. The war in Ukraine has been a demographic mincing machine for Russia, with a lowest-low fertility rate and poor life expectancy. Meanwhile, Xi is racing to break the middle-income trap, before his populace grows old before they grow truly rich on a per capita basis. His own demographic problems mirror Putin’s, with the added sting of a massive sex ratio imbalance, with too many men and not enough women. An invasion of Taiwan would likely be as costly as that of Ukraine. But it is one solution, not out of keeping with Chinese history, to the excess male problem, while finally wiping away the stain of what China, both government and people, see as the century of shame.
It is in the third and final section, on the decline of the West, that Kaplan is at his bleakest, most bracing, and most heretical, given his views on social organisation and the social and political circles he inhabits. Kaplan undertakes a diagnosis of the West’s ills that leads him to cite thinkers like Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, Solzhenitsyn, Henry Adams, as well as his geopolitical forebears Halford Mackinder and Robert Strauss-Hupé. The result is exciting in its reactionary tone, but it is reactionary in service to a managerial political system that is on the wane and in decline.
All of this is happening in the context of a world where geography and technology intertwine ever closer, to produce a geopolitical environment where geography matters like never before in more places than ever before, made so by the very technology that was supposedly the method of our deliverance from the constraints of physical existence. While this is increasingly so within the West, between civilisations and on the fault lines of old conflict, technology renders the world more claustrophobic than it was: “politics has rarely before been played out on such an intense, globespanning, and consequential level, even as electronic communications have made it abstract and therefore more extreme”. Geography “is not disappearing. It is only shrinking. Indeed, the smaller the world becomes because of technology, the more that every place in it becomes important. Every place, every river and mountain range, will be strategic.”
For example, a river system in the Indus valley that runs from India to Pakistan suddenly becomes a concern in Britain because of the prospective conflict between two nations whose diasporas in Britain arrived here because of modernity’s increased mobility and can participate by-proxy, whether in the digital realm or on Britain’s streets. This is because “technology has … contracted our world, erasing the distance across oceans and between continents”. This captures the paradox of our new digital order, that “just as technology liberates, technological demons will abound. The key element in all of this will be closeness. We will all—Eurasia, Africa, North and South America—be exposed to each other’s crises as never before.”
Geography and technology combine to create the landscape within which statesmen must operate in this newly unstable and claustrophobic world. Statesmanship needs a cool head and prudent action, boldness twinned with wisdom to pursue the greatest good for one’s nation or people within the limits of one’s material and human resources. Kaplan is one of the few to apply the frame of the transition from a print-dominated culture to a digital-first culture to the realm of foreign policy. As he writes, “this fragile, finite earth of ours rests, above all, on moderation, which this new age of technology is fundamentally undermining.” The printing press undoubtedly enabled its own form of bestial violence following its mass adoption in the early-modern period. Even so, a culture defined by print media is one where rational reflection and cool-headed analysis is much easier to achieve than one defined by the panicked immediacy and lizard-brained impulsivity of the digital realm.
Kaplan echoes the neural-science basis for Nicholas Carr’s warnings about what a digital-first culture is doing to us when he writes that “the fact is that the communications revolution has changed the way our minds work”. It was the case that “the decades of cool decision-making, especially in the United States, coincided with the print-and-typewriter age: a form of technology that lent itself to objective and detailed explanations of issues, encouraging both the public and its leaders toward moderation”. No longer.
As seen here, Kaplan reflects on the effects of technology not only with regard to the heights of diplomacy and foreign policy but also for the way of life of the ordinary person. This is what marks him out from other geopolitical writers: he takes the human condition and its embodiment in the lives of the governed as worthy of as much consideration as the doings of the powerful. The instability and decline of the West is part and parcel of the rise of The Rest: mass urbanisation and technologization, combining to create the kind of mass man that those like Alexis de Tocqueville, Spengler, and Gasset warned about. Kaplan has long written of the destabilising effects of mass urbanisation. In the world of megacities, people are stripped of the mediating institutions and communities that ground the human experience and give the individual a sense of rooted identity. We become atomised and isolated, the very conditions Hannah Arendt argued provided the seedbed for totalitarianism. Atomism and collectivism are two sides of the same coin.
People are increasingly uprooted from their sense of place in the world of the present
Various forms of religious fundamentalism, with their simpler theologies and more accessible forms of orthodoxy, fall on fertile soil, the mass man primed to hear the story of the good news as to why his life does and should have meaning, and who is responsible for preventing him from attaining this salve for the wound in his own heart. As Kaplan writes, “mass men are particularly prone to extreme political ideologies, warned the 20th-century diplomat and foreign policy realist Robert Strausz-Hupé, since ideologies ‘are mass products in the true sense,’ and ‘represent the final, deepest degradation of reason.’ Crowds, mobs, social conformity, and ideology all flow together, helped by technology.”
Such turmoil in the external world is fed by the transformation of the new mass man’s inner life, as “technology [has] increasingly deif[ied] the present by making it more vivid and overpowering, thus undermining our sense of history, which is an awareness of the past and future.” People are increasingly uprooted from their sense of place in the world of the present, but are also increasingly uprooted from their sense of and connection to a deep past. This combines with the progressive deterritorialization of modern life, whereby those below the global overclass are rendered down to material for the global economy that is operated by the managerial machine.
Such things as culture, peoplehood, and faith are deconstructed and recombined in lower, more simplified forms that can easily be grasped as weapons by the mob. Kaplan was writing during the explosion of such behaviour on American college campuses, “the tyranny of perfect virtue in regard to race and foreign policy that … swarmed over [America’s] elite universities”, when students staged occupations and protests in support of a terror group, Hamas, whose genocidal aims have been repackaged and adapted to the pre-existing lifeworld of the foot soldiers of the woke moral order. This may seem a niche and frankly elitist preoccupation detached from what matters to most people. However, Kaplan is correct to focus on such things because an elite is inevitable, no society can do without one, and so the formation of that elite in its intellectual and ideological outlook matters a great deal for the future direction of society.
Such behaviour seen in the aftermath of the Oct 7 attack showed that chaos is also at risk of gripping “postmodern technological societies, where revolt takes the form of primitive paroxysms, embracing lies or violence or both, in a reaction against soulless technocracy and the tyranny of crowds that demand perfect virtue.” Meanwhile, in the realm of domestic politics, “the more routinized and artificial life becomes on account of technology—the more that human nature in Pinker’s worldview is pacified and feminized—the more likely that the instincts of certain leaders will rebel against those very tendencies, making them revolutionary chieftains.” This certainly describes one of the unspoken elements of Donald Trump’s appeal.
Kaplan’s book is a tragic one, appropriate to a Realist worldview that sees conflict borne of security-seeking through power maximisation as inevitable, and a feature of our fallen human world. The real tragedy of this book is that the world Kaplan describes has been born out of the very managerial system he praises here and has recently defended elsewhere. The contradictions of such a system were always going to show themselves in various and increasingly severe morbid symptoms. The denial of human nature that is central to the managerial form of government meant that such a decline in America and the wider West, enabled by the very technology it gave birth to, was always going to come at some point. What Kaplan does is remind us of the way of seeing the world that is most likely to steer us over the raging seas to dry land. For that alone he is to be commended.
