https://modernagejournal.com/global-wei ... ew/253504/
a new book by robert kaplan is out
Robert D. Kaplan’s books rarely disappoint. He combines an insightful and historical global geopolitical perspective with on-the-ground realities that shed light on current and future international affairs. He is simultaneously a historian, journalist, and world traveler who is unafraid to be provocative and who views global politics as Shakespearean tragedy. The statesmen Kaplan most admires are conservative foreign policy realists who prize order over values because without order values are meaningless. His latest book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, portrays today’s global landscape as a fractured world order reminiscent of the Russian Revolution of March 1917 and the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Today’s geopolitics, Kaplan writes, occur in what he calls a “global Weimar.” “The entire world is one big Weimar now,” Kaplan claims, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.” Global politics are now in an “exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition,” a Weimar “house-of-cards” susceptible to collapse at any moment. And this situation, Kaplan continues, is similar to Russia on the eve of the March 1917 revolution, so brilliantly described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his multivolume historical novel The Red Wheel. The example of Weimar and Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel, Kaplan explains, demonstrates the primacy of order that is necessary to enable freedom to emerge. “Human nature being what it is,” Kaplan writes, “order must remain the paramount political virtue.” Conservatives, like Solzhenitsyn, “prefer stability to illusions of progress.”
Our foreign policy establishment, however, believes in the “illusions of progress.” They constantly invoke the “rules-based international order” and deference to the “international community,” which Kaplan considers progressive illusions. “This is certainly not a world governed by a rules-based order, as polite gatherings of the global elite like to define it,” he writes, “but rather a world of broad, overlapping areas of tension, raw intimidation, and military standoffs.” The United Nations, he says, is a “talk shop more important to the global elite itself than to the world at large.” The global elite suffer from a loss of the sense of the tragic, he writes. They believe that progress is “automatic, linear, and deterministic.” It is none of those.
Much of the bloody twentieth century, he wrote, can be traced back to the decline of four empires caused by the First World War. George Kennan rightly called that conflict the “seminal catastrophe” of that century, and its shadows are still with us in the twenty-first century. The “loom of time” is Toynbee’s phrase to note how present crises throughout the globe reflect the influence of the past.
Kaplan believes that what he calls a “bipolar military conflict” has started—a mix of hot wars and cold wars involved in a “clash of broad value systems” that “fuses the Global War on Terrorism with great-power conflict.” Geopolitically, it is Eurasian Heartland powers versus Eurasian Rimland powers backed by the United States, as Kaplan explained in more detail in The Revenge of Geography. But the conflict’s essence, Kaplan writes, is not, as the progressives say, democracy versus autocracy. Instead, it is “order versus disorder,” just like it was in the great wars of the twentieth century. He invokes the wise counsel of Jeane Kirkpatrick in her seminal essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards” to help guide American statesmen in the current global conflict, perhaps forgetting, however, that Kirkpatrick suggested that America in the post–Cold War world should become again a “normal country.”
Or perhaps we are witnessing the rise of Indo-Pacific powers, predicted by Sir Halford Mackinder in his last iteration of his famous geopolitical theory, that will produce what Mackinder called a “balanced globe of human beings.”
Kaplan ends the book with a chapter on the coming urbanization of the planet. Oswald Spengler predicted that this would be the cause of the decline of the West: in Kaplan’s words, the “abstractions of the city” may overcome “any link to the land.” Kaplan’s title The Waste Land is borrowed from a poem by T. S. Eliot “that begins with a vision of idyllic aristocratic life in Europe that is wiped out by World War I.” It results from the breakdown of traditions and cultures, including religion, that were often rooted in the soil. What will replace those traditions and cultures, Kaplan writes, are the “crowds and chaos” of urban life. And those crowds and that chaos are connected as never before by our digital world.
