Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

failures of the established order to deal with revolutionary powers are not aberrations but the very stuff of history,

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.

my assumption that human nature itself will not improve.

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.

We are all in this together, in other words, as our loyalties slowly, imperceptibly shift from national to planetary,

The more people, the less geography for each of them, and therefore the more that geography shrinks, giving us Weimar.

A Weimar world is also a Malthusian world.

while journalists obsess about dictators and strongmen, it is the very lack of governance that could pose the greater risk, and not only in the developing world, but in the West, too.

Whereas the opinion pages of the time, both liberal and conservative, were obsessed with the clashing ideas shaping the post–Cold War world, I concentrated on how the increasing lack of underground water and the increasing lack of nutrients in overused soils would, in indirect ways, inflame already existent ethnic, religious, and tribal divides. And this factor, merged with an ever-growing number of young males in the most economically and politically fragile societies, would amplify the chances of extremism and violent conflict.

elections by themselves didn’t matter nearly as much as the building of modern bureaucratic institutions.

“The Coming Anarchy” also focused on how elites would increasingly come to see the natural environment, especially water shortages and soil erosion—in addition to shifts in the earth’s climate itself—as a major foreign policy concern.

I said that future wars would be motivated by communal survival, aggravated in some cases by environmental scarcity.

a human population still growing by almost 20 percent before it levels off, affected by debilitating poverty in badly urbanized settings and intensifying climate change, and on the higher ends of the economic spectrum with border-defying cyberattacks on a scale we have not seen a distinct probability. Humankind on planet Earth will constitute an ever-tightening, closed system, divided against itself and armed to the teeth.

The comparison with the Weimar Republic, alarming at first, may ultimately prove, once again, quaint.

there came an historical interruption in Adams’s scenario of Russia’s centrality to Europe, as the collapse of the Soviet Union

rendered Russia politically and economically enfeebled for well over a decade,

was no longer much of a factor to be considered. Of course, few at the time among Western elites thought of this new state of affairs as an interruption at all, since they considered it the birth of a new order, in which Russia would gradually be transformed into a benign democracy along Western lines.

It was abject Russian weakness, and the fact that China’s great navy would not really emerge for another decade, that allowed Western journalists and intellectuals in the last decade of the 20th century to believe that liberal democracy was in the process of taking over the world, shepherded by an America unchallenged by any real competitor. Military power thus became subsumed by humanitarian concerns, as the moral compromises necessitated by great-power politics had vanished with the end of the Cold War, or so it seemed. Thus, the 1990s were a break from rather than the end of history, so to speak.

Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001,

The subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, when looked at from a dispassionate distance, originated not with the urge to remake Middle Eastern countries into democracies but with the demand for absolute security, even beyond what the weakening of Russia in the 1990s had achieved.

9/11,

further diverted us from great-power politics.

fear of more terrorist attacks in those first years of the new century was v...

blotted out any thought of the past or future.

technology marches on, making us less rather than more aware of the pitfalls and disasters ahead.

Technology will increasingly deify the present by making it more vivid and overpowering, thus undermining our sense of history, which i...

11 proved to be a head fake: a far-reaching distraction as Russian president Vladimir Putin methodically rebuilt the Russian state with the help of the military and intelligence services; and as China, especially under the leadership of Xi Jinping, eventually emerged as an aggressive military, economic, and technological power.

by the second decade of the 21st century it had become apparent that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, far-flung imperial enterprises both, had substantially weakened the United States and given its adversaries a head start in the renewed strategic competition.

We still have little idea, given the march of post-Industrial technology, what future great-power warfare could be like, just as in the decades following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 few had any idea what future industrial war would be like.

The problem with predicting the future is that it usually descends into linear thinking—the mere extension of current trends.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suddenly made World War II, though eight decades removed, feel much closer in time,

The Ukraine War, though it has exposed Russian military limits (of which I will have more to say), nevertheless also demonstrated that there is and has been no world order or international community, no rules-based system in Europe or anywhere else, the more one reflects upon it.

Different parts of the world were simply determined by their own balance of power systems that, because they usually held up well, were mistaken for a rules-based order that was in fact nowhere in evidence.

our world is still one of pitiless power struggles that make a mockery of elite posturing.

Globalization, which is based on trade, the large-scale movement of people by jet transportation, and rapid technological advances in the electronic and digital realms, fits neatly together with a world in permanent crisis. That is because the permanent crisis demands a dense webwork of interactions between crisis zones across the earth, which globalization produces.

A Weimar-type world, in the sense that I mean it, would be impossible without globalization.

Globalization can thus far be divided into two broad phases, which I will label Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0, with the coronavirus functioning as a very rough chapter break between them.

Globalization 1.0 was about the spread of democracy and the creation and enlargement of middle classes beyond the West and particularly in formerly Communist Central Europe.

a global elite now seemed to be in charge, claiming to engineer reality from above and throughout the world by virtue of the fancy conferences it held—such

Progress was seen as automatic, linear, and deterministic, and consequently the sense of the tragic was lost.

Again, there was an affliction of presentness, as if the present in all of its vividness, enhanced and constantly improved upon by technology, could g...

9/11 attacks

Chinese

Putin

also began a period when social and economic anxieties began to permeate the new globe-spanning middle classes that had been the creation of Globalization 1.0, resulting in the gradual rise of populism and new forms of authoritarianism in a number of countries in the West and the former third world.

A world united was also a world where there was no place to hide.

the finite earth is gradually losing the race against technology and population growth,

because everything intersects with everything else in a smaller world, such a world is by definition unstable.

Humanity’s new sense of claustrophobia, wrought by the closing of distance, which was in turn wrought by technology, was in and of itself intensifying the magnitude of each crisis as it was perceived.

national power itself, which is derivative of geographical position, natural resources, and economic strength, is ultimately dependent on the good judgment of leaders: not all of the time, but most of the time, and especially when key decisions are required that can constitute historical hinges.