Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

will lead to informal constellations within those organizations.

Europe will not be altogether stable.

Asia,

stability will be undermined by the shock effects of a rapidly arming, more nationalist and tumultuous China under Leninist rule. That will naturally mean higher defense budgets and greater naval activity throughout the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean.

The Middle East will continue in its struggle to create regimes, democratic or not, that avoid tyranny on one hand and anarchy on the other.

this more or less describes quite a number of sub-Saharan countries, too.

We are indeed entering a world that will be vast yet claustrophobic, more reachable yet more intractable and complicated, and most important, less and less tempered by the great powers, which will have no solutions for many countries.

Nevertheless, at the moment that I write, geopolitics has a very particular tendency. Let me explain. A worldwide, bipolar military conflict has begun.

it is a clash: a clash of broad value systems,

One pole of this bipolar world features gangster states like Russia and North Korea; totalitarian states like China and, again, North Korea; a revolutionary and terrorist state like clerical Iran, with all of its proxies; and a movement that, as I shall explain, is at once age-old, Industrial, and post-Industrial: anti-Semitism.

The current crop of villains constitute a more unstable, harder-to-predict human element than what we were used to dealing with during the Cold War. And these villains are all interlocked.

In fact, this is a bipolar struggle between status quo powers like ourselves and leaders and movements that want to topple the existing post–Cold War order,

Order versus disorder. That is what it’s about.

In geopolitical terms, the struggle is also between the Eurasian Heartland powers of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, and the Rimland powers that are essentially maritime, with some variations, such as the United States, Europe, Ukraine, Israel, and the conservative Sunni Arab powers from the Gulf to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

given how technology has compressed geography,

this is better understood as a war of ideas with geopolitical and military ramifications.

The Heartland and Rimland divisions just don’t capture the flavor of what is happe...

anti-Semitism can be post-Industrial, too,

as when Hamas terrorists used GoPro cameras to record their slaughter of Jewish women, children, and elderly people on October 7th. That was nihilism, violent Jew-hatred, postmodern performance politics, and Iranian grand strategy all at once, with clear-cut benefits to Russia and China.

Israel stands at the heart of this global geopolitical war. That is because Israel hasn’t really wavered.

Israel, although its population may be divided on many issues, is absolutely united about the need to militarily defend its territory, to defeat Hamas, and to neutralize Iran and its proxies.

And curiously, such a world will be less and less understood, as frightful headlines and imperfect media accounts from distant places take precedence over what is actually happening on the ground,

the realm of our own Western consciousness as it plunges into the crosscurrents of other consciousnesses and civilizations, nevertheless struggling to survive and both influence and direct all those colliding geopolitical forces mentioned above. Isolationism is the past: full immersion in a chaotic world is the inevitable future.

The fundamental change in geopolitics has not been fully realized. Great-power divides, the collapse of empires, the shrinkage of geography through technology, the legacy of Communism, and Shakespearean decline all play monumental roles in the roiling instability of our world. But there is something at once broader and more subtle that affects both world politics and our daily lives. In fact, the primary change in geopolitics is urbanization, and the intensification of politics that it leads to.

Over 55 percent of humanity lives in cities, by 2050 over two-thirds of humanity will be urban, and increasingly densely urban.

urbanization combined with social media provides the psychological and cultural undercurrents that drive foreign affairs from below the surface, making international politics more turbulent.

Jane Jacobs,

What she did not see, because she wrote in the middle and latter part of the 20th century, before there was the merging of digital platforms with city life, and henceforth the monumental effect of social media on city life, was how cities, rather than places of glorious varieties of opinion, could also become loci of categorical crowd behavior and psychology.

“the most successful urban neighborhoods have attracted not the blue-collar families that she celebrated, but the rich and the young.”

Jane Jacobs’s vision of lively yet unpretentious sidewalks where people of different classes and opinions mix in a variety of architectural settings has been turned on its head. Within each income and professional group now there is a growing and frightening conformity, dramatized by alienating architectural sameness.

And if people, on account of their surroundings, are less anchored to a past, empires, monarchies, and all the other traditions that have historically maintained states and societies are even more likely to dissolve, and to do so more quickly. Cities, therefore, in their current context, can be the conservative’s worst nightmare,

The fact is, people, ideas, and movements are less stable in cities than in the countryside. That is because cities are where the chemistry of intellectual exchange usually happens,

Because of digital connectivity, cities anywhere, with their packed humanity, can be dangerous places, especially prone to information manipulation.

Social media and the digital-video age only amplify crowd psychology. The whole web is a city.

The root cause of crowd psychology is in the very spatial pattern of human contact on city streets and inside apartment blocks. Urbanity changes us. It rewires us, and as we will see, not always for the better. The new world geography is more fearsome than the old, and more destabilizing in terms of excitable public opinion. Thus will geopolitics deteriorate.

The personal would be political, and the name of the modern catechism was ‘ideology.’ ”

Aleksander Wat,

wrote, in regard to Stalinism, that it was the “global answer to negation…that hunger for something all-embracing.” There was “too much of everything. Too many people, too many ideas, too many books.” This is the abundance of the city that Wat is describing. The only way to cope was with a “simple catechism,” an idea that would crush all the others.

If there were too many books and ideas and people back in Wat’s day, that would be only a fraction of what one must cope with now.

The soul itself, explains the contemporary Romanian philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici, is being hollowed out because of its being bombarded by stimuli and the substitution of the inner imagination by technology:

it is the city and overabundant suburbia that is the principal stage set for all of this. And within it people may be ready for a new catechism, or a succession of them.

It is the masses speaking through one voice that are the danger.

Most people think that they generate their own ideas: in fact, their ideas are prepared by...

The idea that some sermon or blog post or tweet has gone viral is a sad reflection on t...

Cities, as we know, have become venues for elites. And elites have an undeniable proclivity for groupthink and echo chambers, despite all their erudition.

Oswald Spengler,

He saw cultural decline in everything

this Spenglerian nugget: whereas the countryside produces the “folk,” the “world-city,” that is, in our context, the Internet, produces the “mob.”

“folk” in the countryside are in demographic decline,

And as urbanization and ever more crowded suburbanization become increasingly inexorable, the future belongs to the “mob.” While the folk on the political right are obsessed with conspiracy theories, the mob on the political left is obsessed with conformity: if you don’t agree with us on every point we will destroy you.