Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

The ultimate danger will always remain in losing our cool heads. Now you may ask: if cool heads have prevailed for many decades until now, why should they stop prevailing? After all, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine may well be the exception that proves the rule. The more businesslike, bureaucratic, and technocratic Chinese—compared to the Russians—would never, at the end of the day, unleash such terror on Taiwan, regardless of their aims, and the United States will always be circumspect in launching any military responses. The problem with such comforting assumptions is that they assume moderate and realistic voices will always predominate in government. But that might not always be the case. And the reason has less to do with personalities than with the social and technological forces molding those personalities. 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.