Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

we should be careful how we label our own side. Our side would be wrongly labeled as the world of democracies, not only because something such as anti-Semitism has rooted itself inside democracies themselves (witness our university campuses), but because our own side also includes conservative autocracies such as the regimes in the Arabian Gulf, Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere, which stand for the regional status quo, as opposed to the revolutionary chaos that a regime like Iran threatens to bring about. 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, whether by territorial acquisition like Russia in Ukraine, or like China in regard to Taiwan, or by the eradication of an entire people—the goal of Iran’s coalition regarding Israel. Order versus disorder. That is what it’s about. World War II was similar, since the Nazis and Japanese fascists attempted to replace an orderly world, with all of its faults, with revolutionary mass murder, military conquest, and extremism. Our Cold War adversaries were cautious by comparison.

Q