Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

given what is relevant for our own time—a time of instability, destructive populism, intemperate dictatorships, and anarchy in places—in light of the struggles of silent billions across the planet who worry about putting enough food on the table and providing safety for their families more than they worry about the right to vote, Deng’s accomplishment is the greater. Deng is what is missing in today’s global environment. The absence of his likeness contributes to the permanent crisis. It may be too much to expect that great powers like China and Russia be both stable and democratic. It would be enough that they be stable and ruled by leaders who are both enlightened and bureaucratically competent. Therefore, I want to spend some time with Harvard professor Ezra Vogel’s magisterial biography of Deng Xiaoping, who more than any other man was the father of the original Asian economic miracle, and whose story reads as though taken from the pages of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.