Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

as Kissinger wrote in A World Restored, “the most fundamental problem of politics…is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”[29] It is self-righteousness that lies at the heart of the worst tyrannies: the belief that your opponents can be destroyed because they are in your eyes fundamentally illegitimate.

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We are now completely on our own in a world made intimate by technology, with its tendency to be destabilized by simplistic social-media slogans and fragile financial dominoes; and though its individual parts may in significant measure be moderately and democratically governed, its very close interactions, including the shattering of powers from within, great and small, make for a geopolitical Weimar.

In this geopolitical Weimar, while monarchical rule, aside from the Arabian Peninsula with its kings and sultans and emirs, has faded into near-oblivion, the legacy of totalitarianism, especially Communism, remains both overbearing and deadening, contributing to our underlying instability. China and North Korea are still officially Communist societies, while three-quarters of a century of Communism, including decades of Stalinism, have exacted enough civilizational damage in Russia to have left its imprint on Vladimir Putin’s murderous rule. Totalitarianism, which essentially means that no action—or any thought even—by any human being is allowed to exist beyond the purview of the state and without the permission of the state, is an invention of modernism.

All ages are ages of transition, but never have such monumental transitions been advanced at such an uneven pace as they are now.

there is more to history than vast impersonal forces such as Communism, technology, geopolitics, and so on. There are also personalities and human agency, with all of their implied contingencies. Vladimir Putin has been the most dangerous Russian leader since Stalin; Xi Jinping is as relentless and ideological as Mao Zedong; Donald Trump, whose political career may lie in the past tense, is more vain and superficial than von Papen even.

Forget Hitler. Every tyrant is unique, just as every hero is. And just as technology liberates, technological demons will abound.

The key element in all of this will be closeness. We will all—Eurasia, Africa, North and South America—be exposed to each other’s crises as never before.

In this, the mid- and late 21st century will be to the 20th century as the 20th was to the 19th and even the 18th. That is, the pace and quality of connectivity—of closeness—will unceasingly accelerate. That will deliver many wonders, of course. But it will be the disease vari...

For decades, strategists have used this military adventure of ancient Athens, documented by Thucydides, as a metaphor for both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Athens had gone to war in support of allies in far-off Sicily, only to become embroiled for a number of years in a military quagmire there. After steeply building up its invasion force, Athens had to retreat with its reputation in tatters. Sicily is next door to Greece, whereas Vietnam and Iraq are half a world removed from the United States. Yet, as we know, the contraction of geography on account of transportation technology has rendered Vietnam and Iraq as close to America in practical terms as Sicily was to Greece; or, put another way, the absence of such technology in 5th century b.c. Athens rendered Sicily as distant as Vietnam and Iraq were to America. Thus, in either case, the analogy holds.

Covid-19 and climate change have, despite all the trouble they have caused, and will cause, not had the very targeted and cataclysmic effect on the globe as, for example, the Great Depression had on Germany, which brought Hitler to power. But give it all time. Climate change and pandemics are relentless, especially given absolute rises in population for a few decades yet in parts of the world, and by people increasingly living in environmentally fragile zones, subject to landslides, rising sea levels, and the like.

Because every place is strategic, the possibilities of conflict become more numerous than ever. And yet no world government has ever been on the horizon. The United Nations has served either as an extension of great-power conflicts, without mitigating them, or as a forum for action on those conflicts, particularly in the far-off corners of the developing world, like sub-Saharan Africa, that the great powers at least deem secondary or nonessential. As for global institutions like the G7 or G20, the more accurate description, as Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer has noted, is G-Zero.

The fact is that no supranational institution can ultimately replace the self-interest of states: something that is itself founded on the naked needs of the mass of citizens—average people rather than of the enlightened liberal few. Progress on global issues like climate change and world poverty generate more headlines than dramatic action, given the actual scale of those problems. Meanwhile, territorial battles, such as Ukraine, Taiwan, and Gaza, will generate age-old behavior based on naked national interest, and have far more immediate consequences based on blood and treasure, even as their tendency to interact with other battles elsewhere on the planet will multiply.

Columbia University historian and polymath Adam Tooze has constructed a series of crisis pictures—Krisenbilder, as he prefers to call them, using the German equivalent—that demonstrate the overwhelming interconnectivity of the world’s various crises. During the Ukraine War, Tooze’s crisis map was so complex it became nearly illegible.

complexity leads to fragility, in which any of innumerable nodal points under attack can disrupt a system as a whole. We may be able to more easily predict the second- and third-order effects of a nuclear weapon being detonated in a war than we can predict the effects of a massive cyber conflict, in which redlines have yet to be clearly delineated. We don’t even know the limits of cyber and information warfare, enhanced by artificial intelligence, which conceivably could do far more damage in different ways than a nuclear exchange.

the optimists can also be right. So I do realize how obsessively negative I am being. After all, among so many other good developments, extreme world poverty has decreased, technology is defeating disease, people are living longer and longer. But it is precisely those and many other kinds of technological breakthroughs that will go alongside (as well as intensify) destabilizing interactions among states and groups, and people and markets, even as new and striving middle classes arising out of poverty incessantly demand more and more of their governments. Middle classes are ungrateful. They want more and more.

I am warning in the tradition of anxious foresight. “Optimism and pessimism can be perilous attitudes that undergird policy. But of the two, optimism is apt to kill with greater certainty,” writes Colin S. Gray, the late British American scholar on geopolitics and military affairs. “Whereas pessimism may inspire a grand strategy and especially defense preparation…optimism has the potential to risk national safety and even international order more generally.”[37] Thus, I will continue in this vein.

Nuclear arsenals, or their equivalent, will probably always exist since you don’t have to detonate a nuclear bomb in order to get value out of it.

suddenly with the advent of precision-guided weapons, in turn derivative of the invention of microchips, state-induced violence becomes, theoretically at least, more tempting and less lethal.

Ukraine was generally not an example of this, with its vast civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure. That has been because of the general backwardness and intentional brutality of the Russian military, which deliberately has pursued a war of few limits against a large European civilian population, demonstrating that the propensity to kill on an industrial scale unfortunately remains a characteristic of the human species.

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.

Remember that the White House has always wanted to be well regarded by the media. That has not changed. It’s just that the media that the White House wants to be well regarded by has changed fundamentally, in the direction of right-wing and left-wing extremes, exacerbated by a noticeable increase in self-righteousness, and politicians have moved with the times.

Anything is possible now because while technology has evolved, human nature hasn’t, even as technology has made large-scale war more likely than during the age of hydrogen bombs. Man has such a propensity for violence that it actually required hydrogen bombs to keep him at least temporarily at bay.

while the status quo powers by their very nature seek a “static condition” in world affairs, the revolutionary power, also by its very nature, seeks the opposite: the overturning of the established order. That is why one of the marks of a revolutionary power is always to “fill a vacuum.” For status quo powers, negotiations and conferences are a means to make progress; for revolutionary power they are a means only to gain time, until the next aggression.[40]

before we go further, I must address a nagging issue for the reader—my assumption that human nature itself will not improve. How do I know this? I don’t. But I assume it to be true. To explain why, let me confront the argument made by the most serious and articulate spokesman for the belief that human nature, is, in fact, improving: Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, whose 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, was an intellectual event.

The most succinct rebuttal to Pinker’s thesis was provided by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder in Foreign Affairs.[41] Snyder notes that it simply may not be true that the violent instinct in man has declined. It is only that in relative terms the carrying capacity of the earth to support large populations through fertilizers and antibiotics is winning the race against machine guns. Snyder explains that modernity and education have not pacified man as Pinker claims—for it is impossible to imagine the religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries without the advent of the printing press.

Snyder’s conclusion is that Pinker “loses sight of the modern world in which we actually live.” Indeed, modernity itself—the Industrial and post-Industrial ages—has brought us everything from tanks to aircraft carriers to atomic bombs, and every historical actor from Adolf Hitler to Mao Zedong to Osama bin Laden.

Pinker defends Angell, saying that the latter may have the last laugh in coming decades, which could see the end to both militarism and the inevitability of war, through secular education and the feminizing of culture worldwide.

“I do not believe in progress in security affairs,” Gray declares. “I am impressed, however, by our ability to muddle through.” For Gray, thinkers like Pinker, rather than insightful, are merely reflective of their own cultural milieu. “Our debellicized West,” Gray explains, “is an island of calm in a sea of troubles. Whether one views that fact as a beacon of hope for the world, or as a perilous source of self-delusion, is a matter for individual choice.”[44]

The carrying capacity of the earth is being challenged in a way it never has before. It is only because the United States is otherwise bordered by oceans and sparsely populated, middle-class Canada to the north, so that only one of our borders is troublesome, that we don’t notice this development as much as we should.

“The beast has only just begun to snarl,” writes science journalist Peter Brannen, referring to the earth. “All of recorded human history—at only a few thousand years, a mere eyeblink in geologic time—has played out in perhaps the most stable climate window of the past 650,000 years. We have been shielded from the climate’s violence by our short civilizational memory, and our remarkably good fortune,” he goes on. “But humanity’s ongoing chemistry experiment on our planet could push the climate well beyond those slim historical parameters, into a state it hasn’t seen in tens of millions of years, a world for which Homo sapiens did not evolve.”[47]

A Weimar world is also a Malthusian world. There is no philosopher as reviled among the educated elite of both the Left and Right than Thomas Robert Malthus, whose essay published in 1798, On the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, is considered the epitome of pessimism and determinism. Malthus continues to be ridiculed for claiming that while population increases geometrically, food supplies increase only arithmetically, so that humankind risks eventual shortages and starvation.

If Malthus is wrong, then why is it necessary to prove him wrong again and again, every decade and every century? Perhaps because, at some fundamental level, relating to the degradation of our eaten-away natural environment, there is a gnawing fear that Malthus may just be right.[49]

Africa, including its far-flung tracts, forms a significant part of our highly connected planet, where “anarchy,” as Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh writes, “is more of a likelihood than tyranny.”[53]

February 1994 issue of The Atlantic, in which I published a decidedly un-American cover story: un-American in that it was pessimistic and deterministic and, most importantly, declared that the victory of the United States in the recently concluded Cold War would be not so much short-lived as irrelevant, because of various natural, demographic, and cultural forces underway in the world that would overwhelm America’s classically liberal vision. It eschewed the debate over ideals that have traditionally been the fare of intellectual journals and newspaper opinion pages. Moreover, because of the unrestrained optimism of the era—globalization in the 1990s was being employed as a freshly conceived and positive buzzword—the pessimism of my essay was deeply alienating, if not abhorrent, to many. The title that the editors chose said it all: “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Destroying the Social Fabric of the Planet.”

I emphasized how political and social interactions, including war, would be increasingly subject to the natural environment, which I labeled “the national-security issue” of the 21st century. 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.

Critics said that my bleak vision was demoralizing. But I was merely following the dictum of the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, who said that the job of a scholar or observer is not necessarily to improve the world, but to say bluntly what he or she thought was actually going on in it.

When it comes to making predictions, a journalist like myself cannot know the specific, short-term future: whether a country will have a coup or not within the next week. That depends on the Shakespearian dynamics between vital political actors and key intelligence that even the best spy agencies have difficulty uncovering; nor can a journalist or analyst know the situation of a country several decades hence, since so many factors, especially the advance of technology, make such a prediction mere speculation.

what a journalist or analyst can do is make the reader measurably less surprised by what happens in a given place over the middle-term future: five years, ten years, or fifteen years forward, say. And that is not an original idea. Ten-year forecasts or thereabouts are the time frame utilized by many corporations in their planning exercises, as I know from my own work as a geopolitical c...

my point in “The Coming Anarchy,” and a related Atlantic cover story titled “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” in the December 1997 issue, was that elections by themselves didn’t matter nearly as much as the building of modern bureaucratic institutions.

Modernism, which implies a world of well-defined states and borders, has been especially cruel to both West Africa and the wider African interior, where ethnic, tribal, and linguistic boundaries “crisscross and overlap, without the neat delineations so much beloved by Western statesmen since the treaties of Westphalia,” observes Gérard Prunier, a French scholar and expert on Africa. Here, he says, borders work best as “porous membranes” that are not set in the “cast-iron” lines favored by Western imperialists.[54]

“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. This was far less obvious in 1994 than it is today.

I concentrate on Africa here because while it is now 16 percent of the world population, it will rise to 26 percent of the world population by 2050 and will be almost 40 percent of the world population by 2100. At the turn of the 21st century, Europe and Africa had roughly the same population. At the end of this century, there could be seven Africans for every European.

I will return to the social, historical, and technological forces roiling our planet in the last part of this book. First, I must describe the geopolitical situation that will face us for some years to come, as geopolitics is the principal surface element through which many of these historical forces play out.

Henry Adams was the bookish grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, and the great-grandson of John Adams, the second president of

the United States. More an introvert than an extrovert, believing himself suited for an earlier, less hurly-burly age than the latter decades of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century, Henry Adams turned away from the bruising political calling of his forebears and became an historian, best known for his posthumous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. A man of acute historical insight and descriptive abilities, he believed that the actual journey didn’t matter, and that it is only the memory of such journeys—the lessons learned—that constitutes an education. The Education of Henry Adams is a work of great literature, written a bit sententiously in the third person, about a man grappling with the onrush of current events and their effects on him.

Europe’s principal dilemma was and always would be Russia: a thing too big, too Byzantine, too Asiatic almost, to fit alongside the more neat and tidy democracies of Europe with their comparatively stronger institutions. Adams writes: “The last and highest triumph of history would be, to his mind, the bringing of Russia into the Atlantic combine.”[1]

three brilliant 19th-century diplomats—Metternich, Talleyrand, and Castlereagh.

This was Stalin’s so-called “revolution from above,” in which he crushed two elements inimical to the Soviet regime: the peasantry as a whole and the Ukrainian nation in particular. Stalin’s depredations would of course continue and grow to include vast purges of his own Communist party and the leadership of the Soviet military itself. This all put the Soviet Union (the Russian Empire, that is), so central to European destiny even as it was so fragile, in an extremely perilous state when Nazi Germany invaded Russia’s heartland in June 1941, penetrating hundreds of miles to the outskirts of Moscow.

The Americans provided the money and industrial might for the war. But it was the Russians, principally, who paid the blood price. The United States and Great Britain could not have won the war on their own.

13,500 Soviet troops were executed by their own side during the fateful battle that turned the tide of World War II.[4]