A New U.S. Grand Strategy: A World in Permanent Crisis, With Robert Kaplan

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is, "A World in Permanent Crisis." With me to discuss how an increasingly connected world is likely to generate crises that spill across borders and regions is Robert Kaplan. Bob is a journalist and author with twenty-three books on foreign affairs and international relations to his name. He currently holds the Robert Strausz-Hupe Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Foreign Policy has twice named Bob one of the world's top one-hundred Global Thinkers. His latest book is Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.
This episode of The President's Inbox is the sixth in my series on U.S. grand strategy. Bob, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

KAPLAN:
It's my pleasure to be here.

LINDSAY:
Now, Bob, I usually start off when I talk to authors by talking about the title of their book, but I want to begin with your subtitle, A World in Permanent Crisis. What do you mean by that?

KAPLAN:
What I mean is we'll always have something to worry about. There will always be some tumultuous event going on somewhere in the world that captures our imagination, causes us to have discussion. It will be permanent. There's always a crisis. The reason I chose that as a subtitle is because we're more interconnected than we've ever been. Geography has been shrunk by technology. It hasn't been defeated by technology, just made smaller. The world is more anxious, more claustrophobic, more interconnected than ever before. A crisis in the Far East can affect a crisis in the Middle East or in the United States to a degree greater than before. We're all trapped with each other, in other words, and Africa is no longer just far away and doesn't matter. Every place, to some extent, is strategic.

LINDSAY:
That's why you write that, "Isolationism is the past, full immersion in a chaotic world is the inevitable future"?

KAPLAN:
Exactly. I think isolationism is kind of an old word from a hundred years ago, when it took five days to travel from America to Europe by luxury steamship or something. It doesn't work for our world. We're too on top of each other.

LINDSAY:
Well, in your book, you make a compelling argument that if we want to think about this world of permanent crisis, where countries are basically butting up against one another because technology has shrunk geography, you say the analogy or maybe it's the metaphor we should think about, is Weimar, Germany. Unpack that for me, and maybe begin by explaining, for people who aren't familiar with Weimar, Germany, what you mean.

KAPLAN:
Yes. Weimar, Germany, the Weimar Republic, lasted from 1919, in the wake of World War I, to 1933, with the ascension of Adolf Hitler. It was fourteen, fifteen years, and it's called that because legislators and lawyers and others all met in the central German town of Weimar, basically to devise a constitution. And they felt they had a goal, which was to devise a constitution that would prevent the rise of an autocrat, like Kaiser Wilhelm or Otto von Bismarck.
And like a lot of us, and like happens in foreign policy periodically, they overlearned a lesson. They became so obsessed with preventing another autocrat that they devised a system that nobody could run, essentially, where there was always a cabinet crisis, always a crisis. It was not just separation of powers, but it was separation of territories. Prussia was a law unto itself. Bavaria wanted to be a law unto itself. So it was Germany, but it was so sprawling and badly managed that nobody could get a handle on it, so to speak.
And so Weimar was a deeply artistic flowering period that produced a lot of great art and literature. It also produced some great statesmen, like Walther Rathenau and Gustav Stresemann and others. Weimar did not have to end badly. There were many other options open to it. That's why I don't consider this a totally negative metaphor. One thing I've learned, Jim, is that it's all about geography until it becomes all about Shakespeare.
But anyway, I make the comparison between our world today and Weimar because geography has been shrunk by technology, as I said before. We don't have a world government, we don't even have world governance, but we do have an emerging world system, so to speak, where we're all interconnected and we all affect each other. And it's like Weimar. There's a permanent crisis. And that's why I say at the end of the book that the goal is to make Weimar work because Weimar almost worked, it could have worked.

LINDSAY:
Let me pick up on that, because one of the themes that runs through Waste Land, but it also runs through a lot of your writing, is the importance of order, and order as a precondition to having freedom. I'm not sure most people approach the issue in that way, so sort of lay out for me your philosophy in terms of how to think about order, and where order comes from.

KAPLAN:
Yeah. Without order, there is no freedom for anybody. And when I mean order, I don't mean dictatorship or anything like that. I mean basic institutions that function. You know, it doesn't have to be stable, it doesn't have to be democratic, it doesn't have to be perfect, but there's a functioning system so that people don't have to worry about going to work in the morning, or things work. That was what obsessed the English philosopher of the early modern period, Thomas Hobbes, because he had lived through some upheavals, and he understood that before you could have freedom, before you could really perfect your society, you needed order, so that's why I concentrate on order.
And when I talk about, for instance, the opposite of order, chaos, I'm not talking about the general convulsions in a democratic society or the arguments. The word chaos is overused too much in our newspapers and magazines. What I'm talking about is a total breakdown of government or where government doesn't exist, and therefore anyone who's experienced parts of the world where government basically doesn't exist or doesn't function, as I have, you'll see the requisite for order.
And so that to me is the starting point. Once you have order, you can go about making it less and less tyrannical. And that, of course, were the arguments that the founders of the American Revolution had. They understood the need for order first, but they wanted to make it as un-tyrannical as possible.

LINDSAY:
I want to pick up on this thing because it seems to me in your thinking it's tied to the notion that Americans in particular, but maybe people in the West more generally, being children of the Enlightenment, tend to exaggerate the role of reason in politics and in world politics, tend to miss the potential for tragedy, tend to believe that progress is virtually guaranteed. Help me think through how you think about that set of issues.

KAPLAN:
Yes. History doesn't go according to reason, often. Things happen. Maybe now's the time to introduce my idea about Shakespeare, which is when you read Shakespeare's plays, especially the histories and tragedies, what comes through is people are making moment-by-moment decisions, not based on reason, but based on ego, based on fear, based on the need for honor. All these combustible human emotions enter into it. And to think that our politics is different, I think, is illusionary because when we read the notes of the White House before this thing happened or that thing happened, there's a lot of politics involved. There's a lot of fear.
Not everything is going according to a textbook reason, and therefore I feel we need to have a sense of the tragic, in that sense, because you have to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy. And we do this, actually, in our daily lives. We often worst-case-scenario so many things, and the result is we avoid them from happening. So when I say we have to think tragically, it's a form of anxious foresight, of constructive pessimism.

LINDSAY:
So, you write, Bob, that Europeans on the eve of World War I were, "Taking their good fortune for granted and assumed it was a permanent condition." Do you think we're guilty of that same thinking today?

KAPLAN:
I'm not sure. I know before World War I Europe had essentially a century of peace. There was the fighting of the Italian Risorgamento and other things, but generally there was no continent-wide war since the end of Napoleon. And Europeans began to think that this was a permanent condition, that it could be taken for granted, and therefore they entered into World War I thinking it would be over in weeks, that it wouldn't be a World War. Do we think that, did I think Americans have actually, with all the disruptions in our politics, not just over the past few weeks, but over the past few years from much of this new century, have developed a sense of the tragic, that things could go wrong. I don't think we're nearly as naive as Europeans were before the onset of World War I.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about the state of the world today, particularly in terms of great powers. You really focus on three great powers, China, Russia, and the United States, and you see all three of them in decline. That's not typically how they're described. Either it is Xi Jinping's point of view, where the West is in terminal decline, and the East is rising or the American point of view that the China rise has been over-exaggerated, but you see all three headed in a downward spiral. Help me understand.

KAPLAN:
Yeah. First of all, decline itself is overrated, in the sense decline can take decades and centuries to play out, and decline only has meaning often in comparison to the trajectory of other powers. For instance, if we're in a gradual decline, but China is declining more suddenly and Russia even more suddenly, even in the midst of our gradual decline, we're getting stronger in a sense.
The British Royal Navy, which is often an arbiter of British power and history, began to decline in the 1890s, but that did not stop Great Britain from essentially saving the world a half a century later in the 1940s because the decline was so gradual that it didn't really have meaning until literally after World War II when the British state literally ran out of money, and the empire, within a few short years, disappeared.
But I think America, China, and Russia are in gradual decline, Russia more suddenly, for different reasons. Remember, our problems, because we're a boisterous democracy, are out in the open so everyone can see them. China's problems are more hidden, and also sometimes more convoluted to examine because a lot of it has to do with complex economics.
I think we're in decline because mass democracies work best in the center, in the moderate center, when you had a center-right Republican Party and a center-left Democratic Party. We just lost President Carter, and some people forget that he governed as a moderate Democrat. He fought the Cold War. He was not a progressive or anything like that, and that was part of his strength, in other words. I think we've lost the center. The Democrats have moved further to the left. The Republicans have moved to the populist right, and when there's no center, each party thinks an election is of mortal, existential importance, that if you lose, you lose everything. I remember elections twenty, thirty, fourty years ago where someone lost, so what? You go on, essentially. There are still compromises, all of that.
When the center is gone, politics becomes much more difficult. I think one of the reasons for that is technology. It's because the center was synonymous with the print and typewriter age, more or less, where people got their news from professional journalists who wrote at length. Things were fact-checked. There was a lot of moderate professionalism in it, and that affected how the public thought. Now we're in the digital video era, where social media favors the extremes. It favors simplistic, emotional, passionate outbursts, in other words, and passion can be the enemy of analysis. So I think America was a great mass democracy in the greater print and typewriter age, but it's unclear it can continue as such in the digital video era and the other eras of technology yet to come.
When it comes to China, I think that, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars are fleeing China. Chinese are stashing their money overseas, to the degree that they can. China, to me, worked best when it was a collegial, risk-averse, enlightened authoritarian system with mandatory retirement ages. I think Deng Xiaoping was one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century. His method was continued by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
But I think China now under Xi has a Leninist autocracy, where you have Marxist ideologues making sometimes complex financial decisions or what amount to complex financial decisions. And the result is China, I think, we're in a period where it's unclear that the Chinese Communist Party can last for a few more, you know, another decade or two. Remember, China has had a history of the collapse of dynasties and new ones forming so it's not out of the question to ask that question.
I think Russia, it's much simpler. You know, World War I did the damage to the twentieth century that it did because it went on for four long years and killed seventeen, what is it, eighteen million people. That's where Hitler arose from, et cetera. The Ukraine war has been going on now for three years, to this month. That's a long time to be fighting so furiously with tanks and men, thousands of men, hundreds of thousands of men killed or casualties killed and wounded, and thousands of tanks destroyed.
We tend to discount it because there's no novelty value after a while so the story drifts from the top of page one to the bottom of page one to page two and three because media loves novelty, essentially. But it's of profound importance that it's been going on for three years, and I think this will weaken the Russian ability to influence and to control the caucasus, former Soviet Central Asia, Siberia, and the Russian Far East.

LINDSAY:
You know, Bob, as I read your book and your articles, you've been a very prolific author, you've spoken a lot about structural forces influencing world politics, whether it's technology, the finite size of the Earth, climate change, decline arises in various powers. But you also seem to be very sensitive to contingency, that things aren't determined, not following, a mechanical law. There's the element of, for lack of better word, serendipity. Either you get a leader who rises to a moment or a leader who takes you into the abyss, and you write about the Shakespearean tragedy. So how do you think about the role of the individual? You've already alluded to Deng Xiaoping, for example, versus Xi Jinping, and how they have fundamentally different visions for China.

KAPLAN:
Yes. You know, the foreign policy elite loves the word agency. You hear it a lot, "Where is the agency?" And agency is usually meant in a positive sense, you know, how we can improve things, take action to avoid a catastrophe, to feed the starving, where is the agency. But agency can also be negative, as I think we see with Putin's decision to invade Ukraine. What's fascinating to read about is that Putin was isolated for many, many weeks before invading Ukraine because of Covid, you know, and his fear of getting infected. Did that influence his thinking? You know, he was less in social contact. Who knows?
It's things like this that can matter so much in history. That's why elections are so crucial. You know, if the Florida recount had gone differently, and Al Gore had been president, which it very well might have, we might not have had the Iraq war or if we did, we would've had it very differently than we did. It's things like that, that history has a lot of pivot points where it can, you know, turn on a thread, on a decision, just on an impulse.

LINDSAY:
So is that what you mean by the Shakespearean decline in leadership?

KAPLAN:
Well, to me, when you have Xi Jinping, a Leninist ideologue, you have Vladimir Putin, who's not a Communist, but is far more dangerous than many Communists we've dealt with, like Mikhail Gorbachev, even Brezhnev, you know, someone like that, and then we have, you know, I'm getting political here, we have someone like Trump, who's very unorthodox, I think we have Shakespearean decline in terms of the leaders of the great powers.

LINDSAY:
So Bob, why does it matter if we're going to have the decline of the great powers? What are, in your view, the knock-on effects of seeing a decline of China, Russia, and the United States, even if it is something that unfolds over decades?

KAPLAN:
Well, great powers and empires have risen and declined over the course of history. That's one of the definitions of history so it's not abnormal, but empires arise out of chaos. But when they collapse or weaken, they give way to chaos too. There's no neat solution to this. So I think, you know, if you have the gradual weakening of the great powers, I don't believe, oh, we're going to have a better world, India will rule or the BRICS will rule. I don't believe any of that.

LINDSAY:
Why not?

KAPLAN:
Because first of all, I think India is overrated somewhat. India has a lot of problems. There's a great essay, very long essay, in the recent issue of The Atlantic by Robert Worth about India, and how most of India still lives in poverty, most young male Indians are looking for work and all of that. India has been living on hype, as Worth said, for a long period. I think India has a lot of problems.
Secondly, the BRICS do not have a core geopolitical philosophy. You have, for instance, the United Arab Emirates, who unofficially are sort of pro-Israel, and then you have South Africa, which is very officially anti-Israel. Then when you go through the BRICS, I mean, what does Brazil have to do with India and all of that? I don't see a coherent strategy there. So I think the weakening of the great powers will just lead to more tumult in the world.

LINDSAY:
So as you survey the trends you see there in the world, Bob, and keeping in mind the need to think tragically to avoid tragedy, what is your advice for policymakers?

KAPLAN:
My advice to policymakers, you know, is to always worst-case-scenario everything in order to avoid big mistakes, and also, experts make mistakes. Experts can be wrong. They don't have all the wisdom, but much of the time or most of the time, the experts are right, so you have to listen to experts. You have to think four steps down the road, and they have to listen to different opinions. They cannot be closed off. It's very dangerous at a meeting in the Oval Office where everyone agrees with each other.

LINDSAY:
So as you sort of survey the terrain then, Bob, are there issue areas or big issues on the front of The New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal where you say, "Here's a case where we're giving into the fallacy of progress, and we're not grappling with how things could go wrong"?

KAPLAN:
Yes. I think a big issue is we kind of misunderstand climate change and population growth. You know, who knows? The Earth has had shifting climates for hundreds of millions of years, and we've had wildfires and heavy winds in what is now Southern California for millions of years. And we've had massive superstorms and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico for many years around Houston, Texas. But this is the first time in human history where you've had massive, congested urban populations living in these fragile climatic and seismic zones. It's the combination.
You know, everyone talks about how population is going to start to decline. That's true, but we're already over eight-billion, and we'll rise to ten-billion before we actually start to decline. And so, you have masses of urbanized human beings living in terrain that is very fragile, and therefore we're going to see more superstorms like Harvey which devastated Houston, more Indonesian tsunamis, more L.A. wildfires or things like that or the drought in Mozambique some years ago. Southeastern Africa has had droughts for forever, but never with so many people living there. So it's this combination of population and the drumroll of climatic variations that I think that we have to get used to and try to deal with.

LINDSAY:
What about the confrontation now taking place between the United States and China? Again, Xi Jinping, who you alluded to, I think you call him a revolutionary chieftain, he has tried to change and has succeeded in changing the direction of China. He sees China as ascending. He sees the United States as declining. I don't think that's a diagnosis that Donald Trump would accept. There's been a lot of talk about the United States needing to stand up, confront or contain China. Is there a tragic element of that confrontation that we're not thinking through?

KAPLAN:
There is something, very much, we should all worry about, which is it's been impressive the way that financial markets have priced-in Middle East wars for a quarter century now, and have also more or less priced-in the Ukraine war. People have not noticed a big reduction in their retirement accounts because of the war in Ukraine or in the Middle East. It's something we all argue about and are passionate about, but it hasn't really affected us financially.
But if there was ever a high-end military conflict in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait between the United States and China, and maybe with Japan too in the East China Sea, it could have a devastating effect on world markets. And suddenly, everyone would be talking about it and would be obsessed with it because they could see the result when they get their monthly retirement statements. So we have to avoid a military conflict in East Asia by all means, at all accounts.
And actually, I'd go further. I'd say it's the very fear of what I've just described that ironically keeps the peace between the U.S. and China, just like hydrogen bombs kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War. Both sides know the consequences if they actually got into a military conflict.

LINDSAY:
I take your point there, Bob, but I wonder if another caution you have made, which is about Shakespearean decline and the risk-proneness of certain leaders, might not get us into the very trouble that you warn against. I mean, I would've thought, on the eve of the Ukraine war three years ago, that the calculation in Moscow would've been, they could have gotten a big chunk of what they wanted, basically seizing a little bit of the Donbas. But instead, Vladimir Putin went to try to eradicate Ukraine off the map and that brings us to where we are today.

KAPLAN:
Yeah, I agree with that. I agree. It's getting very dangerous. Trade wars can lead to real war because they bring economics, everything, into the conflict, and they make each side more suspicious of the other side than they were before. So I think in a period of trade wars, when you have a volatile leader in Washington, a very ideological leader in Beijing, the risk of a conflict in the Western Pacific goes up. It doesn't go down.

LINDSAY:
On that very sobering note, I'm going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Robert Kaplan, a journalist and author of the new book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. Bob, thank you very much for coming on The President's Inbox.

KAPLAN:
It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster, with recording engineer Jamie Stoffa and director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.