Transcription
This is a conversation with Robert D. Kaplan, a legendary journalist, academic, and one of the most influential thinkers on US foreign policy and geopolitics of the past decades. This year, he published a book called Wastelands, in which he portrays a pretty grim diagnosis of why the world is increasingly becoming more and more unstable and dangerous. Why is the United States, but also Russia and China in decline? That is only getting faster. And why what's coming is more chaos, more instability, violence, and danger, as well as what we can do to avoid it. We talk about all that and much more in what I think is a pretty fascinating conversation.
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So, welcome to the podcast.
>> Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I want to talk about your your latest book, um, Wastelands, in which you sort of introduce your view of the world and the world that we are entering now and for the foreseeable future. And for those who haven't read the book, you sort of the core argument that you're making or or the the core of the argument that you're making is a an an an analogy or a metaphor that you're making in which the world of today resembles the famous interwar period in Germany, the Weimar Republic, which to me is absolutely fascinating historical period to read about and that had a very uh notoriously bad ending. And so maybe to introduce your core argument to the people who haven't read the book, why did you pick this analogy and why do you think that we are in a new global Weimar republic today and how did we get here?
>> Yeah, sure. Um, first of all, I'm not interested in how Weimar ended with Hitler because Weimar could have had many different endings. You know, the the fact of Hitler coming to power, how and when he did, was a contingency built on other contingencies. What I'm interested as a metaphor is how the Weimar Republic operated from about 1919 to 1933. Um, and the way it operated was that the the authors of the Weimar constitution um wanted to at all uh put all their efforts into avoiding Germany falling into the hands of another autocrat whether it was Kaiser Wilhelm II or Otto von Bismarck. And like many people and like many of us from time to time they overlearned the lesson. You know, they made a constitution and a separation of powers that was so diffuse that nobody could rule Weimar. Not only wouldn't you know, just nobody would rule it. Um, you know, there was always so many checks and balances to a far greater extent than exists in the United States um with its separation of powers. So that Weimar was a sprawling empire without an emperor. It extended from Western Europe into Eastern Europe. Um, Prussia and Bavaria were laws unto themselves um essentially and and the result was there was always a crisis in Weimar, always something going on so that all anyone could discuss was politics, which is a very bad thing because when things are going well nobody discusses politics. It's only when things are going badly that everyone wants to argue and fight about politics. Um, so Weimar is a metaphor for our world today which has been condensed by technology. Our world is smaller and smaller. It's more anxious. It's more claustrophobic. It's more Weimar-like with nobody in control but each part of the earth affecting the other part of the earth like never before in history. And it's becoming tighter and tighter. Um, so I so the world today is Weimar essentially and it will continue such. We will have, I mean, in the mid-19th century you had the Taiping Rebellion in China killed like 20 million people, but nobody in the United States cared about it or knew about it because they were fighting their own civil war which killed only about 600,000 people. Um, so that um, but the the difference today is technology has brought all of this vividly into our living rooms in a way that did not exist then. So we are all one big global Weimar.
I have kind of seen all of that during my own lifetime. When I was born in in the '90s is the period of the maximum stability after the Cold War. And as I grew older, things were getting less and less stable until we got today to what you describe as a perpetual crisis that's happening everywhere and one crisis is breeding the other. Do you think that it could have been avoided, things getting so bad, if we would have done something differently, or is it just a historical cycle that comes every now and then, that the world just cannot stay safe and stable forever because people forget and the historical memory disappears?
>> Um, the British philosopher um John Gray um uh, you know, John Gray wrote a book about, you know, the fall of liberalism and and in it he said there is no end of history. There is, you know, think, you know, there'll be periods where everyone will be screaming about anarchy, other periods when people will be screaming about too much autocracy, other periods which may actually be democratic. There is no, there is no um, history has no direction um, uh, um, essentially, you know, it's, you know, that's the whole problem with the term progress that it seems we're moving in a linear direction from A to B. We're not moving anywhere. We're going around in cycles. And and everything. And I think rather the reverse, rather than this time being so bad, it was the Cold War in Europe and especially the post-Cold War that were abnormally peaceful. Now, of course, the Cold War was violent in Southern Africa, in Korea, in Vietnam, but inside Europe itself, Europe was projected by hydrogen bombs. I mean, the fear of hydrogen bombs kept the peace in Europe for 44 years between 1945 and 1989. Then um, the the dramatic um, economic expansion of NATO and the EU into Central and parts of Eastern Europe, uh, led to a whole new period of vigor and prosperity that was unusual. You know, we're talking about 60 years that were very unusual. Now we're back to normal history.
>> So, a few generations of Europeans just got spoiled by a historical abnormality and now we're back to the history as as it always has been.
>> Well, yeah. And another example of this historical abnormality was that the the time between the Congress of Vienna in 1822 and the outbreak of World War I, 1914. That was an abnormally peaceful time in Europe. Of course, you had the wars of the Italian unification and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but those are relatively small conflicts. Um, for mostly Europe was at peace and that's why in 1914 all the elites thought World War I rather than become World War I would just be a short, a short sharp war. Uh, that would be over in no time and nobody was very fearful of it. Um, so this isn't the first time this has happened. In other words.
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Well, well, that's kind of concerning because as as you said, the that peaceful abnormality was followed by a period of quite a long period of very bloody few decades with two world wars in Europe. So, if if I don't know if that's implied for our trajectory as well, but it doesn't sound very hopeful.
>> Um, nothing is exactly the same. I think the World War I analogy applies best to the Western Pacific today. You know, with all these war games going on in the Pentagon and in Beijing about a short sharp war, you know, in Taiwan. Um, you know, we can all argue about Ukraine. We can argue about the Middle East, but neither Ukraine nor the Middle East has affected people's retirement accounts or savings. I mean, it's been very impressive the way that the financial world has priced in those wars with very little effect to average people. But if you had a co a military, a high-end military conflict in the Western Pacific involving the two or or three largest economies, uh, over the most vital sea sea lines of communication with the most vital supply chains, um, uh, you would have a conflict that would change everybody's lives. Um, uh, essentially that hasn't happened. It may never happen, you know, but just, who knows?
>> And I think that's an excellent point because I think that I'm I'm European. I'm I'm based in Europe and even though an idea of a bigger European war is quite far away, there's definitely a lot of fear and concern about it and no one wants it. But if you look at maybe China and the US, there seems to be a lot less concern about a conf or cons that's maybe not the great wording, but for how destructive that conflict would be, there's surprising amount of uh calm with which both sides are taking it.
>> Yeah. No, that's true. Um, as I said, there's this assumption that there won't be a war or it would be a short quick war. But one thing, one thing about the history of war is it can start short and quick and then where does it end with the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party and anarchy in China? I mean, nobody has thought these things through.
So another core part of your argument that you're making in the book for why the world is unstable is that the United States, which used to be a major stabilizing factor when it was was at its height of power, is now itself in decline and that makes the whole world less stable. What makes you say that it's in decline? Because I'm sure that for example, Donald Trump would probably tell you that the US is doing better than it ever has.
>> Yeah, it isn't just the US. I say, I say all three great powers are in decline. We can get to China and Russia later on if you want. But the reason, remember, decline is relative and decline can be overrated and decline can take decades. Remember that the British Royal Navy began to decline in the 1890s, but that didn't stop Britain from essentially saving the world in the 1940s. Um, um, essentially, I believe America is in decline because the center is gone. That mass democracies function best in the center. Uh, when you have center-right Republicans, center-left Democrats who get together and make compromises all the time and pass intelligent bills through Congress so that institutions function and elections don't matter as much because whoever wins, it's going to be someone from the center who the other side can work with, essentially. Now you have instead of a center-right Republican party, you have a hard populist right-wing Republican party and instead of a center-left Democratic party, you have a hard progressive, in its own way, populist Democratic Party. So that the center is gone and elections mean everything because who, you know, it's life or death, essentially, because both sides have moved to the extremes. Um, and, you know, and that gets in the way of institutions functioning well. You know, the Senate is almost useless because of infighting. The House is almost useless because of infighting. Uh, between the two extremes. Uh, places like the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve are under intense political pressure that they weren't in decades past. So, it's harder for them to function as independent institutions. Um, the great late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington wrote in one of his books that America is great not because of the character of its people, but because of its institutions and the way that they function and interact with each other. That is not the case anymore. So, I think, I think that's why America is in decline. And then you'll say, why? Why is there no center? What's happened? What's happened is two things. One is globalization, where half of the America has been swept up into a globalized world, multilingual, whiskey and wine sipping, uh, European vacation-oriented upper middle class, and the other half has been left behind. Um, you know, just a few um, you know, a few a few tragedies in life away from poverty, um, uh, resenting this global class. So that's one thing. Globalization, rather than unite the world, has split countries down the middle, and it isn't just the United States, it's other places as well. Um, then there's technology. For most of its history, the United States was a great mass democracy in the print and typewriter era. Uh, where journalists were in the center. They wrote long, complex, well-researched, well-fact-checked pieces, and that and, you know, and that had an effect on people in government, on on voters. Um, however, we're now in a digital video social media era, uh, which prizes not centrism, it prizes passion and furiousness. And everyone says, "Oh, you should be passionate." That's wrong and it's dangerous. Passion is the enemy of analysis. Um, and that, and social media with its brevity and its passion is the enemy of democracy. The founding, the founders of the American Constitution would be horrified um of u of social media. Remember those men, Hamilton, Jefferson, uh, Madison, John Jay. Um, they were all they were mainly pessimists who because they were such relentless pessimists, they produced a country of optimists um, uh, because they thought out loud about everything that could possibly go wrong and they avoided it. So that America became a rich, optimistic country, but that era is slowly fading.
There's so many different things I would want to dig into, but one of the ar core arguments you made and that you you make in the book is one that I think it's really interesting because it goes so much against the mainstream where you basically say that the era of politics when you would have two candidates who would be chosen by the party elites in some kind of a not very transparent party deal and then both would have basically quite mainstream opinions and policies. So, whoever gets elected, not that much has changed for some fundamental issues. For I, if you would probably ask a number of Americans or people on the street if that's better than the what you call pure democracy where when elections decide everything, they would probably prefer the the pure democracy. But you're saying that's not the way and actually the the backroom dealing is probably necessary part of the politics to produce the better outcome.
>> James Madison did not want a democracy. He wanted a republic, and he got a republic. And the difference is, in a republic, you have indirect democracy, a partial democracy. And that functioned in the era of what you were referring to, which is called the smoke-filled rooms, when party bosses in an era when everyone smoked cigarettes and cigars, essentially chose the candidates, and then the public got to choose between the candidates of each party. So it was a partial democracy. The smoke, the party bosses would never have chosen Donald Trump in 2016. They would have chosen boring, uninspiring Jeb Bush, who would have governed excellently like his father, not like his brother. Um, and the country would have rolled along. But at, but with the end of um, with the end of the smoke-filled rooms and the party bosses deciding who the voters could choose, we got a pure democracy. Um, and that's what's led not just to Donald Trump, but to a lot of other characters. You, you know, flaky characters, and, you know, Trump is not flaky. He's different, but there's a lot of flaky characters in both the Democratic and Republican parties who would never have been allowed to become senators or congressmen in previous eras.
>> Well, to maybe play the devil's advocate on on this issue, because I I understand it and I think it there it makes sense. But you could also argue that the elites in the party backroom deals also picked, for example, Joe Biden to run for the second time in 2024, which objectively probably was not a very good choice. And even before that, in the past 20 years, there were many candidates, mainstream candidates, maybe you could say George W. Bush, um, who were just not that good either. So, what's your view on that?
>> No, that's a good argument. I mean, nothing is pure, nothing is 100% perfect, but remember, you know, Biden, you know, had Biden, you know, kept his promise to be a one-term transitional president, we would be having a different discussion now. Um, so um, sort of. And and there's something interesting that people miss that I put in the book Wasteland about George W. Bush, which is Bush was chosen to be the candidate in 2000, you know, 1999, 2000. The Cold War was over and 9/11 still had not happened, and neither did the rise of the Chinese military, especially its navy. So the, so George W. Bush was chosen in an era when people mistakenly thought that there was nothing dangerous at stake. Kind of it was like, you know, had the Cold War still been going on or had 9/11 already happened, the party bosses probably would have said to Father Bush, George H.W. Bush, "Your son has a lot of uh potential, but he's not quite there yet."
>> Yeah. I I think that another point to get back to what you were saying before um about how the world is less stable because the US doesn't control it the way it used to, which actually made it more stable, with which I fully agree. I would be very happy if if the US was still running things in the world. I'm sad that it's not. But um, many people in the current administration would probably argue that that era of the US managing the world just wasn't sustainable long term and that it was probably too overstretched and it couldn't afford to be the world policeman anymore.
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