Waste Land
Robert D Kaplan, Hurst £20

THIS account of “A World in Permanent Crisis” — the subtitle of Robert D Kaplan’s latest, self-admittedly “obsessively negative” forecast for humankind — is anything but a reassuring read. He exudes an impressive, almost overweening confidence in his political analysis of where we stand and where we are going.  

Kaplan has long been on the fringe of US governments. His advice and influence with Presidents Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama and Biden, owing to a long career as a widely travelled war correspondent and political commentator, were eloquent, well-read and able to support any line of argument with ready references. He is particularly interested in the influence of geopolitics on international relations. Consequently, he has held military and defence consultancies and he is a prominent member of several influential right-wing think tanks.

Despite this introduction, and even if you share an instinctive suspicion of all gurus, don’t be put off. Undeniably our world is in a state of crisis and, however much one may take issue with Kaplan’s views on how and why we have reached this state, they provide fascinating and, at times, provocative forebodings.

The first of the three complementary essays examines the state of the world, today facing unrealised dangers similar in key aspects to those of the short-lived interwar Weimar Republic, a period “packed with nasty racial and religious tensions, to say nothing of inflation and depression, all leading to … Hitler.”

Kaplan believes our super-technological communications systems now mask a comparable vulnerability where, in our shrunken world, we are constantly being overwhelmed by the next international crisis and likely to be plagued by new “revolutionary chieftains.”

He is a great believer in established order, maintaining that without order there can be no freedom and, although “the 2017 to ’21 presidency of Donald Trump tested those institutions … they nevertheless held firm.” Here history has played a joke on Kaplan as his book was written before Trump’s electoral second coming.

When Kaplan turns to the contemporary situation, we can clearly see where he is coming from. His take on Ukraine sees that Vladimir Putin’s “World War II-style invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the combination of a process in which the United States, Nato and especially Germany kept trying to integrate Putin into established order and over time signally failed to do so.” He ignores Putin’s rejected attempts to obtain an agreement to stop Nato’s further advance towards Russia’s borders.  

The second part of Wasteland, “The Great Powers in Decline,” explains why Kaplan believes Russia, China and the US are all, to varying degrees, waning forces in the emerging new world order. 

“In the first quarter of the 21st century, two of the three great powers, the United States and Russia, initiated truly unnecessary and disastrous wars of choice: the United States in Iraq and Russia in Ukraine … [while] China’s leader Xi Jinping’s obsession with absorbing or even conquering Taiwan might indicate that … China, too, face over the long term what I call Shakespearean decline.” By “Shakespearean” he refers to the “inner demons that drive all powerful leaders to a certain degree of madness.”

Kaplan claims that Putin’s Russian dictatorship, critically weakened by the Ukraine debacle, will disintegrate once Putin goes, whereas the more resilient “Leninist” Chinese autocracy has a built-in mechanism for replacing a leader when he goes. The US's decline, on the other hand, has been “more subtle and qualitative.” Again, Trump trips up Kaplan’s self-assurance when he claims that “democracies can be undynamic, late to the party and weaken decision-making, but in their consultative ways they’ve generally less of a capacity for outright blunders than authoritarians do.”

What vitiates Kaplan’s analysis, weaving together the various strands of political tension today, is its rooting in conventional Western capitalist ideological dogma. Ironically, he claims, the world just looks different depending on where you sit.

In the third section of the book, “Crowds and Chaos,” he describes the physical and cultural changes in the modern world due to the enormous rise in populations and the ever-accelerating development in technology. He admits the increasing gulf between rich and poor noting from his New York vantage point: “While the wealthy gentry shop at artist artisanal cheese shops and frequent trendy restaurants, one in four Brooklynites receive fruit stamps.”

There are not many food stamps available in other parts of the world Robert!

Essentially, Robert Kaplan is an old-fashioned conservative who sees himself as a modern Oswald Spengler (the pessimistic German political philosopher, whom he quotes extensively) imperiously analysing and prophesying a new “Decline of the West.”