Robert Kaplan is one of America's most influential geopolitical thinkers, the author of 24 books, a three-decade correspondent for The Atlantic, and a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. In his latest book "Waste Land," he draws an unexpected parallel: the modern world is one giant Weimar Republic, where every crisis instantly goes global, institutions decay, and emotion replaces analysis. Speaking with Ryan Murdock, Kaplan explains why all three great powers - the US, Russia, and China - are in decline, why Russia after Putin could repeat Yugoslavia's fate, and how technology has killed not just distance but the quality of Western leadership.
Ryan Murdock: Welcome to Personal Landscapes. I'm Ryan Murdock. The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today's world as a larger version of Germany's Weimar Republic, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. National disasters like pandemics and recessions spread across a digitally interconnected world beset by urbanization, mass migration and great power conflict, causing a crisis in one part of the planet to instantaneously become a crisis in all.
In his latest book, "Waste Land," he uses history, literature, politics and philosophy to draw parallels between today's challenges and those of Germany's interwar period, giving us a bracing glimpse of a dangerous world that we have already entered. How did we get here, and where are we going? That is what we are talking about today.
Robert Kaplan is the author of 24 books on foreign affairs and travel, including "The Revenge of Geography," "The Coming Anarchy," and "Balkan Ghosts." He has reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic for three decades, and he was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the US Navy's Executive Panel. We spoke about the immediacy of every crisis, how faltering institutions enable fanatics and ideologues, and why the roots of our permanent twenty-first century crisis continue to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth. And now, here is my conversation on our world in permanent crisis with Robert Kaplan.
Weimar as metaphor
Ryan Murdock: You use Germany's Weimar Republic as a comparison to the situation we find ourselves in today, and anyone familiar with Berlin is especially aware that Weimar was a period of intense creativity and experimentation, but it was also politically, socially and culturally unstable. So do those two things always go together - is a period of intense creativity always marked by political tensions or racial and religious conflict?
Robert Kaplan: Not totally, but what I think is that periods of political instability stimulate artists. They stimulate thinking. The end of the Cold War, which was very dramatic, stimulated a lot of great ideas - the end of history, the clash of civilizations - because it was a time of change. Nobody knew what was coming next. So I think that artists are stimulated by political instability. I have a book coming out in November on China, and one of the little factoids I have in it is that the very tumultuous, anarchic situation in China in the early twentieth century stimulated tremendous thought and writing and art.
But what I want to make clear in this book is that people have misinterpreted it. They don't read the book - they see a headline and say Kaplan is making a link between Weimar and Donald Trump in the United States. But that is not what I am doing at all. I am using Weimar in a totally different context - how the collapse of distance has made our world like one big Weimar, where there is a crisis everywhere, where we are always in some breathless crisis. And that is what Weimar was like. But this world is not leading to another Hitler. I make that clear in the book.
Globalization: broken promises
Ryan Murdock: This ability of one crisis to cascade to another, and for a small crisis in one part of the globe to affect just about every country and every region of the world - is that an unintended consequence of globalization, or just an outcome of technology?
Robert Kaplan: I think globalization itself is an unintended consequence of much. I remember very vividly the early 1990s, when I was writing books and reporting. And everyone thought globalization was really the end of history. I don't mean it as a pejorative to Fukuyama, who wrote a great book actually. But they really thought that now there is peace on earth, there will not be other wars, everyone is going to get along, we are going to have similar cultures. And globalization was not a security system - it was just a phase we were passing through of a world more united due to American management techniques. Corporate boards had people from all over the world speaking different languages. Borders came down, it was easier to travel. The world was shrunk by technology.
But I think the end result, as I point out in "Waste Land," is that globalization, rather than unite the world, is just splitting countries down the middle. It split the United States, Britain, France, other countries down the middle between the halves that are globalized and the have-nots who have not joined in the whiskey-sipping, wine-tasting, European-vacation-oriented fun.
The tyranny of the present moment
Ryan Murdock: You point out that one of the greatest current challenges in this period is the immediacy of every crisis - not just local crises but global. And when you connect that with our constant obsession with the immediate, with our focus on short-term election cycles in the West, it seems that we are rarely ever ahead of events - like we are increasingly unable to set the agenda, or we are less and less willing to.
Robert Kaplan: Yes, we are afflicted by presentness, is how I would call it, because of the vividness of the media, the vividness of digital communications, of videos. The present moment takes over completely and we lose our sense of the past and we are oblivious to the future. So there is very little historical thinking. The only thing that matters is the present news cycle, in many people's mind. And this hurts analysis, because the whole point of analysis is to see beyond the news cycle, to get a sense of where things are going. And that is less and less the case.
Ryan Murdock: You have got a great quote in the book describing the situation. You say, "whole populations in the grip of some political frenzy or other, tapping feverishly on their smartphones in unison, their approval or disapproval, will increasingly resemble the mores of teenage girls in which the worst fear will be that of ostracism." It is really alarming when you think that this short-termism, this obsession with the present, paired with our increasingly post-literate society and the removal of things like classics from the curriculum because the world that those writers lived in does not match the progressive values of today - that this obsession with the present moment blinds us to the lessons of the past and dooms us to repeat those mistakes, like we lose sight of the inherent tragedy of human existence.
Robert Kaplan: Yes, exactly. We have again this loss of any sense of where we have been. And if you do not know where you have been, you do not know where you are going, and you cannot plan for it. Books never used to be part of the media. A publicity strategy for a book used to have in the 80s and 90s not much to do with the general media or with the current news cycle. Now it is totally dominated by the news cycle. If the book does not fit in with the news cycle, the book does not do well. And so it becomes a crapshoot - an author gets lucky or unlucky. And this occurs with everything. America was a great mass democracy during the print and typewriter age. In a digital video social media era, I am not convinced that the US has a bright future as a mass democracy. It has gone through transitions in the past, but I am not so sure if it will have successful transitions in the future.
The decline of leadership
Ryan Murdock: You wrote in the book that leadership is vital to a great power or empire. It constitutes the Shakespearean element that ultimately eclipses the vast impersonal forces of geopolitical and economic fate. So is this why we are seeing such a dearth of leadership since the end of the Cold War? That we have shifted from this print and typewriter age into a world that rewards emotion?
Robert Kaplan: It is really astounding. If you look at the group of American presidents from Truman to George H.W. Bush - that is the Cold War generation. And then compare that to the post-Cold War generation from Bill Clinton all the way up to the younger Bush to Donald Trump. You see a dramatic decline in the quality of leadership. Yes, there are some exceptions, not every case in that group fits the pattern, but generally the decline is dramatic. And you could say something similar for European countries as well.
So what is doing that - are people just born with weaker characters and become politicians? No, I think politicians have to react to the media. That is the ecosystem in which they operate. And if the media becomes more superficial because of a change in technology, if the media rewards passion rather than analysis because of the switch from a print and typewriter age to digital video, the quality of leadership is going to go down too. And you see this throughout the West. Think of it: in 30 years, is anyone going to remember Keir Starmer's name, or the name of the Spanish prime minister, or Olaf Scholz, or Macron? These are all forgettable figures. This age of technology has thrown up forgettable, really forgettable figures. A lot of people, most people maybe, hate Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, but they will be writing biographies of him in 50 years still, because he is not one of these forgettable figures. And I could also name Putin or Xi or others. But in the West, what we have had due to this social, cultural, technological transition, this new Weimar, is a bunch of forgettable, underperforming leaders.
Ryan Murdock: Or they are memorable for all the wrong reasons. My country elected Justin Trudeau - seriously, one of the least serious of world leaders. But this was a brilliant observation you made about the print and typewriter era, because these earlier politicians were a product of that, and the current batch of leaders are increasingly products of the social media era. So it is not just the media landscape that changes, and the response to the voters, but also the way they think. Like you pointed out that the Cold War leaders, many of them, experienced the Second World War, so they were much more conservative-minded and careful.
Robert Kaplan: And they inhabited a world of narrow choices with great consequences because of the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the West. Even in the media, in the early television age, the United States had great television commentators - Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, others. And why were they so great? Because they had grown up and become well known in the print and typewriter age. They were print and typewriter journalists who got scouted to become the stars of this new media called television. But once you had people who grew up in television become the stars, they were of a much lower category. If you look at the TV commentators now, for the most part - there are exceptions of course - they are of a much lower quality than in the early television age, because the early television age got its stars from the print and typewriter age.
The decay of institutions
Ryan Murdock: Another thing that really stood out for me in the book - you mentioned the steep decline of institutions, and the role that the lack of strong institutions played in places like post-Soviet Russia. And I look back at Canada and at Germany where I recently lived, and I also see a steady breakdown in the sort of behind-the-scenes underpinnings of our civilizations, like basic infrastructure. We cannot seem to get anything done anymore, from building an airport in Berlin that is 10 years overdue to just fixing a bridge. Why?
Robert Kaplan: Yeah, and it has afflicted the US military, because it could take 15 years to design and build a fighter jet, and by the time it is built it is already obsolete or semi-obsolete. And meanwhile there are these new startup powers that can just be producing drones that can take out a US military target of a much bigger and much more expensive vintage.
This all goes back to Ibn Khaldun, as I say in the book. He was a fourteenth-century North African Arab philosopher and historian [Kaplan mistakenly calls him a thirteenth-century thinker - ed.]. When civilizations become mature, they become wealthy, they become bureaucratized, and they become decadent, and then they are replaced by new civilizations - or new tribes in Ibn Khaldun's formulation. We are in a state now of very calcified bureaucratic regimes where it is very hard to get things done, meanwhile startup powers can just build stuff. You even see the difference not only between countries but within states in the United States. For instance, Texas, where I am for the moment, is a much more dynamic place than Massachusetts, where I live, because it is newer. They have to build a new interstate, they do it. They do not do a thousand different environmental impact statements before they can build it. They just start digging it and building it. And that is the case in China, in the Arabian Gulf, where things get done and get built. And that is a threat.
Federalism as a buffer
Ryan Murdock: That is one thing that does give me some hope for the States - that the various states are existing in very different degrees of this sort of collapse, and things seem to shift to the states where opportunities are and where the roadblocks are removed. Texas seems to be the current place that people are fleeing California to go to. Canada does not seem to have that.
Robert Kaplan: California used to be the place where the future was. Now Californians and companies are moving to Texas.
Ryan Murdock: So will this provide a bit of a buffer to a place like the US, where other regions start to pick up the slack?
Robert Kaplan: In a way it does, because the US - remember the name of it - it is the United States. It is plural. You have 50 states, all very different, all in different stages of development, and an experiment in one state that works could be copied by other states. Part of the mix of American dynamism is the fact that you do not just have federal but state power, and you have states with real identities, which often is not the case in many other countries. But generally, I am not so sure the US is going to make this transition, because as I said earlier, the greatness of the mass democracy of the United States was made in one era of technology, and different eras of technology bring out different sides of a country's character.
Fanatics and ideologues
Ryan Murdock: You said that there are large overwhelming forces of geography, culture, and economics, and there are also contingencies based on pivotal personalities, and history blends the two. Most listeners are familiar with pivotal figures like Churchill or Napoleon, but you also pointed out the outsized role of fanatics and ideologues, and how figures like that seem to arise or to succeed when institutions break down.
Robert Kaplan: Yes. Some philosophers have said that the world is becoming more civilized, less violent. One writer even said that the world is becoming more feminized - there is less overt hate. Well, there are two problems with that. One is, as I point out in the book, there will always be individuals who will revolt against the new conformity. Fascism was really a revolt of the bullies. It was glorifying the bully mentality. That is what fascism was originally about. And fascism was led by a few men who went against the grain of where things were developing. So there is the revolutionary chieftain, the individual, like Hitler. And then there is the other thing - that conformity can lead to decadence, to what the early twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset called the mass man: the man who knows his narrow slot of existence, an expert in a narrow range of expertise, but is ignorant of everything else in the world. And those periods can lead to all kinds of instability.
Urbanization and the intensity of geopolitics
Ryan Murdock: So how is urbanization making this worse?
Robert Kaplan: Urbanization is intensifying the present moment. It is intensifying geopolitics. Why are geopolitics so intense when we go from crisis to crisis? Because technology has defeated distance, and so any part of the world can ignite a geopolitical crisis that affects another part of the world as never before. The US Civil War killed about 600,000 people. I think there were several million people killed in the Taiping Rebellion in China at the same time, but nobody knew about it, because there was no technology to connect it. Now everything is known. So that intensifies geopolitics.
Also, we experience geopolitics through the digital video age media - these video clips you see in intense vividness when you go to the homepage of the New York Times. It is not just something we read about, so we react emotionally strongly, and that leads to further instability. And urbanization is an intensification of all of this. Urbanization encourages groupthink because people live close together. It demands more infrastructure, so if things go wrong it is even worse. And social media and urbanization go together - they feed off each other to provide a more intense experience of the present.
Look at the Gaza war and the images coming out on it, and the extreme reactions in the West. You could take a step back and say there have been conflicts with equal bloodshed in the Middle East going back a long time. It did not excite the West as much, or students in the West as much. And what I am saying in this book is that it has something to do with technology.
Narrative over reality
Ryan Murdock: Yeah, and technology also gives the advantage of controlling the narrative. You really see that playing out, because in the Second World War the Nazis launched a war of aggression and cities like Berlin were completely bombed to oblivion, and nobody was saying "stop, the poor Germans." It was seen as a consequence of picking a fight that you did not win. But you are not seeing that now. It is totally skewed.
Robert Kaplan: Everything is a narrative. We really live in a media age. The media is the dominant power, and that is not a good thing, because ultimately the media is not accountable - except for profits, for how many eyeballs it has. In social media you have these influencers with extreme views, really extreme horrific views, who have millions of followers in the United States. You never had that before. Because before, to influence people you had to have an expertise. A written news article had to be fact-checked, it had to be in the political center. All of that is gone now.
Ryan Murdock: We are also seeing the complete dissolution of the barrier between news and op-ed. Neutrality is not a thing anymore. Everything is an opinion.
Robert Kaplan: Everything is an opinion. You can really see it through the evolution of the New York Times. The Times used to have an op-ed page - it always did. And everything that was not on that one op-ed page was an article so balanced that you could not tell how the writer voted. Now you have opinions and what they call analysis - that are really opinions - all over the website.
Ryan Murdock: And you wrote very vividly in the book how the culture of social media sets the agenda at a place like the Times, where social media outrage spirals to the point where they can fire people.
Robert Kaplan: The New York Times is like the greatest business model anyone could invent. Its real audience is not the United States - it is the global elite. It refers to Americans in the third person, so to speak. It is a great business model, almost like an intelligence factory, because it produces these detailed investigative reports on everything from climate to soil in Africa. You go through the Times for a year and it is just amazing what they do. But they have a point of view. And they have evolved into this point of view. The Times has moved gradually to the left.
The Times used to have a great executive editor in the 70s - Abe Rosenthal, A.M. Rosenthal. And he said: "Look, the reporters write from a little bit to the left, and I have my editors edit a little bit to the right, and the result is we get a balanced paper." That world is gone, it is dead. Technology has completely undermined moderation. The center has been abandoned almost, and things are either one side or the other.
Three great powers in decline
Ryan Murdock: You wrote that because every place is strategic, the possibilities of conflict become more numerous than ever. The First World War was the first industrial war, and World War Two was a total war in which civilian cities became legitimate targets. So we should expect this to continue, and that technology will become a natural extension of geopolitics - the integrated network itself becomes another zone of conflict?
Robert Kaplan: Yeah, exactly. And also, this is a key thing that I say in the book: all three great powers are in decline. The United States I believe is in decline - I have alluded to why. Russia is in decline, because the longer the Ukraine war goes on, the weaker Russia becomes in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. And China I think, because of the extremity of its rule - a real Leninist autocracy - is really in the last phase of communism. And what replaces it - remember, communism is just another Chinese dynasty - may be very, very different.
This is another case of where we are so obsessed with the present, with Xi Jinping, we cannot see beyond it. And Xi is in his seventies. Putin is in his seventies. Trump is not going to be around forever. So the world is going to go through a tremendous transition that in many ways is unpredictable in the years to come.
And then there is India, which I do not talk much about in the book. India is obviously the world's primary pivot state. Whichever way India goes affects geopolitics dramatically. But India still to an extent has been living on hype, because it has vast numbers of young men without jobs, and is a lot less stable when you go into the heart of India than you read about in news headlines. It is unclear that India for a long time will have the capacity to project power the way the Chinese do.
China: a black hole
Ryan Murdock: So what do you think will happen in China? Because anybody who has read a bit of Chinese history knows that each time a dynasty comes to an end, there is a period of civil war or total collapse before the next dynasty replaces it. Do you see something like that?
Robert Kaplan: Anything is possible. If Xi is going to be replaced, there is no sign of it at the moment. The signs are that he is filling the bureaucracy with people who think like himself. But nevertheless, as he ages, there will be different tendencies and cliques will come to the fore that could provide a framework for a new and different China to emerge. That is not an odd event - that is a very natural, organic event. That is what should happen, actually.
But China to an extent is a black hole. For instance, just three weeks ago or so, Xi Jinping fired his military chief [General Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission - ed.], and there were all these learned analyses in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, by real experts. And what struck me is that they all disagreed with each other. There was no real consensus. Which to me means they do not know what is going on. We do not know what is going on behind the scenes there.
I suppose the one big difference between China and Russia is that China has strong institutions. That is what I point out in the book. If Xi were to get deathly ill tomorrow, China would not collapse. China has a standing committee, it would elect a leader or a group of leaders, and it would govern. It might change dramatically, it might have some short-term instability. But China would hold together.
You cannot say the same thing about Russia. Russia has always been weakly institutionalized throughout its history. Even the czars had very little control of what went on in the hinterlands. And so if Putin were to get deathly ill tomorrow, it is unclear what or who would replace him. Because he more or less governs through concentric circles of oligarchs and crime figures and intelligence figures. He has committed a great blunder in this war, but nobody could replace him, perhaps because nobody wants his job. When he goes, the system may collapse. You may have, as I point out in the book, a kind of low-calorie version of the former Yugoslavia.
The legacy of communism
Ryan Murdock: You said in the book that though technology has kept evolving, the roots of the permanent crisis in the twenty-first century continue to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth. In what ways is that? Is that because the World Wars wiped out stable institutions like monarchies?
Robert Kaplan: It is the legacy of communism too. Communism existed in Russia - in the Soviet Union, as it was called during the communist decades - for 70 years. That is a long time. And unlike traditional authoritarian right-wing regimes, a very hard left regime affected every aspect of life all the way down the line. And it did tremendous damage to Russian political culture.
Putin, though he is nominally a post-communist, his rule, his style of rule, his absolute aversion to any humanity, is really still the problems of communism going back to 1917. Let me put it this way: had Lenin and Trotsky not been successful in what was then really a coup d'etat in toppling the czar, Nicholas II - had they not been successful and the czars were able to remain on the throne - eventually they would have become constitutional monarchs. And Russia would have been corrupt, a bit unstable, not of the quality of government of Central Western Europe, but you would not have had tens of millions of people murdered. It would not have been that catastrophe.
And the same I could say about Iran. Had the Shah stayed in power in 78-79, he would have liberalized, he would have become more of a constitutional monarch, and Iran today would be like South Korea. Instead, it is a basket case - it has destroyed the middle class, it cannot even provide water or electricity for its people.
History is not governed by reason
Ryan Murdock: You wrote that it is a conceit of the modern world, and particularly of the West, that history is governed by reason. Why do we get that so wrong? Is it because as humans we use stories to make sense of the world?
Robert Kaplan: Yes. Tolstoy had a way of putting it. He said it is impossible to know why events happen because so many billions - he calls it billions, that is the word he uses in "War and Peace" - there are so many billions of factors that go into each great historical event that you have to stand in awe of history, you cannot try to explain it. Like he said, Napoleon had a head cold at the battle of Borodino. Had he not had a head cold, maybe the French would have performed better because his quality of thinking would have been better, and they would not have entered Moscow like they did. He goes along in this train.
And because all you can do is stand in awe of it, what Tolstoy says is that historians work backwards. They provide a cause for each event so it all seems logical at the end, while in the moment of it happening, it was impossible to know which way things would go.
The value of being on the ground
Ryan Murdock: You have talked in the book about the illusion of knowledge among elites, and in particular all those confident pronouncements that the world was on the verge of democracy everywhere. Anyone who has traveled even a little bit knows that is just a pipe dream - that democracy will not come to some of these countries probably ever. And that is something I have always liked about your work, that since I first read you 30 years ago: you are a traveler with firsthand experience of the places that you write about. So how important do you think it is to go on the ground and see these places for yourself and describe what is happening there?
Robert Kaplan: The world is shrinking because of technology, and more and more places are more or less similar - more similar than they were 30 years ago, and 30 years ago more similar than they were 60 or 70 years ago. Now it is almost impossible to go to the most far-reaching places without crowds of tourists. But I still think there is a lot to be said for being on the ground. The hardest thing, the most dangerous thing sometimes a writer can do is to describe what he actually sees in front of his face. Because what he actually sees or experiences in a local place will go against the thoughts of liberals, neoconservatives, what have you. Because they all have this very structured view of how the world works. And the world is too messy for that.
Ryan Murdock: You said it best in the book: the problem with predicting the future is that it usually descends into linear thinking, the mere extension of current trends. And I liked how you quote Paul Theroux from his "Last Train to Zona Verde," where he said: "my feeling has always been that the truth is prophetic and if I write accurately about the present, seeing things as they are, aspects of the future will be suggested."
Robert Kaplan: That is absolutely true. The times when I have gotten the future right was not when I was trying to be a futurologist. It was when I was just reporting on the present in a place that other people ignored. I was doing my job as a reporter in the Balkans in the 1980s - that made me a bit prophetic about the 1990s. And I was doing my job in West Africa in the early 1990s, which made me a bit prophetic about West Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1990s and on. It is not about predicting the future. It is just about being a reporter or a traveler and describing what you see in front of your face.
Fiction as a source of truth
Ryan Murdock: Another thing I really like about your work is that you look to writers who were on the ground at the time, and not just journalists. You said that in the guise of fiction, a writer can more easily tell the truth. So how important is fiction as a source of information for you?
Robert Kaplan: It is very important, because in the guise of fiction, a writer can hide behind his characters. He can say, "Well, I don't believe that, but my character does." And that way a fiction writer can be very politically incorrect and get away with it. And there is another thing - it goes back to Tolstoy. A fiction writer uses his or her imagination. Tolstoy said in "War and Peace" that it is not enough to know something analytically - that there could be a revolt or a revolution or an invasion. You have to be able to vividly imagine it actually happening. And that is what a fiction writer can bring: imagination. He can write without worrying about correct thinking, because he can hide behind his characters and behind the plot.
Ryan Murdock: I think fiction also reveals the underpinnings of a culture - the unspoken assumptions that people do not talk about. You kind of see the water that they are swimming in by reading a fiction writer from a place. You get a sense of how the culture influences thinking.
Robert Kaplan: Yes, exactly. I think one of the most important fiction writers alive today is Amitav Ghosh, who I have always championed, because what he is writing about is migration - that is the world we live in today. And the environment, threats to the environment - that is the world we are living in today.
A world with no exit
Ryan Murdock: I know our time is limited, so I want to wrap up with one last question. You said the earth is vast enough so that no individual political force can really dominate it, so we are forced to wallow in one sort of emergency or another without pause as crises seep and ricochet across the globe. So is this our permanent condition now? And is there any way out of it short of some authoritarian global government?
Robert Kaplan: No, I do not think there is a way out of it. You put your finger on it. Any global government would by very definition have to be authoritarian. Because none of us on this earth agree on basic things. So the idea of a world body is essentially authoritarian.
Ryan Murdock: I guess we are in for interesting times. Thank you for your time tonight, Robert. I have been reading your work for 30 years and have benefited enormously from your insights, and it has been a great pleasure to introduce "Waste Land" to my readers.
Robert Kaplan: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.