Robert Kaplan, one of America's foremost geopolitical analysts, has made a sweeping claim in his latest book "Waste Land": all three great powers - the United States, Russia, and China - are in decline. Each, however, is declining for fundamentally different reasons.
As "Hvylya" reports, Kaplan laid out his thesis in a detailed interview with Ryan Murdock, drawing on decades of on-the-ground reporting and his experience on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.
The United States, Kaplan argued, was "a great mass democracy during the print and typewriter age." The shift to digital video and social media has degraded both leadership quality and institutional capacity. He pointed to the dramatic contrast between Cold War presidents - from Truman to George H.W. Bush - and their post-Cold War successors, calling the decline "dramatic."
Russia is weakening because the Ukraine war is eroding its grip on the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East. Putin governs through personal networks rather than institutions, making any succession potentially catastrophic. China, meanwhile, is "really in the last phase of communism" under what Kaplan described as "a real Leninist autocracy." He suggested the current regime is simply another Chinese dynasty - and all dynasties end.
Yet there is a critical difference. China has strong institutions: if Xi fell ill tomorrow, the system would hold. Russia has no such cushion. And the United States faces a challenge that is neither institutional nor personal, but technological - whether its democracy can survive the media environment that now shapes it. As former ECB chief Mario Draghi recently warned, Europe risks being squeezed between a declining US and an assertive China - a dynamic that Kaplan's analysis only makes more alarming.
Kaplan also addressed India, calling it "the world's primary pivot state" but cautioning that it "has been living on hype" - with vast numbers of unemployed young men and less stability beneath the surface than headlines suggest.