Robert Kaplan, the author of "Waste Land" and a three-decade correspondent for The Atlantic, has declared that the West is producing an entire generation of "forgettable, really forgettable figures" - and the cause is not weak character but a fundamental shift in the media ecosystem that shapes political leadership.
As "Hvylya" reports, Kaplan laid out his argument in an interview with Ryan Murdock. The contrast, he said, is stark: the Cold War generation of presidents - from Truman to George H.W. Bush - operated in a print and typewriter world that rewarded analysis and depth. The post-Cold War generation, from Clinton to Trump, emerged in a media landscape that rewards passion over substance.
"Politicians have to react to the media - that is the ecosystem in which they operate," Kaplan said. "And if the media becomes more superficial because of a change in technology, the quality of leadership is going to go down too." The result: "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?" This leadership deficit was on full display at the Munich Security Conference, where European leaders struggled to articulate a coherent response to a world in "a state of disruption."
Kaplan drew an analogy with television itself. Early TV stars were brilliant because they had been scouted from the print world - Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid. Once people who grew up in television became its stars, "they were of a much lower category." The same dynamic, he argued, now governs politics.
He made one pointed exception. Benjamin Netanyahu, whatever people think of him, "is not one of these forgettable figures" - biographies will be written about him for decades. The same goes for Putin and Xi. But in the democratic West, the technology-driven transformation of media has produced leaders who are, in Kaplan's blunt assessment, historically irrelevant even while still in office. As Mario Draghi recently warned, unless Europe overcomes its "old divisions," it will remain subordinated to the priorities of others - a problem that forgettable leaders are unlikely to solve.