Sinister Silliness

Kaplan became a prominent advocate of the Iraq War, not only promoting it in print as a staging post for US influence across the Middle East but also forming part of a secretive political lobby around the Bush administration’s deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. As the 2008 financial crisis gained momentum, Kaplan penned a mournful mea culpa.

Alongside a series of counterfactuals, including lurid imagery of an alternative-history Saddam Hussein reborn in a surge of oil prices as a “new Nasser of the Sunni faithful, from Morocco to Pakistan,” he warned that the United States was losing ground through the “war on terror,” “overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Russians move methodically to recreate their former Soviet near-abroad in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and the Chinese continue to use the years of our Middle East distraction to become, in military parlance, a future peer-competitor.”

This mixture of hysterical fear and amoral imperial calculation still characterizes Kaplan’s thinking today. What has changed is a loss of belief in the prophets of the American Century and a conviction that the “anarchy” has finally arrived with all its horrors.

The sinister conclusions of Kaplan’s latest work, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, are only slightly cushioned by the silliness of some of the prose. “History is Shakespearean as well as geopolitical,” Kaplan muses early, since it is “a matter of contingencies.” Baffling guff like this is littered throughout, giving the impression of an author who has been hothoused in flattery and seldom exposed to challenge.

There are few ideas in this short book, and the author repeats and contradicts them with maddening frequency. We get shallow readings of the usual conservative luminaries: Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, German civilizational botanist Oswald Spengler, economist and misanthrope Thomas Malthus. Eager to seem widely read, Kaplan merely comes across as easily impressed.

Yet Waste Land’s dust jacket sports recommendations that are effusive even by promotional standards, describing Kaplan as a kind of Renaissance man. Featured quotations include Professor John Bew, historian and foreign policy advisor to four successive UK prime ministers (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer).

Also prominent is General David Petraeus, veteran of disasters from Iraq to Afghanistan, who is now enjoying a talking-head career encouraging the Israel Defense Forces’ slaughter in Gaza. Trite though they may be, these arguments are mixing near the top of the Atlantic foreign policy world. Kaplan’s pessimism is in fashion.

A Global Weimar?

The first part of Waste Land is devoted to one of the most popular (and most tedious) historical analogies of our time. The world system as a global Weimar, corresponding to the doomed interwar German republic, is second only to the Munich Conference of 1938 as an idée fixe of moronic pop history.

For Kaplan, the key to understanding the dysfunction of Weimar Germany is the weakness of a cobbled-together, “loose-limbed” constitution that distributed power too widely and too arbitrarily. This is a key similarity with our global society today: “Like Weimar, it is an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules.”

Besides the limited analytical power of the comparison, the historical claim is false. Industrial and statal elites, from big capitalists to Junker landowners and the officer class of the army, did indeed rule the disorder of the Weimar Republic, and a core would continue in place through the Third Reich and on to West Germany.

The real function of the analogy is to blame mass democracy itself for Germany’s collapse into fascism. Kaplan endorses Winston Churchill’s claim, at once laughable and grim, that Germany’s old dynastic families, the Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs, and Habsburgs, should have continued to rule it.

These bloodlines, Kaplan enthuses, were “inherently legitimate” and could have frozen Germany in a more benign form of dictatorship than that which resulted from the political vacuum they left behind. The rotting hand of old autocracy should have extended over vast stretches of Eurasia, with the Romanovs and Ottomans too keeping their undead watch against the perils of modernity. Churchill himself, rather than being tainted by cynicism, was entirely noble in finding his motivation for fighting Adolf Hitler in the cause of defending the British Empire.

Without the imperial necropolis, the horrors of “virulent” nationalism were unleashed. Above all, it seems, the great evil was revisionism against the international status quo. Hitler was a “revolutionary chieftain,” in Henry Kissinger’s phrase: “In both Churchill and Kissinger’s minds, world order may not be altogether fair or compassionate even, but it does constitute the foremost political legitimacy to be had in the secular realm of human affairs.”

From these coldly authoritarian premises, it’s clear that the overworn Weimar and WWII analogies really express neuroses about current threats to US global influence. The harking on “legitimacy” is characteristic: established power is good, Kaplan believes, because it is established. It is the changing of the guard that threatens catastrophe, and democracy that threatens the changing.

Through him, we can see that the obsessive focus on the interwar period represents very different things in elite and popular imagination. In the mind of reactionary Atlanticism, Hitler is only one manifestation of a wider malaise born from forms of political contestation that threaten deference, topple power blocs, and dissolve order.

Samuel Huntington is recruited to this monotonous argument for legitimacy. The US state is powerful because of the strength of its institutions, not its ideals, argued the old sage. But in a feature of the book, Kaplan then leapfrogs this familiar claim to arrive at more radical conclusions.

The Texture of Anarchy

Democracy, he contends, has survived in just parts of the globe for a few hundred years (and not even that long, though one doesn’t want to lend credence to the argument), whereas royal families ruled for thousands of years. Their “moral example” is “aesthetic, emotional and numinous.” It is “mystical even,” in case you hadn’t got the point.

Particularly outside the West, in China, Russia, and the Middle East, it is this sort of transcendent authority that is required. Attempts to foster modernity and freedom in these places are the root cause of their blighted condition.

In pursuit of this antediluvian vision, he returns to the source of the problem, the Russian Revolution: “a master key to the whole experience and consequences of political disorder.” The enemies of order, such as democracy and freedom (expressed as collective will, not individual choice, he stresses), are all to be traced here.

In his description of prerevolutionary Russia, Kaplan slips into incoherence. Using as his guide the idolized figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he describes Tsarist Russia as ramshackle, decadent, and going to pieces. Yet its final collapse was, we are assured, the work of “sheer contingency.” History is a random sequence of events upon which historians foolishly impart judgements and patterns. Solzhenitsyn was wise to forego the discipline, turning instead to historical fiction to create a “treatise on unreason.”

Once again, Kaplan finds an authoritarian personality whose departure explains the whole terrible course of historical events, not only in Russia but across the world of the twentieth century. The prime minister of Tsar Nicholas II from 1906 to 1911, “Pyotr Stolypin, a real force for stability,” could have rescued the whole tottering regime. Unfortunately, he was gunned down on the whim of a revolutionary.

Yet Stolypin, even taken as an individual, expresses so much about the deep structural instability of the Tsarist regime. A reformer whose attempts to evolve class relations in the countryside earned him the ire of the monarchist right, he nonetheless became notorious as a jailer and executioner of thousands in the years following the 1905 Russian Revolution. The hangman’s noose came to be popularly known as “Stolypin’s necktie.” His assassination too was part of what had become a national tradition of targeting state officials, and he had survived prior conspiracies.

As with Weimar Germany, class warfare was clearly at the root of the disintegration of order in Tsarist Russia. Kagan makes sure to heap blame on his usual enemies: proletarian rock-throwers, mutinous soldiers, and youths who desecrate a statue of the great Stolypin all represent “the very texture of anarchy.”

Even florid speechmakers in the Duma, the tightly circumscribed parliamentary body, come in for scolding. You are left with the impression that the Tsarist Empire, land of the noose, Black Hundred pogromists, Siberian exile, and secret policemen was, perhaps, too democratic.

The general pattern of these surveys is a retreat to obscurantism, reverence, and hopelessness. It seems futile to criticize this as bad history, since Kaplan derides history as a discipline. The abandonment of reason, of the mere attempt to comprehend the development of civilization, with all the difficulties and shortcomings these efforts must surely confront, is grim enough.

Yet these sketches belong not to a work of history but to an essay on our own times. Inside Kaplan’s squirming mind, behind the anxieties over declining empires and ungovernable contingency, is a more potent fear of class warfare. In this sense at least, we can credit the author with some insight.

Anything Is Possible

Kaplan’s conviction that contingency rules the world leads him to assert “the fact that literally anything is possible now.” This would seem to threaten the book’s purpose beyond historical and literary vignettes. What is there left to say if events are just exploding from the ether?

Part of the answer is found in the book’s pessimism. It has the spirit of a survivalist handbook at times, with the only message being to expect the worst. “I do realise how obsessively negative I’m being,” he intimates, before justifying his mood on the basis that the human race “has not known a century of peace in its hundreds of thousands of years of existence.” The failures of caveman diplomacy confirm our helpless addiction to war, which is being made inexorably more dangerous by the development of technology.

Debates about the nature of historical forces have traditionally attempted to balance structural determination and contingency. The chaotic and unpredictable nature of our times has reignited a debate about complexity in the social sciences to which Kaplan briefly refers. Adam Tooze’s use of the term “polycrisis” seeks to capture both the plural causes of world chaos and their interaction in a global capitalism of unprecedented scale and sophistication.

Polycrisis may be only a description rather than a theory for the convergence of crisis factors in our times. It prompts endless debates about the relationship between structure and agency, causes and effects, determination and chance.

At least it would be a debate. And it may seem leagues away from Kaplan’s bald assertion of “sheer contingency.” Yet this claim lives happily alongside his apparently incompatible belief in natural and technological determination. In practice, these positions form a unity of opposites: “Anything is possible now because, while technology has developed, human nature hasn’t. . . . ”

Technology, for Kaplan, is a reified force seemingly independent of human relations and agency. In its permanent and uncontrolled ascendancy, it magnifies human atavism in unpredictable, violent ways. We are trapped on the long technological arc to hell: “Nuclear weapons were a culmination of a process that had begun with ancient catapults.” Why not Cain wielding a jawbone over Abel?

There is little sense of a dialectical exchange of species and civilization here. We cannot transform ourselves along with our environment. But we can exalt the evil totem of technology in our baseness.

The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are what happens when human nature combines with the printing press, Trumpism is the diabolical admixture of man and video, and we now face the global proliferation of human vice through what Kaplan insists on calling “cyberspace.”

Primitive Materialism

Not for the first time, a rigid, primitive materialism has complemented the backlash against theories of structure in history. If history is merely a soup of events, with little to move it in one direction or another, trends require an ulterior force. For Kaplan, one is “technology,” crashing like a hammer against the lifeless rivet of human nature.

Another is the horrifying spirit of revolutionary demagogues “who reject rationalism and the Enlightenment and seek to be pure and authentic.” Forces of revolution reside in the characteristic human geographies of modernity. Kaplan endorses the claim of Oswald Spengler that while rural society creates a “folk,” mass urban life produces a “mob.”

Urbanization, when combined with infectious social media, is promoting hysterical cults that poison democratic government in the United States. In coming years, hysterical mobs “will increasingly resemble the mores of teenage girls” in their compulsive, persecuting, and conformist nature. In a bovine aside on George Orwell’s 1984, Kaplan claims that the dystopian novel’s party dictatorship is really governed by the prejudices of the mob. As with the postimperialist evils of Nazism and the laxity of Tsarism, the message is the danger of democracy.

In the countryside of the former Global South, more dangers lurk. The interstices of the globalized world, “in the bush and hinterland away from capital cities,” harbor substate paramilitary violence as a way of life. Africa is a nightmare of postmodern lawlessness and mayhem. We cannot escape the menace, since “at the end of this century, there could be seven Africans for every European.”

Pressed through Kaplan’s conceptual mangle, his Weimar world is “also a Malthusian world,” where global population growth threatens savage resource competition. He heaps praise on Malthus, while opaquely conceding that the dire prediction of civilizational starvation made by the economist at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution have consistently failed to materialize. Never mind — Malthus has been proved correct anyway by modern resource scarcity.

Declining Empires

One of the more useful attitudes in the book is a suspicion of the notion of multipolarity as a unilinear process grounded in relative US decline. Kaplan is closer to important truths when he identifies a more general and chaotic dispersal of power.

All three of the world powers — Russia, China, and the United States — will face serious challenges in the coming period. Power will regionalize as it further globalizes. Borders will become ever more porous and threats more difficult to contain to any corner of the world system.

Russia has proved capable of bursting Western Europe’s complacency, but remains crippled by unwieldy geography and social stagnation, as exemplified in its disorderly invasion of Ukraine. Kaplan can’t slip his old neoconservative animus against US rivals and clings onto an exaggerated belief in Russia’s impending collapse.

Inter alia, Kaplan provides a rare attempt at theoretical justification for “anti-communism without communism.” This bizarre cult, which haunts various wings of the Western intelligentsia, seems connected to the broader WWII obsession, both of which constitute an unrelieved presence in Waste Land.

Westerners were naive to think that the end of the Cold War meant the end of Communism, which “as a morally debased political culture continued unabated under Putin.” In his promotion for the book, Kaplan claimed that “the best way to describe Leninism” was by reference to its purported doctrine: “You have to strike fear into the hearts of the innocent — that way you get total control.”

Having failed to develop a strong middle class before the revolution, Russia lacks the counterculture to exorcise this evil spirit. “Because anarchy is a permanent condition of the species,” Kaplan explains, “Communism and fascism are never actually dead, but only in occultation.”

Thoughts on China are likewise colored by his preoccupation with supposed communist recidivism, especially Xi Jinping’s “pure Maoist principles.” Yet Kaplan is uneasy about the decline of any imperialist force: “The decline of the great powers signals another death knell for the stabilizing virtues of imperialism and the relative political order it brings.”

He is correct to register the retreat of China’s once-dynamic economic model as a source of potential global instability and yearns for the decades of growth under Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Tellingly, it is not just Deng’s economic liberalism that he admires but also his “enlightened and bureaucratically competent” authoritarianism.

Deng was for Kaplan “a Burkean conservative” of sorts, who understood that the centralized power of the Communist Party itself was the guarantor of order. His crackdown on the Tiananmen Square movement thus does little to sully his example as Beijing’s answer to Stolypin.

Russia too faces “anarchy” in the wake of Putin’s rule, if it cannot achieve a more broadly based and collegial mode of strong-arm rule. What the world needs is more leaders like Deng to take a firm hand over strong states. And so, we have returned to Kaplan’s fixation with legitimate rule.

Parties of Order

In the light of such attitudes, it becomes clear what a growing chorus on the Western right find attractive about the Gulf States, praised by Kaplan as “conservative autocracies . . . which stand for the regional status quo.” It hardly needs to be said that Israel is for him a heroic exemplar of the struggle for order, “absolutely united about the need to militarily defend its territory, to defeat Hamas, and to neutralise Iran and its proxies.”

The book acknowledges the slaughter in Gaza, and so there can be little doubt about the nature of the “order” Kaplan wants to see. He even slips into old habits, toying with the idea of an Israeli-American attack on Iran, in advance of the military onslaught that Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump subsequently launched.

In the meantime, Western elites have no idea how to deal with the revolutionary chieftains. Kaplan scorns German rulers Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel for fostering a dependence on Russian energy. But instead of seeing this approach as an integral, strategic dimension of German capitalism, Kaplan presents it as a consequence of fuzzy thinking by a political class whose members don’t understand the intractable viciousness of their Russian counterparts. The doomed German Ostpolitik, an attempt to salve the horrors of past wars, reduced Germany to prey in the jungle.

These arguments encapsulate the new foreign policy realist thinking on the right. Everything that has gone wrong is a consequence of liberal and conservative elites striving vainly to do good. Once again, you wonder how much this reflects Kaplan’s own support for the invasion of Iraq, which certainly did involve perverse illusions in Washington’s capacity for social engineering.

What is badly wanting is any notion of the contradictory nature of development in history. The German model worked until it didn’t, just as the Romanov dynasty survived hundreds of years until it was overthrown. Deng’s ingenious reforms and rapid growth were possible on the basis of the scorned Chinese revolution and would succeed to the point of failure. The same strengths that sustained these projects of class rule in their pomp became lethal impediments later.

But the idea of internal contradiction, in the Marxist vein, requires the existence of structure. If there is only contingency, then paradoxically there is only linearity and determinism. This theoretical living death not only allows for radical pessimism but also justifies mutating strains of imperialism.

Kaplan’s views on the future of international order should dislodge any hope that the trashing of neoconservative and liberal-hawk military utopianism automatically inaugurates a new era of antiwar policy. The Trump administration slogan of “Peace Through Strength” gives us a partial view of the new doctrine, by which the worst of the old-school adventurism will give way to regional authoritarian alliance-building.

This, plus an engorged domestic military capacity in the United States and across its Western allies, constitutes the “strength.” The “peace,” which we can read as the hoped-for authority of the new order, will likely prove illusive, not least as a consequence of growing great power rivalry.

Another ingredient in this postutopian militarism will be a new culturalist fashion, similar to that offered by Huntington in the 1990s. Trump made this explicit in the keynote speech of his Gulf tour: “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits . . . but rather from embracing your national traditions.”

The logic here is that of a global “separate but equal” regime — the end of the instrumentalized and fraudulent empire-universalism of the neoconservatives, to be replaced by a faux respect for civilizational pluralism that hides imperial reordering.

After Utopia

What Waste Land demonstrates is that the anti-utopian turn in establishment thought, rather than representing a correction toward greater pragmatism, is a drift toward obscurantism and mysticism. The realism it preaches is veneration for unaccountable strength. Its critique of liberal democracy terminates at a melancholic yearning for lost legitimist power, while its frank talk of global threats barely conceals paranoia about the rapacious billions of the poor and the spectral power of revolution.

The shallowness of the prose, the sense that behind clichéd observations and glib historical analogies there is no hinterland, completes the alarming impressions of the book. We sometimes imagine, in our frustration at the derangement of state policies, that we might feel some reprieve from the admission of mistakes by their intellectual advocates and defenders. Yet Kaplan’s turn from advocacy of neoconservative war has embittered and closed his mind, not educated it. He has learned the harshest lessons, and now we must be forced to endure them.

The epigram from Roger Scruton that hangs above the essay warns us against hope “untempered by the evidence of history,” which “threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.” It is not the masters of war with their hard minds and ruthless calculation who portend catastrophe, but the ignorant masses who believe that the world can be more than a charnel house and have the impudence to demand it be so.

The decline of representative democracy, economic stagnation across the West, a war of attrition in Europe, and the hell to which the people of Gaza are being subjected have made a joke out of the liberal optimism of the 1990s. But unable to blame his own peers, the magnates, warlords, and rulers of the twenty-first century, Kaplan must blame the mass of the population.

For him, the great revolutions of history, like those that destroyed the European dynastic empires or colonialism, are the malevolent engines of modernity. The fact that they freed so many millions from the worst forms of poverty, ignorance, and humiliation doesn’t count for much. In fact, for Kaplan, every traditional measure of progress, from growing middle classes to rising levels of education and access to conveniences, can only mean storing up ungrateful, destructive mobs.

This is the juvenile misanthropy of people who have failed and so declare the world a failure. What Kaplan provides here is truly a wasteland: a bleak landscape of vanquished hopes (his own, though he constantly projects them onto others), uncontrollable forces of violence, and powerless humanity.

This latter point, the lack of a subject, stands out most starkly. Imperiously rejecting any salvation, he naturally must reprove mass politics and democracy as foolish distractions from the dark truths he preaches. We must confront the reality that Atlantic liberalism is such an intellectually unsophisticated tradition, so thin in analytical resources, that confrontation with its own failures has become spiteful collapse into reckless nihilism.