The Coming Anarchy
Robert D. Kaplan’s snapshot of 1994 Geopolitics is an enlightening read
Post-cold war, the general belief was that we had seen the end of history and it would all be a global march towards harmonious neoliberal capitalism from hereon out. Journalist Robert Kaplan wasn’t so sure and pointed to the tragic realism of the past and suggested the present and future would proceed similarly. This 1994 essay collection from a time before internet ubiquity and 9/11 is an interesting time capsule and often shows how accurate his warnings were.
Potential sources of conflict that Kaplan identifies in the titular essay are the steep and continuing population growth in regions like Africa (a hotbed of tribal, religious and racial conflicts) where poverty, denuding resources and topsoil and climate change combine with disastrous results. Illiteracy and poor infrastructure combine to make any nascent democracies collapse under the weight of corruption and inept leadership.
He visits a shanty town in Turkey yet feels relatively safe due to the religious, secularist ideals of the time. They held a moral code without being too zealous against infidels. He is less optimistic about the rest of the Islamic world, nodding towards forthcoming extremism. Again, ecological constraints are key and he highlights the likelihood of water wars as Turkey control Iraq and Syria with their dams.
He saw Turkey’s conflicts with the Kurds as likely to become just as significant as Israel and Palestine. Little unity is to be found in these regions, just more tribal warfare.
Indeed, this year he revisited the essay with an article entitled Anarchy Unbound and he assesses his original contention that the real news story of the time was drought, ecological destruction and population growth in Africa.
He doubles down on that angle and says that the peace treaties, march towards democracy and cold war angst pale into insignificance compared to the need for healthy soil, water and the inevitability of ethnic division.
Africa is now 18 per cent of the world population, it will rise to 26 per cent by 2050, and is projected to be almost 40 per cent by 2100. At the turn of the 21st century, Europe and Africa had roughly the same population. At the end of this century, there could be seven Africans for every European.
Democracy is unable to hold off these natural pressures.
Indeed, the countries of the Sahel region of Africa, which a recent coup in Niger threatens to unravel, are afflicted by the demons of water scarcity and abnormally high temperatures. Women give birth there an average of six times during their lifetimes. Over 40 per cent of Niger’s population lives in extreme poverty, with the result being high levels of forced migration, even as refugees stream over into Niger from conflicts in neighbouring countries.
Pakistan and Egypt are following the African Malthusian forces. All are countries that are full of young men, rampaging in slums as the deserts get drier and less productive.
The second essay asks if democracy was just a moment. This successor to Christianity relies on middle class literacy, low birthrates, the nature of its people, geography and economy. Sudan’s attempt at democracy begot anarchy, Russia was also unsuited to it while China seems to be strengthened by not being democratic; it is a largely homogenous society despite tribal conflicts with local elements such as the Uighurs.
Even Latin America’s attempts have been murky, perhaps only Eastern Europe was primed for democracy. After the shaking off of communism they had still had historical exposure to enlightenment values.
Kaplan vaunts Singapore as a nation that has done well. Strangely the metric he uses at this stage for grading success is GDP, which of course comes with significant ecological costs.
Model democracies like South Africa quickly descended into chaos. The country becoming one of the most dangerous places on Earth, ten private security guards employed for every one police officer. A collapsed state in need of firm authority.
Tragic realists like Thomas Hobbes prized a strong military and state. Security and control over the worst of human instincts. Some kind of hybrid of authoritarianism and democracy seems most realistic.
Corporations abuse their power within democracies but only they are placed to cater to such large and complex societies. No longer localised merchants, they will become a source of power in the future. Another very accurate prediction given our huge populations and consumerist lifestyles.
Meanwhile, life within the functional democracies is far from rewarding. Globalism made one city interchangeable with any other. People are made rootless consumer units and the internet networks would only come to intensify the erosion of community that computers were ushering in.
He opines the emptiness of our modern civilizations and their passive enjoyment for sport and the regional importing of athletes to entertain us. It is akin to the Bread and Circuses of Roman times. Gladiators in the colosseum.
Since neither Tucson nor any other southwestern city with a big state university can find enough talent locally, he pointed out, community self-esteem becomes a matter of which city can find the largest number of talented blacks from far away to represent it.
We have become voyeurs and escapists. Many of us don’t play sports but love watching great athletes with great physical attributes. The fact that basketball and football and baseball have become big corporate business has only increased the popularity of spectator sports. Basketball in particular — so fluid, and with the players in revealing shorts and tank tops — provides the artificial excitement that mass existence “against instinct,” as the philosopher Bertrand Russell labeled our lives, requires.
Democracy might fade in the west as corporations project power and increase their global stranglehold. Liberals still believe government policy can help control corporations while conservatives are for smaller government but turn a blind eye to corporate power.
But isn’t it better that the voters are apathetic rather than fired up and militant? Perhaps this is a a sign of a best case society, posits Kaplan. The signs are poor however for apathetic, unhealthy, depressed democracies such as America. These are marks of a decaying civilization and with a large, complex population it may need to ditch its democratic dreams and create an authoritarian hybrid of its own.
The third essay predicted the future of foreign interventions by the USA. The arrogant belief in holding the truth of progress would prove to be important. Again this could be born out by the shaky grounds for invading Iraq and deposing an authoritarian strong man (Hussein) who held the region together. Similarly the retreat from Afghanistan that immediately saw Tailban rule restored. The Arab Spring revolts were no more successful in this regard, often the rebellions created worse outcomes and a lower quality of life.
The conviction is gaining ground that mass murder, like other deadly diseases, can be prevented by that remedy in which all bourgeois societies, ours above all, deposit their faith, Progress. In this case, progress in global public education: if only Americans spread our values and the international community holds spectacular tribunals of war criminals, then genocide might become a thing of the past. Such an approach is both noble and naive.
All situations are only likely to worsen with climate chaos and the urbanisation around earthquake and flood zones. We can see this reflected in daily news stories.
Kaplan saw that Americans don’t have much stomach for interventions in which Americans die without clearly defined goals of self-interest. So while preserving oil supplies make sense it would be unlikely that any invasions on humanitarian grounds would be welcomed. Any action would be covert and from the secret services to move with out technological climate.
He concludes that:
Alas, protection against evil is surest when man is assumed to be wholly unimprovable. That is a dilemma that liberal internationalism, which subscribes to Progress, has never satisfactorily dealt with. The policy that best incorporates such a bleak view of humanity is “balance of power” — or, more precisely, balance-of-fear-and-intimidation. Because this is neither a new nor an interesting nor an inspiring idea, it is easily relegated when debate focuses on high-minded pursuits like preventing mass murder. But the balance of power is the sine qua non without which warding off genocide becomes impossible.
A hardened and well travelled war correspondent Kaplan feels that no book better exemplifies his experience than Edward Gibbon’s The History of The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. All the same patterns of decadence, tyranny and corruption are on display everywhere, not least in the USA.
Gibbon’s certainty that the tendency toward strife is a natural consequence of the human condition — a natural consequence of the very variety of our racial, cultural, and economic experience, which no belief system, religious or otherwise, can overcome — is reminiscent of James Madison in The Federalist. Madison, too, was convinced that a state or an empire can endure only if it generally limits itself to adjudicating disputes among its peoples, and in so doing becomes an exemplar of patriotic virtue.
Proportional intervention will prove best. Aid for women’s literacy across the world is a prime method that is said to bring down birthrates. This is much more useful than a global call for democracy. Strongmen authoritarian leaders may be best to support when they keep the peace and hold regions together. The pessimistic view is often the most accurate.
In this pragmatic mindset Kaplan gives Henry Kissinger a reappraisal. A fellow tragic realist, he knew that searching out harmony would merely leave the peaceful nations subject to the aggression of the most malevolent renegades. He understood that an orchestrated network of fear is what maintains peace.
Kissinger rejected the disorder posed by revolutions and was willing to take some injustice and imperfection. This is because successful strategists are realists, which sits in opposition to the idealism of the media and such institutions. We should work within the individual limits of different regions instead of creating instability with doomed-to-fail pushes for democracy.
The philosopher John Gray has been heavily influenced by Kaplan’s work and both like to cite literature as a method of assessing the way humans think and behave. Another essay found here is regarding Josef Conrad’s Nostromo. He posits the importance of novels in saying the unsayable. Journalism meanwhile repeats idealist, acceptable talking points. Nostromo is a novel in which the gritty realities of imperfect compromise take place. Especially in the third world, a solid military is required to stave off chaos and you might have to work with criminals to maintain order.
Next the author ponders peace, he believes that only a tyranny can hold together different groups with different beliefs. War is impossible to end and attempts towards that end empower those who are most apt to use violence. There is little sense of history on display, Kaplan warns of the decadence that we display and often comes before violent outbursts of rebellion. We believe we deserve more than corruption and our fallible human leaders but the only alternative to this imperfect state of affairs is tyranny.
Indeed, particularly countries with large numbers of young men need to offer an overflow for the testosterone and rage. The violence will turn in on the society if those men aren’t given an active military to serve in. The illusions fostered within the United Nations offer no universal truths on how to create a peaceful society. Nor is much honesty displayed on the different ways different groups behave:
Rather than a better version of humanity, a world body merely reflects the global elite as it is. Until recently, the U.N. has been, to a significant degree, strongly influenced by a Third World aristocracy, those whose families have acquired wealth and prestige in their own societies through various means, often unmeritocratic, often without having to pay income taxes. To this unmeritocratic elitism, add a northern European element that implicitly trusts bureaucracy — because its own historical experience has been within tight, uniethnic societies where the functionary is “the man next door.”
Kaplan warns us that any global unity in consensus on political correctness would be intensely suffocating. He foresaw a time when bureaucratic language would be used to crush “wrong” behaviour. We could be said to be living through this time of stifling speech put forth by elites in the anglophone world (if not globally). Similarly, with the United Nations and its preaching of a one size fits all drive for democracy.
The consensus between different groups is actually so low as to be meaningless, there is little common ground. More realistic is NATO with its shifting coalitions and honest divisions. This can be a solid way forward as it even leads countries to share their data and reconnaissance. The USA is the ideal central power of the UN in Kaplan’s view because it at least has some values to guide others with and can gain assistance for its goals.
Ultimately, peace has only been part of a cycle and is always broken by further violence. Human ingenuity always trails behind new problems, much to the chagrin of the techno optimists. He sees that we live within similar conditions that birthed the first World War, an extended period of peace after Napoleon. In the mid nineties NATO could be seen to be opening up new divisions and the populous was lost in trivial pursuits such as celebrity and award shows. This lack of wisdom and respect for experience makes us vulnerable during any relative time of peace.
Our leaders alas are forever stuck in short-termism and lack that sense of the tragic that only history teaches. Kaplan paints a concerning picture; ever shallower leaders and an ever shallower culture armed with modern jargon from social sciences but little background in the great philosophy. This lack of any wise people at the wheel makes it likely that a costly miscalculation will occur.
Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 realism has come to pass in many ways. He suggested that only during a period of struggle can we fortify our little slots of existence in a system grown lazy and flaccid. We can then take our place between the soldiers and the barbarians at the gate, restricted by a world of natural limits and ecological health concerns.
The Coming Anarchy makes for a refreshing read when compared to the fantasy idealism found elsewhere in the media. I highly recommend The Coming Anarchy and look forward to checking out the 2023 book The Tragic Mind for his latest musings on world events and possible futures.
