Robert D. Kaplan is one of America’s most prolific and important writers. Presidents have consulted his books, and as anexpert in geopolitics, he is a member of both the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. Astonishingly, Kaplan publishes a book most years and his latestWaste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis contends that the West’s democratic liberalism is caught in a fatal pincer of conformity and conspiracy.

　　Taking his theme from T. S. Eliot’s long form poem written in the wake of World War I, Kaplan argues that the West is a declining civilization but not on account of pressure from other great powers. China and Russia are also declining powers, so the West’s problem is internal. A gifted civilization, the West has unleashed powerful forces that have boomeranged.

　　“The West has crested …and with it has crested the main invention of the West, the sanctity of the individual and individual thought.” Self-determination is the great legacy of Enlightenment liberalism, but not the only legacy. That legacy also includes utopianism and technology, and these now conspire to subvert liberty. The left, contends Kaplan, demandsa utopian equality that acknowledges no natural hierarchies or differences. Leftist techno-futurists believe technology can level the playing field, and those who oppose their conformist demand will have their lives ruined by media-driven ostracism. The right also makes great use of social media and AI, but, Kaplan proposes, all too often its populism folds into the murk of conspiracy theory, abetting collective paranoia and scapegoating.

　　Democracies are particularly prone to these mob pressures. This is why governance of Western nations is increasingly difficult, he believes. Evidence of the difficulty is the turn to executive rule in the US and in Europe, with emergency powers constantly invoked, even to the point of annulling referenda and election outcomes. Creaking governance and legitimacy crisishave persuaded Kaplan thatWeimar is our fate.

　　A Darkening Security Situation

　　“We are indeed entering a world that will be vast yet claustrophobic, more reachable yet more intractable and complicated, and most important, less and less tempered by the great powers, which will have no solutions for many countries.” Kaplan discerns a broad list of problems in need of solutions. A premise of the book’s argument is that the modern state is disaggregating. Modernity is synonymous with well-defined, competent states, and these are now in short supply. Although the process advances unevenly, the retreat of the Enlightenment state is palpable. “We think about Weimar only in terms of the weakening of American democracy. While we should really think about it in terms of the world.”

　　With the nation-state on itsback foot, Kaplan’s 2022Adriaticobserved the rise again of city-states. He continues this theme here, describing how city-states are “separated from each other by limitless zones of darkness.” In these zones, organized government is scarce and the rule of law is shaky or non-existent, with anarchy prevailing. State power is thus fragile and relations between states are fraught. Kaplan warns that there is no “rules-based system in Europe or anywhere else” but rather “a world of broad, overlapping areas of tension, raw intimidation, and military standoffs.”

　　Adding to the problem,the core of our modern oases is an unreliable middle class who are “ungrateful. They want more and more.” Entitled city-dwellers feel threatened by increasing populations of young men, especially in Africa, whose lives are precarious and are sure to migrate to improve their lot. Kaplan predicts a future where “people everywhere will be on the move.” This raises a strategic problem: “Geography is not disappearing. It is only shrinking. Indeed, the smaller the world becomes because of technology, the more that every place in it becomes important. Every place, every river and mountain range, will be strategic.” In consequence, migration means that militarization is on the rise everywhere, with Kaplan making the interesting point that after WWI, all the major political parties in Germany had private armies that they could call upon in a street fight. “Humankind on planet Earth will constitute an ever-tightening, closed system, divided against itself and armed to the teeth. The comparison with the Weimar Republic, alarming at first, may ultimately prove, once again, quaint.”

　　Eroding Civilizations

　　At the heart of Kaplan’s geopolitics is the belief that “anarchy is a permanent condition of the species” and “human nature being what it is, order must remain the paramount political virtue.” Across millennia, monarchies and empires have a proven record of delivering order, whereas democracies are a few hundred years old and not doing especially well, he contends. Kaplan argues that our Weimar condition requires us to tryto find fresh political forms fostering stability. His preference would be for the relatively benign monarchies that made possible old European Enlightenment liberalism. The record shows, he thinks, that monarchies made for more serious-minded political leadership. This was not accidental, for “the opposite of anarchy is hierarchy, from which order derives.” However, a return to the old forms of liberal civilization is closed. Monarchies were housed in great capitals, but cities now are places of enormous churn and unrest.

　　David Hume recommended that we all flock to cities to enjoy one another’s glamour and conversation, but Kaplan identifies cities as a principal cause of today’s instability. “Postmodern democracies are rooted in the cosmopolitanism of city life.” In the United States, for example, “the themes and ideas of presidential campaigns are increasingly filtered, and given their slants, through elite media establishments in cosmopolitan cities.” Yet it has been a feature of much of Kaplan’s writing to expose “the illusion of knowledge where little actually existed among elites.” Think tanks in America’s leading cities have, Kaplan contends, “exceedingly stove-piped visions of reality.” He is sure that journalism—his own trade—is now more ideological and “trashier” than in the past.

　　Kaplan has raised social media and AI to new players in geopolitics alongside geography and it is not clear on his telling whether Shakespearean agency can escape the pincer.

　　Unfortunately, alternatives to the city do not exist. Urbanization is a global phenomenon, and it has its allure. Peoples and ideas are more stable in the countryside, but “cities are simply where it’s at.” The problem isnot only that elites are less sophisticated than they think, but also that city life is often “intolerant and conditioned by the mood of the multitude.” Kaplan cautions that “the new world geography is more fearsome than the old, and more destabilizing in terms of excitable public opinion. Thus will geopolitics deteriorate.”

　　Once more, technology is a problem. Kaplan proposes an interesting argument: “America was a great and well-functioning mass democracy in the print-and-typewriter age.” Trump, Putin, and Xi all come in for a mauling. All three put “the reality of the ethnic nation above that of the individual.” There is more: “It is uncanny, as if all three great powers have produced leaders with a death wish, each driven by private torments.” This did not happen by accident, however. The Internet and social media, he argues, is responsible for generating “a global platform for performance politics.” This results in “the media increasingly directing governments rather than the other way around.” In consequence, there is a “palpable decline” in leadership quality globally.

　　With agile leadership lacking and the pincer unrelenting, reliance on emergency measures will intensify with the result that legitimacy will further erode and revolutionary conditions come into focus: “My point is that the more conformist postmodern urban civilization forces us to become, the more often we will face revolts from the new-old zealotry of the Right and Left.”

　　Reasons to Hope

　　Kaplan’s is a bleak accounting, and he offers no reasons for hope: “I do realize how obsessively negative I am being.” Of course, he concedes that people live longer and materially better lives. It is also possible that digital technology and AI can contribute to democratic renewal, but stoking fevers and panics is just as likely. He is sure “disequilibria everywhere will intensify.” Kaplan’s grim prognosis has many analytical parts but there are three which may, in fact, point away from his thesis and give grounds for hope in the Western tradition.

　　Kaplan fears the rise of ethnic tribalism, affirming instead that “to be civilized is to judge people as individuals.” Yet, at the same time, he regrets that “the ongoing decay of the West is manifested not only in racial tensions coupled with new barriers to free speech, but in the deterioration of dress codes, the erosion of grammar, the decline in sales of serious books and classical music, and so on.” Kaplan is impressed by Oswald Spengler’s claim that fashion is only a “refinement of the body” and complains that “individualism is being assaulted by fads and trends and viral tweets and videos and such.” To the contrary, Adam Smith argues that the vanities of fashion generate both liberty and prosperity. The fact that social media is so much about putting the best version of the self out there is, for Smith, basic to economic growth. Smith holds this position despite being one of the thinkers most attentive to the problem of the mob. Fashion, he argues, is attended by all manner of absurdities, but it is the accelerant of the division of labor. To his mind, Kaplan’s opposition between city and countryside is too stark. Smith would doubt Kaplan’s observation, since the division of labor depends on a mutuality between urban centers and rural spaces.

　　Eliot’s poetic modernism, comments Kaplan, “saw through the transparencies of the modern world to its message of alienation underneath.” Kaplan is convinced that modernism is eating away at our liberal inheritance: “Modernism signaled indifference to (and independence from) the past. … The very word modern suggests a dismissal of everything that comes before it as primitive in some way or other.” I think Kaplan presents a one-dimensional modernist poetry. For example, Eliot praised as “one of the most distinguished writers of my age” the Anglo-Welsh modernist David Jones, who identified continuities between not only the modern and the medieval but even the neolithic. In his own long poems, Jones sought to place the modern in an ancestral tradition that included the West’s Christianity. The political and civilizational resilience of religion does not appear to be an analytical category for Kaplan yet in the US, and never mind Russia and India, it seems basic.

　　A third analytical point in need of work, it seems to me, is Kaplan’s philosophy of history or theory of causation of world events. Fully on display in his 2023 The Loom of Timeis his conviction that geography gives the longue durée of political history. Kaplan is completely at ease when talking about Mahan’s sea power, Mackinder’s heartland, or Spykman’s rimland. However, he is sure that “history is Shakespearean as well as geopolitical.” Fond of Kissinger’s “revolutionary chieftains” being the “very stuff of history,” he argues that statesmanship “constitutes the Shakespearean element that ultimately eclipses the vast impersonal forces of geopolitical and economic fate.” On the face of it, it seems three likely candidates for “revolutionary chieftains” are Trump, Putin, and Xi. Yet the thrust of Waste Land is that these men are marionettes. We are in a Weimar predicament of weak governance and emergency rule because “we are now completely on our own in a world made intimate by technology, with its tendency to be destabilized by simplistic social-media slogans and fragile financial dominoes.” Kaplan’s contention is that these larger-than-life political personalities are no match for digital politics. Kaplan has raised social media and AI to new players in geopolitics alongside geography and it is not clear on his telling whether Shakespearean agency can escape the pincer.

　　It is the stuffof science fiction to wonder whether we can control the thinking machines. In his current thinking, Kaplan is a Cassandra. Time will tell, but those of us who tend to the Pollyannaish have in Waste Land a lot to ponder about the resilience of our ancestral tradition of liberal humanism.