Robert Kaplan
Subject: Why Authoritarianism Beats Anarchy
Bio: Author
Reading: Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis is here
Transcript:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Why Authoritarianism Beats Anarchy.
Our speaker is Robert Kaplan who is the author of a new book entitled, Waste Land. We are going to hear why the world is in permanent instability and that we should expect ongoing conflict in economics, trade, migration, and on the battlefield.
Tell us about how you use fiction to understand history.
Robert Kaplan:
I never took a political science course in college. My learning is travel and literature. The two go together because they are both real experiences. And if you want to understand the 19th century, do not read political science, read the great novels of Tolstoy, George Elliot and Charles Dickens, because that's the way to access what people think and what their assumptions were in that time. Fiction is more relevant and explains more because fiction writers can be completely honest. They can hide behind their characters.
When you see a panel at an international conference, they're worried about what the audience and their fellow panelists will think of them. For a view of the world, I read fiction and particularly the Russians because Russia in the 19th century produced the most penetrating fiction.
Larry Bernstein:
It was a perception at the time that the czars were authoritarian but maybe there was more freedom than we give it credit for?
Robert Kaplan:
Czars were normal authoritarians. They were not infected with 20th century ideology. Had Nicholas II stayed on the throne and Lenin not taken over Russia would have evolved into a messy, fairly corrupt, less developed, normal European constitutional monarchy, like others in Europe, but poorer. A bit more chaotic but not nearly like the monstrosity it became under communism when tens of millions of people were slaughtered.
Larry Bernstein:
You quote Churchill after the World War I negotiations thinking that maybe we'd better off if we had not removed the monarchies in Germany and Austria. Is that that same concept?
Robert Kaplan:
Yes, it's exactly the same concept. Churchill's comment was that had the peace negotiators at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 not removed from the throne, the Hohenzollerns from Germany, the Wittelsbachs from Bavaria and the Habsburgs from Austria, there would've been no Hitler because had these monarchies been allowed to stay as constitutional, not ruling, their simple presence in longevity and tradition would've given politics a seriousness, which the 1920s and early 1930s utterly lacked in those countries because the monarchies have been removed by the Western negotiators. I think monarchy has played a very positive role in history.
Larry Bernstein:
Churchill is at that time a real conservative, a believer in continuation of ruling regimes. He was also a true believer in the Empire. What modernity does is strive to move away from the monarchies and imperialism, and it takes risks to go into the unknown. How do you feel about how you transition away from one regime into something else?
Robert Kaplan:
Churchill was an Edwardian era reactionary, which is exactly what was needed in 1940. Nothing more or less reactionary than that. He saved England and Europe. I consider myself a conservative, but not a MAGA Trump Republican. In my book Waste Land, I make it clear that there's too much credit given to political experimentation and pushing into the unknown, that we're much better off with the old traditional systems that favored moderation because human nature never changes. We will continue to have wars and conflicts into the future.
Larry Bernstein:
United States foreign policy has been in favor of regime change. We wanted regime change in Germany and Japan during the war. And then in more recent times, we wanted regime change in Iraq and Syria.
Robert Kaplan:
In Vietnam, we wanted a democracy, which was impossible for the Vietnamese in the late 1960s. The problem is our arrogance, that our happy history of 250 years as a mass democracy is more important for these other countries than their history. Exporting our system is the equivalent of exporting our history, saying our history is more important for you than your own.
Larry Bernstein:
I co-headed Salomon Brothers Emerging Markets Proprietary Trading Department in the 1990s. My partner at the time was Mark Franklin. Mark was a big believer in the shoe leather approach to the emerging markets. He wanted to walk it, he wanted to meet with everybody and evaluate it. You are a big believer in the shoe leather approach to analyzing other nations and cultures. Tell us about using shoe leather.
Robert Kaplan:
There is nothing more provocative than describing what you see in front of your face. Because you go to these countries and say this is how it is. And it immediately offends everyone in Washington who has a liberal internationalist, neoconservative, or an isolationist belief.
The only people who respect the shoe leather approach have been the realists like George Schultz, James Baker and Henry Kissinger. The Cold War realists who wanted America deeply engaged in the world but were realistic enough to know that countries had their own systems. And as Machiavelli pointed out, you have to work with the material at hand. You cannot just snap your fingers.
Larry Bernstein:
The first book I read by you was The Balkan Ghosts. Walking Eastern Europe with your backpack. That process of combining classic books and memoirs from a previous generation looking at the same places through their eyes and then reflecting on them with what you saw in front of you is how you look at the world.
Robert Kaplan:
That's a fair assessment. I didn't travel around the with political science or economics books or anything theoretical like that.
Larry Bernstein:
The next book that I read of yours was called The Arabist about how the State Department viewed the Arab world. The Iranian takeover of our embassy radically changed the State Department's perspective of the Middle East.
Robert Kaplan:
By taking US diplomats’ hostage, the Iranians made themselves hated in the State Department. They had no friends, no sympathizers in the State Department for a generation. That led partially to the State Department's benign view of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and 1990s. He was an adversary of Iran. The Arabist that I wrote about were a group of people who had grown up in the Middle East, the sons and daughters of missionaries who went to Ivy League colleges, and then spent their lives back in the Middle East. Because there were 28 Arab countries you could be posted to you could spend a whole career just going from one Arab country to another. Their sympathy for the Palestinian cause was bureaucratically natural.
I am working on a book now, which is a sequel called China Whisperers. It is about the old China hands and our modern-day China experts where there are similarities to the Arabists.
Larry Bernstein:
In your new book Waste Land, you focus on your opposition to anarchy, your desire for order, and your willingness to accept authoritarian regimes.
Robert Kaplan:
Yes, that's absolutely true.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about the dangers of anarchy and the desire for order.
Robert Kaplan:
The majority of people who write about anarchy have no personal experience. Anarchy is being held up at a roadblock after the government leaves power and a drunken soldier says, “I like your watch. Why don't you take it off?” That's anarchy when there is nobody in control.
When I was in Iraq in 2005, in Mosul in an army striker brigade. We went house to house interviewing Iraqis, and they said it was better under Saddam than Americans. Saddam was a brutal dictator. You figured out solutions within the system. Now with Iraq, with nobody in control, you can just go out on the street and get murdered. There's no police force. If there is nobody to separate right from wrong to prosecute wrongdoers, be it local thieves or whatever, then good and evil have no meaning because anyone can do anything.
That's the anarchy that I'm writing about. What I learned is that anarchy was worse than tyranny. In many countries of the developing world, it's not about perfecting a democracy, it's about building a stable system that people can go to work without being worried about what's going to happen out on the street.
Larry Bernstein:
Another theme in your books is the role of geography. I read your book on the United States called Empire of the Wilderness, and The Revenge of Geography. I went on vacation to a birthday party in the country of Georgia a year ago.
Robert Kaplan:
I'll be going in June.
Larry Bernstein:
We spent an afternoon at a vineyard on the Georgian border with Chechnya, and there's a big mountain range between Chechnya and Georgia, but it's a world of difference. Geography in that area plays an important role as a protection against potential invasion by foreign forces. Tell us about the historical importance of geography and why more recently your views have started to change as it relates to technological aspects to minimize the role of geography.
Robert Kaplan:
Georgia is in what's called the South or Transcaucus. Chechnya is in the North Caucuses. In Chechnya, Russia rules indirectly. Georgia is an independent country with Russian influence that it's trying to fight off. But the two places are a world of difference. You could go to a wedding in Georgia and feel safe, but you would never travel to Chechnya because it is unsafe and controlled by robber bands. Those mountain ranges that you saw, that's geography.
Taiwan is 98 miles to the east of mainland China. 20 miles is the width of the English Channel that extra 78 miles created a problem of logistics.
The United States is a great country because of its geography. The East Coast has many deep-water natural ports. There are passes through the Appalachians to the fertile flat soil of the prairie, which ground down cultural differences in the 19th century to produce an authentic American character. And by the time they got to the impediment of the Rocky Mountains, the Transcontinental Railroad had been built to carry settlers further west.
The United States comprises the temperate zone of North America, and everyone in Canada lives within a hundred miles of the US border. Canada is just an extension of America's temperate zone climate and geography to the South. We are the temperate zone of the biggest island satellite of Eurasia, which is what is given us power over the last 150 years. We are tied by sea lanes to Eurasia, but we are not subject to the conflicts there because we're protected by the seas.
Poles or Romanians living next door to Russia having been invaded many times, they would not take geography for granted. They were historically the victims of geography.
Technology is making geography less relevant. We have an emerging world system where a crisis in one part of the earth can instantly affect another part of the earth as never before in history. That is what makes the world unstable and in a permanent crisis because technology has tied us all together and this will accelerate.
Larry Bernstein:
There is a sense of negativity in your book Waste Land. I wouldn't call it pessimism so much as realism, that the world will be challenging for the foreseeable future.
Robert Kaplan:
I start the book with an epigram, a quote from Roger Scruton who wrote a book, the Uses of Pessimism and that pessimism has killed less people than optimism. Pessimism is needed in war planning. We worst case scenario. It's what I call constructive pessimism. Whereas if we were purely optimistic, like these panels at Davos, we would be open to catastrophes. So anxious foresight, pessimism is very useful.
Larry Bernstein:
You've mentioned these Davos panels. For the past 30 years, I've tried to attend the World Bank/IMF conferences, and that's our domestic Davos equivalent where two people sit down in front of an audience. The conversations tend to be banal, boring, and not provocative. What is the failure of the Davos panel?
Robert Kaplan:
The Davos panel that's been copied around the world. I first went to Davos in the early 1990s. And at that time they did not allow the media inside and the panels were useful. You had important people saying what was on their minds. They knew they wouldn't be quoted in the press the next day. At some point, Davos let in the media and it was somewhat inevitable. Smartphones are in an audience, it's public. People can tweet anything they want. It's hard to control. I went back to Davos again in 2018, and the panels were just awful. Nobody was saying what was on their mind. They were all playing to the media. The intrusion of the media has destroyed the Davos concept, but I don't see how it could have been prevented because of the evolution of technology.
Larry Bernstein:
I host two-day events in Washington DC around the IMF. I have 30 guys in the room, all friends of mine, so no press. We can ask tough questions and hopefully get honest answers. And it seems to be very effective. Is that the only approach where you can get learning?
Robert Kaplan:
You have basically made an end run around technology because you invite only your friends where everyone is in a circle of trust. If you are holding a meeting where there are 3000 people invited, that's impossible. What Davos is and why people desperately want to get invited to it is not because of the panels. It is because they could get a year's worth of meetings done in a space of a few days in Switzerland because the people they want to meet around the world will be there. So it's all for networking. It has nothing to do with the panels. People say to me, why don't you attend more conferences? And I said, because I can learn more from reading fiction than I can listening to the Davos panel.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to change the topic to the Russian War in Ukraine. Before the US entry into World War 2, the Germans and the Russians were killing each other. Our enemies were killing each other, and we should let them just do that. And in this conflict between Russia and Ukraine, I wonder if that same concept comes into play. Do we want, as a strategic matter, the war to continue to weaken Russian power? Or are we more concerned about general loss of life and a desire to see a peaceful resolution even if it does not make our most opportunistic borders?
Robert Kaplan:
Yes, you are right about how there was a feeling in the early days of World War 2 that led Germany and the Soviet Union to fight it out and they would weaken each other. The difference here is that the war will go on and lead eventually to a precipitous decline of Russia to the point where it becomes a version of the former Yugoslavia.
If Xi Jinping got seriously ill, China would remain stable because the standing committee would elect a new leader. China might change dramatically with Xi's demise, but it would hold together. There wouldn't be anarchy.
Russia is a different story. Russia was always on the verge of anarchy. The real fear for Europe is not a Russian victory in Ukraine, because Russia would not be able to militarily defeat NATO countries like Finland and Poland. I don't believe that.
But a very weakened Russia has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States in 30 minutes. Russia is going to be a serious issue for Europe for many years to come no matter what happens in Ukraine.
Larry Bernstein:
Trump said in his discussions in that famous conversation with Zelensky at the White House that you're willing to risk World War 3, and I'm not.
Robert Kaplan:
What Trump did to Zelensky was unforgivable. James Baker and George H. W. Bush would've been all smiles before the cameras, and then when the journalists left, they would've issued Zelinsky with the utmost politeness, some very tough love, and that would've been a far better outcome than what Trump did.
Larry Bernstein:
To be devil's advocate, Trump wanted to encourage the Europeans to be responsible for Ukraine and to dramatically increase its defense budgets. After that interview with Zelensky, the Germans announced a major new defense spending.
Robert Kaplan:
In 2011 Robert Gates, then the Secretary of Defense to Barack Obama, gave a speech in Brussels where he warned the Europeans that if they did not immediately dramatically raise their defense budgets, there would not be the support in America ultimately to defending them. They simply ignored it because they felt that the Americans had no choice but to defend them. Why should they raise their defense budgets and take money away from social programs and other hard choices? Gates was very prophetic in that speech. And one could argue that Trump's vulgar moves has finally gotten Europe to be serious.
But we'll see what the follow through is. It's easy to make statements. We'll see what the German defense budget is four years from now.
Larry Bernstein:
The Israelis have been successful in Gaza and with Hezbollah. The Syrian regime has fallen. How do you think about whether the Israelis and Americans should go after the Iranians?
Robert Kaplan:
The big question will the collapse of the regime in Iran be brought about by internal disturbances. There was a real threat to the regime two years ago over the wearing of the hijab, and you had vast crowds denouncing the clerics. It ultimately didn't go anywhere, but it was touch and go for the regime. If you had another outburst like that because the context has changed. As you said, Hezbollah has been virtually defeated. Hamas has been virtually defeated. Trump is going after the Houthis. The Iranians have lost their whole proxy network, and they've been bombed directly by the Israelis. If you had an uprising now with the sense of how weak the regime is, you could get a real world historical change. Remember, there are 85 million highly educated, urbanized Persians waiting to join the world. And I can tell you after this regime ends, it will be looked back upon as one of the most incompetent, tragic, oppressive regimes in Iranian history, which destroyed the middle class, destroyed the currency, was so incompetent that even though Iran is rich in natural gas and oil, there are regular electricity blackouts in Tehran.
Larry Bernstein:
When I think about Robert Kaplan conservatism in the context of Iran is that the Americans probably should have been more willing to support the Shah and prevent the Khomeini revolution. But I notice a lack of conservatism as it relates to the political vacuum that'll occur after this regime should fall. Why are you more optimistic about the fall of the current regime, and why is that consistent with your general conservative philosophy?
Robert Kaplan:
If the regime in Iran fell, it would occur because of natural causes. It would be internally driven. Iran is far more developed, far more urbanized than any other place in the Muslim Middle East, outside of Turkey. So you could get a breakup of the country. I believe we're entering into the last days of an era in the Middle East that began with the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about?
Robert Kaplan:
The ability of people to muddle through to deal with permanent crises, one after the other without an absolute catastrophe. And if you take the long view, there are a lot of better days ahead.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Robert for joining us today.
If you missed our previous podcast the topic was Dismantling the Department of Education. Our speaker was Lindsey Burke who is the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Lindsey discussed the implications of firing most of the workers in the Department of Education and she explained how the existing federal programs will be divided among various other government agencies, and what this all means.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Dismantling the Department of Education, here.
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