Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

By

Robert D. Kaplan

 

M. P. Ross 02-05-25

“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!”

The Emcee invites us to the Cabaret

“…Marie,

Marie, hold on tight…

…In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

At the threshold of “The Waste Land”

“Grishkin is nice: Her Russian eye

Is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss…

…The sleek Brazilian jaguar

Does not in its arboreal gloom

Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing-room.”

In the “Waste Land”, only “Whispers of Immortality”

 

World War I came as a surprise.  What arrived was a much larger package than ordered.  A family conflict that blew up beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.  Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to improve Germany’s position in the world vis-à-vis the states ruled by his cousins—George V and Nicholas II—and their friends, which is to say the rest of Europe.  The relatively modest plan, to push the limits of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the mere continuation of politics with other means, using a military show of force as a grand gesture of diplomacy intended to bring France and the others to the treaty table, and formally make room for a more a more properly prominent role for Germany, somehow got away from them.  All of them.  The entire continent and beyond became a battlefield, with forces from around the globe taking part and suffering the consequences.

During the one hundred years of relative calm since the Napoleonic Wars, the world had changed a great deal.  There was no unified German state before 1871.  Technology had made leaps into the future with the increasingly common use of automobiles and airplanes.  Dreadnaught battleships dominated both the seas and the land within the range of their massive guns, and submarines controlled the waters below.  Immense railway guns—the medium range missiles of their day, larger yet than their naval counterparts–had a range of up to seventy-five miles.

When the guns had gone silent and the smoke cleared, what lessons were learned?  That the capacity for industrialized slaughter and devastation had surpassed the defenses offered by trenches and barbed wire?  Entire empires were blown apart, gathered up piecemeal, and redistributed by the victors.  While there was a sense that things had gone too far, that more effective boundaries were desirable, perhaps creating a League of Nations, we know how well that worked out.

Enough with the long faces!  Pop goes the Champagne cork!  “Come to the Cabaret!”  The world exploded in a new way.  We got the Roaring 20s and the Jazz age.  Air travel joined luxury steamships and transcontinental railways, and individuals took to the roads in their own automobiles.  Those who stayed at home were joined to others far away by radio, bringing news, music, and other entertainment.

Since the first migrations out of Africa, the world became an increasingly smaller place, resources scarcer, with less space between people.  All relatively speaking, of course, and not advancing in a straight line, but this has been the general trend over the course of history.  Change, even for the good, requires adjustments.  It’s hard to get things right the first time around.  Displacement—socially and economically, technologically and geographically—breeds alienation.  And the stage is set for a new round catastrophes.

The brief, intermittent if bright, light of the Weimar Republic shown from 1918 until 1933, when the party that sustained a little life steadily gave way as the Nazi Party took power.  The democratic, constitutional republic was weak.  The conditions for establishing and sustaining a modern liberal state were not sufficiently robust during post World War I Germany.  This was a time of political assassinations and attempted coups—like the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, for which Hitler was sent to prison for his involvement.  Forward to 1933, Hitler is appointed chancellor.  Convicted of treason, sent to prison, with a brief turn as chief executive of the state soon seizing power as a totalitarian dictator.  Who could imagine such a thing?

 

Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, Robert D. Kaplan’s latest book, frames its case through concepts familiar to readers of Kaplan, adding a new perspective, T.S. Elliot’s poem, “The Waste Land”, from which it takes its title, and the example of the Weimar Republic.  Thinking tragically to avoid tragedy is its most consistent through-line.  “The Waste Land” expresses alienation amidst material progress.  Weimar is an avatar of not just that specific time and place, but ongoing global risk of complacency in conditions of excess, when progress seems the inevitable trend and the promise of a liberal democracy at hand, only to be overcome by the dystopian nightmare of totalitarianism lying in wait.  Sadly, the reality is far worse than this dismal depiction.

The book’s scope of material strains at the bounds of a post-Weimar “Waste Land” frame of reference, however.  All Kaplan books benefit from his experience and scholarship.  There is no disputing examples of fact.  Though one might take issue with an observation or opinion, on the whole his work is consistently sound.  Waste Land presents an interesting if challenging read.  The reader, positioned within that Weimar waste land, is sent out on a path through distinct landscapes, connected only broadly yet tenuously.  Provided with that premise, viewed from its perspective, it requires an effort for one to hold that course through such diverse territory as the book traverses.  Does the premise serve the book’s purposes?  It’s a tough sell.

 

We might think of Waste Land as the fourth in a series of Kaplan’s four most recent books.  The series includes Adriatic, The Loom of Time, and The Tragic Mind.  They represent a welcome new beginning for an already remarkable career.  Four books in just over three years for an author about to turn 73.

Adriatic is a bridge between earlier and current Kaplan.  His past and recent travels around the region bordering the Adriatic Sea provide a context for discussions, observations, and analysis.  While an imperfect device, the journey as framework in Adriatic serves to deliver an engaging Kaplan in his element.  Loom is pure, classic Kaplan, tighter thematically and analytically.  The most enjoyable of the four.

The Tragic Mind is a necessary, book length expansion of his principle, one must think tragically to avoid tragedy.  Its necessity is the essential (fundamental, crucial, pick your adjective) concept expressed in the principle and the serial failure of even our best thinkers to heed it.  It is another, more specific, way of stating an adjunct of The Folly of the Pure Model, “What am I missing?  Because surely I am omitting something, and likely something critical.”

Viewing video of Kaplan and listening to him gives the impression that he is rather humorless. He appears, as he admits in Waste Land, “obsessively negative.”  Reading these four books, in which Kaplan offers a frank reassessment of himself, his career, and his influence, it is clear that he comes by his serious demeanor honestly.  He earned it, at great personal cost.  The weight of his experiences would wear down any person with normal emotions; to not be similarly affected would be a sign of suspect humanity.

In Adriatic, he confesses the want of a PhD depth of subject knowledge.  Yet, his work benefits from his scope of experience.  (And, not bearing the scars of adhering to the academic style required for a dissertation, his writing has been consistently enjoyable as literature.)  This is a minor issue.  Of greater impact was his depiction of the states of the former Yugoslavia, and how, as read in the Clinton administration’s policy circle, it led to delayed U.S. involvement in the Balkan wars.  Of even greater impact, on Kaplan personally, was his initial support for the Iraq War.  His experiences inside Saddam’s Iraq—and other totalitarian dictatorships—led him to conclude that if something could be done to rescue that society from Saddam, it should be.  Here is where the principle on tragic thinking comes home.  Good intentions do not necessarily result in positive outcomes; things could be made far worse, and demonstrably were.  In Tragic Kaplan quotes the medieval Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, “one year of anarchy is worse than one hundred years of tyranny.”  This is also where The Folly of the Pure Model applies.  There was no question of Saddam Hussein being a desirable ruler.  He wasn’t.  The models applied to assessing and remedying the concerns presented by his regime were inadequate, tragic thinking was required, the question “What am I missing?” either not asked or answered.

 

Waste Land needs to be understood as much from the perspective of its subtitle, A World in Permanent Crisis, as from its title.  The Adriatic Sea managed to bind the narrative of the places Kaplan traveled along its littoral, but cohesion in Adriatic was due more to his skill as a writer than strength of that geographical device.  With Waste Land, it is helpful to keep A World in Permanent Crisis bound close to the title.  The idea of Weimar or a western European waste land may comprehend societies from London to Vienna, including perhaps New York and Chicago, but not the environs of Asian despotic Moscow or Beijing.

Analogies can be futile, I know, since no thing is exactly like another…Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain.  While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world.  It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the global crisis.  We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us.  This is the usefulness of Weimar.

On AppliedPoliticalTheory.com theory expressed as a model is examined with the intent of arriving at better analysis and policy.  Properly applied, it is hoped that these models can serve to keep the world’s many crises in check.  What is a model?  Theories, laws, principles, world views, and also analogies.  We can think of these as different angles of approach, perspectives, or modes of analysis, from which to examine observable phenomena.  Each model is like an overlay on a map or chart, highlighting different relative data, or not, and telling us something both by what it reveals and what it doesn’t.

From Kaplan, we get the dictum that one must think tragically to avoid tragedy.  It is a model that focuses on what might have been overlooked.  From it, we can understand Kaplan seeking another model to augment, amplify, and clarify what was learned by applying tragic thinking.  The analogy of Weimar is that model.  Waste land is a product of Weimar.

From that Waste land/Weimar model’s perspective we are asked to consider the examples given in the book to reach the conclusion of a world in permanent crisis.  As suggested earlier, it seemed a tough sell.  A stretch that made the buy-in hard to grasp.  Can the view from this window take in all of Kaplan’s troubled territories?

From Weimar the book travels east to Russia, a one country tumble of dominoes.  As much as revolutions appeal to a sense of romance, heroic adventure opening up to a glorious new sunrise, history offers a much grimmer reality.  Civil war concludes with a Bolshevik government, Lenin, and worse, Joseph Stalin.  When the Soviet state finally collapses in on itself, early optimism yields to opportunism.  Western elites cheered: “That’s the ballgame!  Democracy and free markets are on the way, let’s join in and give the Russians a hand.”  Too much too soon.  And we get Putin and a kleptocratic mafia state, which itself is now at risk after territorial grabs in the Caucasus in pursuit of rebuilding the tsarist empire prove more difficult to repeat in Ukraine.

China has fared little better.  After the Maoist nightmare, hope reappears as Deng becomes Chairman.  While not a liberal, Deng made remarkable progress bringing China into the modern world.  But now China is ruled by Xi; Deng must be rolling over in his grave.  All that a state could wish for was being attained through technology and manufacturing, trade, soft power, and modest military expansion.  Internally, China has been an expansionist Han empire for over 2,000 years.  This continues with repression of the Uyghur in Xinjiang exceeding even that inflicted on Tibet.  China’s legitimate international expansion through trade and soft power would be expected from such a populous, technologically advancing state.  What rightfully concerns the West is China’s more aggressive military build-up, territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, and malign cyber attacks.

Thus far, parts I, “Weimar Goes Global”, and II, “The Great Powers in Decline” hold together.  With part III, “Crowds and Chaos”, the premise becomes stretched.  The examples are factual, though too numerous and diverse to easily place all together within the same set of concerns.

It has been noted that geography is shrinking due to technology, which has long been the case, and the continuing trend is population movement from rural to urban.  This is global, and especially evident in Africa.  Within states urban areas grow to megacities, unable to fully accommodate the scale of migration from the countryside, with shanty towns appended to the modern metropolis.  Beyond state borders the ongoing migration from developing to developed states creates a slate of social, political, and economic challenges.  The phenomena of crowds is introduced, as discussed in Canetti’s Crowds and Power.  How are cities to remain viable, the kind of urban environment championed by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities?

These are all real concerns.  We do not have to wonder what will happen.  They all have already happened–throughout history, in various manifestations.  They are not trivial, though however much calamity they bring, the world is still turning and life on earth continues.  But, bringing in Malthus and Spengler to bolster the case tends to have the opposite effect.  Likewise, some of Kaplan’s statements that lament modern societies’ changes for the worse.  His remarks on “monarchy, with its inherent legitimacy,” and modern art and architecture are surprising for someone with his deep understanding of history.  Democracy has been suspect for as long as it has been a recognized form of government.  It seems evident that “human nature will not improve,” and “[t]he direction of history is unknowable.”  However, while that sentence contains two whole truths, they are not complete truths, and their relevance depends on reading them at the appropriate level of abstraction.  People may change over time, as individuals and in groups as large as an empire, and over the course of a single person’s life or a historic epoch.  Viewed from a higher level of abstraction, history is linear and all encompassing.  At a greater degree of specificity, it’s all over the place in scope and scale.

Doom is the word that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the Weimar Republic.  Weimar is the candy-coated horror tale: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism…a period replete with so much social and cultural experimentation…[yet which led to] Hitler.

Not every society is at risk of becoming a Weimar.  Then again, can we be certain?  Think tragically to avoid tragedy.  Manage for the consequences, not the likelihood.  The world is undeniably a dangerous place.  It always has been.  But all manner of dangerous things are done safely, with care.  We might take note of what Whymper wrote after the Matterhorn tragedy:

Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end.