Henry George: Living with the new world disorder

Robert Kaplan was among the first to see the coming age of state collapse

The end of the Cold War was a time of epoch-defining change that induced a heady sense of limitless possibility. The sense of an old world ending and the birth of a new one produced works of politics and philosophy that we still refer back to when surveying our own time. Along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, there was another book published in the post-Cold War years that bears important lessons for our turbulent geopolitical environment. Robert Kaplan’s 2000 book of essays The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, based on his 1994 essay of the same name, douses the fires of idealism with the cold water of realism.

Far from heralding an ‘end of history’, Kaplan saw the end of the Cold War as signalling the return to history, where “scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.” As Kaplan wrote, “To understand the events of the next fifty years …one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war.”

Influenced by the Realist school of foreign policy epitomised by Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Nienhold Niebuhr and others, Kaplan’s core argument is that while excessive order can result in brutal oppression that suffocates human individuality, anarchy is a worse form of tyranny that makes impossible the fundamental building blocks of life as such.

Kaplan illustrates this through a gritty journalistic portrayal of life in 1990s West Africa, where the lines on the map were irrelevant to the lines of human social groups on the ground. He echoes military theorist Martin Van Crevel, arguing that the state, as a political structure with its monopoly on force and entrenching of political sovereignty, was coming to the end of its 350-year history from its formal creation at Westphalia in 1648. State collapse was the order of the day in that area then and has continued to be so elsewhere in the world since.

It is here that the reader sees Kaplan’s particular talent for twinning the grand sweep of history, geography, and political theory with on-the-ground reportage that ascends from the street to the halls of power, and back again. His work is a study in contrasts, itself an expression of the universal paradox of our human existence revealed in its particulars, of triumph and tragedy, hope and despair, compassion and brutality. This use of specificity to ground high political abstraction means Kaplan’s work is more open to those who wish to deny his more pessimistic view of human nature and moral and material progress.

In 2018 Kaplan himself admitted he did not get everything right, specifically the argument regarding instability in the developing world, embodied by his portrayals of the anarchy and violence of West African countries like Sierra Leone, as he drew “too close a link between dissolution in the developing world and instability in the United States and the West.” His predictions of widescale state collapse, resource scarcity combined with increasing urbanisation leading to increasing ethnic competition and renascent religion turbo-charged by modernising fundamentalism, were all seen as woefully Cassandra-like at the time.

However, looking around us at the world today, maybe the point is not that Kaplan was excessively doom-laden in his diagnosis and predictions, but that he was simply too early and pinned them on a too specific set of circumstances. One cannot say, after the last few years, that there is no link between instability in the United States and the West and dissolution in the rest of the world. The United States is polarised and fragmenting, with an open southern border. Europe faces a demographic winter, economic stagnation, and increasing waves of migration from the Global South as climate change effects most those parts of the world least able to bear it.

Simultaneously, the crusade to democratise the world failed much as Kaplan warned it would, with foreign policy idealism among our elite detached from the consequences that produced barbarism in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. Meanwhile ethnicity and religion still matter to most of the world, and combined with today’s tech poses a threat to civilisational peace. The resulting conflicts see pre-modern warfare fought in a post-modern world made claustrophobic by the very technology hailed as liberator. The latest war in Israel and Gaza embodies this state of affairs. 

Kaplan serves as a guide to those seeking explanations for the grand affairs of geopolitics as the global stage for the acting out of the drama of the human heart. He reminds us that in the coming decades, prudent government and great statesmanship can only be assessed by the security, prosperity, and dignity of those in whose name one governs, whether at home or abroad.

For Kaplan, “avoiding tragedy requires a sense of it”. The danger is that “in an era of extended domestic peace, those who deliver up pleasures are the power brokers. Because pleasure is inseparable from convenience, convenience becomes the vital element in society.” The prevention of anarchy without succumbing to enervating safetyism remains the foundational national interest and primary reason for the state’s existence. The recovery of this duty by our ruling class will be essential to living with our new world disorder. 

Henry George is a freelance writer and researcher based in the UK.