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by Robert Kaplan
Random House
Copyright © 2001 All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0375505636
Chapter I
There Is No "Modern" World
The evils of the twentieth century arose from populist movements
that were monstrously exploited in the name of utopian ideals, and
had their power amplified by new technologies. The Nazi party began
as a crusade for workers' rights organized by a Munich locksmith,
Anton Drexler, in 1919, before Hitler took it over the following
year. The Bolsheviks also emerged amid emancipating political upheaval
and, like the Nazis, exploited the dream of social renewal. Once
the Nazis and Bolsheviks were in power, the inventions of the Industrial
Age became crucial to their crimes. As for Mao Zedong, his push
for labor-intensive industrialization, through the establishment
of utopian communes, led to the deaths of at least 20 million Chinese
during the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962.
The twentieth century may be a poor guide to the twenty-first,
but only fools would discount it, particularly because populist
movements now permeate the world, provoking disorder and demanding
political and economic transformation. Asia is a specific cause
for concern. India, Pakistan, China, and other emerging powers pulse
with new technologies, nationalistic zeal, and disintegrative forces
within. Recall the words of Alexander Hamilton:
To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent,
unconnected sovereignties situated in the same neighborhood would
be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at
defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
Thus, the evils of the twenty-first century may also arise from
populist movements, taking advantage of democratization, motivated
this time by religious and sectarian beliefs, and empowered by a
post-Industrial Revolution: particularly information technology.
Hindu extremists who burned down mosques in India in the early 1990s
and attacked Christians in the late 1990s belong to a working-class
movement within India's democracy that uses videocassettes and the
Internet to spread its message. Similar phenomena have occurred
in Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Algeria, Mexico, Fiji, Egypt, Pakistan,
the West Bank, and Arab Nazareth, to name but a few places where
religious and ethnic groups, predominantly working-class and inspired
by democratization, use modern communications technology to stir
unrest.
Populist rage is fueled by social and economic tensions, aggravated
often by population growth and resource scarcity in an increasingly
urbanized planet. In the coming decades, 2 or 3 billion more people
will live in the vast, impoverished cities of the developing world.
Global capitalism will contribute to this peril, smashing traditions
and dynamically spawning new ones. The benefits of capitalism are
not distributed equitably, so the more dynamic the capitalist expansion,
the more unequal the distribution of wealth that usually results.
Thus, two dynamic classes will emerge under globalization-the entrepreneurial
nouveaux riches and, more ominously, the new subproletariat: the
billions of working poor, recently arrived from the countryside,
inhabiting the expanding squatters' settlements that surround big
cities in Africa, Eurasia, and South America.
It is expected that Internet access through computers and cellular
phones will increase from 2.5 percent of the world's population
today to 30 percent by 2010; but of the 70 percent of the world
still not connected by that date, about half will never have made
a phone call.4 Disparities will be enormous, while the terrorism
that arises from such disparities will enjoy unprecedented technological
resources.
The spread of information will not necessarily encourage stability.
Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-fifteenth
century led not only to the Reformation but to the religious wars
that followed it, as the sudden proliferation of texts spurred doctrinal
controversies and awakened long-dormant grievances. The spread of
information in the coming decades will lead not just to new social
compacts, but to new divisions as people discover new and complex
issues over which to disagree.
I focus on the dark side of every development not because the future
will necessarily be bad, but because that is what foreign policy
crises have always been about.
Western policymakers, according to their public statements, believe
that ethnic and religious unrest is caused by political oppression,
even though it is political freedom itself that has often unleashed
the violence that liberal societies abhor. There is nothing more
volatile and more in need of disciplined, enlightened direction
than vast populations of underpaid, underemployed, and badly educated
workers divided by ethnicity and beliefs.
Peacemaking, in particular, will become increasingly difficult.
That is because successful peace talks require the centralization
of power. Only strong rulers can justify the historic about-faces
necessary for peace, often with the help of pliant medias and minimal
opposition. Without the tools of dictatorship, Anwar Sadat of Egypt
and King Hussein of Jordan could not have made peace with Israel.
Democratization is a long and uneven process: it will generate weak
and uncertain rulers before it generates stable organizations. Some
say that only when the Arab world becomes democratic will it make
peace with Israel: not necessarily. Liberalization in places like
Egypt and Syria may unleash extremist forces that, in the near term,
will further destabilize the Middle East.
Western policymakers believe that dictators can be defeated merely
by removing them. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt
writes: "Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the disease
by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were put
to death, freedom would follow of itself." In the 1990s, Western
governments demanded elections throughout the developing world,
often in places with low literacy rates, weak institutions, and
raging ethnic disputes. Dictators were replaced by elected prime
ministers. But because the dictators themselves were manifestations
of bad social and economic development, their removal frequently
permitted the same uncivil practices to continue in democratic clothing;
as for example in Pakistan and Côte d'Ivoire, two large bellwether
states in South Asia and West Africa, where elected leaders stole
vast amounts of money and played one ethnic group against the other,
until by the end of the 1990s the military in both countries staged
coups, which the local populations greeted with demonstrable relief.6
Of course, military rule solved nothing, and the unrest continued.
Even when the West intervenes and takes charge of local administration,
as in Kosovo and Haiti, intractable cultural and historical factors
may preclude stability. On the last day of the twentieth century,
six months after President Bill Clinton and British prime minister
Tony Blair had declared victory in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, the
United Nations administrator there, said that ethnic reconciliation
between Orthodox Christian Serbs and Moslem Albanians remained a
distant goal. "You cannot change the mentality and the heart
of a person after centuries of difficulties, fights, hatred, in
some weeks and months. It is not possible."
It is not only ethnic reconciliation and the triumph of liberal
democracy that should not be taken for granted; neither should the
present system of nation-states. The postcolonial era is only in
the early phases of collapse. The residue of European empires in
Africa and the Asian subcontinent still provides a somewhat stable
division of territories. Only in marginal areas such as Somalia
and Sierra Leone has that system broken down. In the next decade,
it may crumble further in much larger, more populous, and more urbanized
societies-for example Nigeria and Pakistan, where intervention scenarios
will be particularly problematic.
The dramatic growth of cities in recent decades raises the possibility
that in the new century vast metroplexes, with their own adjacent
hinterlands and loyal populations, will overshadow nations in political
importance. The United States is increasingly a conglomeration of
peacefully competing city-states. Eighty-five percent of Arizona's
inhabitants live in the Greater Tucson-Phoenix urban corridor; in
2050 it is estimated that 98 percent will. The Pacific Northwest
is becoming a single urban community located along Interstate 5,
or "I-5 Main Street" as locals call it, from Eugene, Oregon,
to Vancouver, British Columbia, increasingly oblivious of the U.S.-Canada
border.
Overseas, a significant number of emerging city-states-São
Paulo, Bogotá, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, and Kunming in south China-that
are surrounded by weak and anarchic regions, may be controlled by
corporate and military oligarchs: some enlightened, others criminal.
In such high-tech, neomedieval principalities, money may buy elections
and militaries and security services may influence policy, in degrees
far greater and subtler than today.
In the wealthiest parts of the world, where the rule of law exists,
it is not clear if such emerging political entities will need governments
at all: some may survive on nimble executive branches that provide
a few essential services while increasingly robust global institutions
take over other bureaucratic responsibilities.
Cities have always lived beyond Good and Evil, in splendor and
ugliness, creativity and terror, with new ideas and gadgets: places
to be experienced rather than judged. Imagine the multitudes of
wealthy city-states in years hence: happy in their concrete beehives,
subsisting on cinema, television, and the Internet, drifting from
one craze to the next, conditioned to such a degree by the opinions
of others through ever-expanding electronic media that their individuality
becomes imperiled, even as they loudly proclaim otherwise.
Only the Islamic masses have seriously questioned the moral status
of cities in our era. Islamic fundamentalism gives moral and psychological
support to millions of peasants who have migrated into Middle Eastern,
South Asian, and Indonesian cities, where in poor outlying slums
their values are under attack, as water systems and other basic
services break down. Thus, while our elites babble about globalism
as they once did about Marxism, new class struggles arise, tied
to religion and the tensions of Third World urban life.
The twentieth century was the last in history when humankind was
mostly rural.10 The battlefields of the future will be highly complex
urban terrains. If our soldiers cannot fight and kill at close range,
our status as a superpower is in question.
The Industrial Revolution was about scale: vast factory complexes,
skyscrapers, and railway grids concentrating power in the hands
of rulers of large territories: not only responsible rulers such
as Bismarck and Disraeli, but Hitler and Stalin, too, intensifying
their evils. But the post-Industrial Revolution empowers anyone
with a cellular phone and a bag of explosives. America's military
superiority guarantees that such new adversaries will not fight
according to our notions of fairness: they will come at us by surprise,
asymmetrically, at our weakest points, as they often have in the
past.
Asymmetry gives terrorists and cybercriminals their strength, since
such adversaries operate beyond accepted international norms and
value systems on a plane where atrocity is a legitimate form of
war. The enormous size of our democratic institutions makes military
planning and weapons procurement both cumbersome and publicly accountable.
Our future adversaries will be under no such restrictions. Their
operations will be fast and simple, leaving no paper trails and
incurring no public oversight: that will be their advantage. Foolish
dictators like Saddam Hussein who fight conventional wars against
us are historically rare: more likely is a chemical and biological
version of Pearl Harbor.
Biological weapons will become increasingly available to terrorist
groups. Even if such weapons were to remain within the hands of
states, diplomacy may not be enough to neutralize them, since they
are part of an ongoing, unstoppable biotech revolution.
Indeed, the acceleration of technology in genetics, biology, chemistry,
optics, and computer sciences provides immense new vistas for uncontrolled
weaponry.
Consider, too, that we are at the brink of a major new expansion
in space exploration and satellite deployment. By some estimates,
20 percent of the U.S. economy may be devoted to space-related activities
by 2025, with software programmers, engineers, and other highly
skilled workers lured from around the world (particularly from the
Indian subcontinent) to develop and manage these new technologies
for U.S.-based multinationals. The diffusion of such power to private
boardrooms may unleash new evils, yet unnamed: recall that the words
"fascism," "totalitarianism," and "Nazism"
did not acquire common currency until the third and fourth decades
of the last century.
Then again, technology could magnify the power of states themselves-something
else to beware of, given our experience of the last hundred years.
For example, a rogue state could employ new technologies to wage
an undeclared war against the United States, through the strategic
use of terrorists and crime groups, all the while manipulating a
powerful global media to conceal its intentions.
Of course, new technologies will bring a host of beneficial developments,
but that is another reason for our military and civilian leaders
to be cautious. Scientific optimism at the beginning of the twentieth
century left Europeans unprepared for the calamities that would
soon befall them. New devices will provide new opportunities, as
they always have, for human mischief. Unlike a sword or an ax, which
acts as an extension of the human arm, the machine bears no relation
to the body; thus, it breaks forever the emotional link between
a violent act and its perpetrator, greatly expanding the scope of
impersonal viciousness. Consider the assault rifle, a machine that
converts heat energy into kinetic energy. For that is another lesson
of the twentieth century: the link-when we are not vigilant-between
technological acceleration and barbarism.
So far I have mentioned only driving forces: trends that are already
visible (the expansion of populations, cities, capitalism, technology,
income divides, and so on). But there will also be sideswipes: developments
that come at us by surprise, as AIDS did in the 1980s. Natural disasters
like floods and earthquakes, which destabilize fragile political
systems, may be one such sideswipe: the cloning of human beings
who are genetically engineered for military purposes by a rising
power such as China may be another. Then there is global warming,
which could turn out to be both a driving force and a sideswipe,
by precipitating both natural disasters and extremist political
reactions to them.
The very word "modern" suggests a desire to separate
our life and times from the past. "Modern" ideas, politics,
architecture, music, and so on imply not an extension of the past
or even a reaction against it, but a rejection of it. The term "modern"
is a celebration of Progress. Yet the more "modern" we
and our technologies become-the more our lives become mechanized
and abstract-the more our instincts are likely to rebel, and the
more cunning and perverse we are likely to become, however subtly.
Electronic communications, by allowing us to avoid face-to-face
encounters, make cruelty easier to accomplish, as we enter an abstract
realm of pure strategy and deception carrying few psychological
risks. Auschwitz was possible partly because new industrial technology
distanced the German perpetrators from their acts. An executive
at a leading Internet company told me that the most brutal corporate
power plays-in which whole departments are "downsized,"
while each unit is kept ignorant of what the others are undergoing-occur
at firms where electronic communications have replaced face-to-face
dealings.
Meritocracy also fuels aggression, because it creates new opportunities
for millions venting their ambitions-putting them in desperate competition
with each other. We see this plainly in the workplace and in the
highest reaches of business, government, and the media. Therefore,
to expect future relations among states and other political groups
to be more harmonious, or wiser, because of technological advances
seems unrealistic.
In those cultures that fail to compete technologically, many young
males may, like warriors, rape and pillage in almost ritual style,
wearing tribal insignia rather than uniforms, like Serb and Albanian
paramilitaries, Indonesian militiamen, Moslem holy fighters in Kashmir,
Chechen brigands, and Russian soldiers. Of course, places such as
Russia and Serbia may recover politically and economically, and
their young men may become industrious. Such blighted places will
never form a majority of countries, but will remain a periodically
shifting minority-sufficient to create regional instability and
constant crises with which statesmen must deal.
The media cliché "the global village" confers
prestige on the very media which employs it; witness CNN. But statesmen
must grapple with difficult truths, not clichés. Conflict
and community are both inherent in the human condition. While the
postindustrial West seeks to deny the persistence of conflict, Africa,
Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Caucasus, among other places,
demonstrate its survival, as ethnic and religious groups seek to
dominate rivals and create their own dominions by toppling existing
elites.
It takes a shallow grasp of history to believe that solutions exist
to most international problems. Often there are no solutions, only
confusion and unsatisfactory choices.
That is why when General George Marshall-the architect of America's
World War II military victory and the postwar rebuilding of Europe-became
head of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1927, he
discarded the rule book with its emphasis on "solutions,"
and replaced it with "realistic exercises," which trained
officers for "initiative" and "judgment." The
rule book for incoming presidents and secretaries of state must
reflect Marshall's wisdom at Fort Benning. Marshall doubted
whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions
regarding . . . the basic international issues today who has not
at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War
and the Fall of Athens.
Marshall knew ancient history. Likewise, any new rules for leadership
will have to reflect upon it. Ancient history, as I will demonstrate,
is the surest guide to what we are likely to face in the early decades
of the twenty-first century.
This is not an essay about what to think: but about how to think.
I am not writing about specific policy but about policy as an outgrowth
of thinking-not feeling. Seasoned policymakers like Marshall were
not guided by sympathy but by necessity and self-interest. The Marshall
Plan was not a gift to Europe but an effort to contain Soviet expansion;
when necessity and self-interest are properly calculated, history
calls such thinking "heroic."
In the opinion of Marshall, a courtly and aloof officer whom few
dared call by his first name, heroism was the result of cool judgment
reached on the basis of inadequate information: on a real battlefield,
information about the enemy is always incomplete; by the time enough
is known, it is too late to do anything.
Foreign policy crises are like battles. Domestic policy tends to
emerge from statistical studies and drawn-out negotiations between
the executive and legislative branches, but foreign policy frequently
relies on sheer intuition to fathom the often violent, fast-moving
events overseas, complicated by cultural differences. In a world
in which democracy and technology are developing faster than are
the institutions needed to sustain them-even as states themselves
are eroding and being transformed beyond recognition by urbanization
and the information age-foreign policy will be the art, rather than
the science, of permanent crisis management.
As future crises arrive in steep waves, our leaders will realize
that the world is not "modern" or "postmodern,"
but only a continuation of the "ancient": a world that,
despite its technologies, the best Chinese, Greek, and Roman philosophers
might have been able to cope with. So, too, would those like General
Marshall, who manifest the ancient tradition of skepticism and constructive
realism.
But skepticism and realism are categories far too broad to form
a useful guide for statesmen.
After all, both Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain were
realists, calculating possibilities and outcomes based on past experience
and self-interest. Churchill's respect for restoring the European
balance of power in England's favor needs no belaboring. But the
appeasers, too, were pragmatists. German rearmament was, historically
speaking, normal, and in the mid-1930s Hitler could have been seen
as simply another contemptible dictator with whom the West had to
deal, rather than as the self-described maniac of Mein Kampf-especially
since two decades earlier, 8.5 million men had died in a war born
of miscalculation and confusion that produced no demonstrable gain.
Far from it; it produced a disaster. Stalin, on the other hand,
had already proven himself a mass murderer, while Hitler (prior
to the outbreak of World War II at least) had not. For the appeasers,
permitting a rearmed Germany to check Soviet Russia seemed perfectly
reasonable.
Yet that did not stop Churchill from seeking not only to contain
Hitler but, ultimately, to destroy him. It did not stop Churchill
from fearing Germany more than Soviet Russia, even though it had
been Churchill who, as British secretary of war from 1919 to 1921,
led the Western effort to topple the Bolsheviks in the civil war
following the October Revolution. Indeed, Churchill-who sought an
alliance with Stalin against Hitler-had always been more fiercely
anti-Communist than any of the appeasers.
So the question arises: how was Churchill a realist in a way that
Chamberlain was not?
What did Churchill seem to know, in that particular circumstance,
that can guide statesmen in future crises? Answering those questions
is the first step toward confronting the world before us.
Excerpted from Warrior Politics by Robert D. Kaplan Copyright
2001 by Robert
D. Kaplan. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of
Random
House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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