I greatly appreciate Robert Kaplan’s inviting me to respond to his new essay, “The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response,” which has already—and deservedly—generated considerable discussion and debate among the global commentariat. A consistent iconoclast and an instinctive systems-level thinker, Kaplan belongs to a dying breed of analysts who compel us to probe the full spectrum of interdependencies in world affairs—between geographic realities, security threats, regional dynamics, and so forth.
The Hobbesian, occasionally dystopian tenor of his new piece recalls his influential essay of nearly a quarter century ago, “The Coming Anarchy,” wherein he foresaw “an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states [would] be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms.” Reflecting on his travels to Sierra Leone, where President Joseph Momoh had been ousted two years earlier, Kaplan saw Western Africa’s troubles as a harbinger for global instability: “worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress[es],” he predicted, would converge to produce an order “in which criminal anarchy [would emerge] as the real ‘strategic’ danger.” In the essay under consideration, Kaplan refers to a “violent and interactive earth”; laments that Eurasia is beset by “non-stop crises and political stagnation and weakness”; and ventures that the evolution of today’s world order could yield “more ethic unrest.”
Although it is not possible here to grapple sufficiently with the full range of concepts he introduces and the judgments he renders, I thought I might offer some preliminary reactions.
Four Points of Agreement
First, Kaplan reminds us to appreciate the enduring relevance of geographic considerations to strategic analysis: like much of his past work, his new essay evinces a formidable command of the chokepoints, features, and pathways that network humanity on land and at sea. To that end, while most conceptualizations of power center on a familiar triad—military, economic, political—he demonstrates that they will prove increasingly deficient if they do not incorporate a fourth dimension: connectivity.
Second, Kaplan’s essay is an important point of departure for analysts and policymakers who are struggling to process the present multiplicity of disorder: witness the confluence of challenges to European cohesion, the ongoing disintegration of the Middle East, and the growing threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs to the Asia-Pacific. Over three quarters of a century after the United Nations was established to spare the world from the devastation of another world war or economic depression, there are over 65 million forcibly displaced persons; meanwhile, some 20 million people in four countries—Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen—are at risk of starvation. As resurgent populism in the United States and across Europe demonstrates, moreover, some of the most potent challenges to the liberal international order originate within its architects: large swathes of their populations fear that the ongoing march of globalization threatens to obviate the geographic, cultural, and religious divides that imbue them with identity. While the recent defeats of Marine Le Pen, Norbert Hofer, and Geert Wilders may offer a temporary reprieve from populism, Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman warns that “[t]he forces that have fed the populist surge in Britain and the U.S.—and nourished populist movements in continental Europe—have not disappeared.”
Third, Kaplan dismisses “the dichotomy between the pessimists who predict anarchy and the optimists who predict greater connectivity” (though he states upfront that “[t]he age of comparative anarchy is upon us”). I recently offered a variant of this judgment, venturing that “one of the emerging features of world affairs is a paradoxical duality: growing disorder coexists with growing gains in human welfare.” While some readers might criticize Kaplan for presenting what he himself concedes to be “a very contradictory picture,” I would argue that that admission enhances the credibility of his analysis. In a nod to Walt Whitman, one might observe that world order contains multitudes: the task of the analyst is to distill the essence of that system as precisely as possible without diminishing the salience of those tensions.
Fourth, Kaplan properly urges the United States to “act with caution and restraint, without drifting into neo-isolationism,” and to “keep [its] limitations in mind.” America’s can-do ethos will increasingly come into conflict with the constraints on its influence—a conflict that will be especially hard to manage in an era when social media and establishment forces demand that the United States do something whenever and wherever a fire erupts. It behooves the country’s policymakers not only to adopt a more focused conception of its national interests, but also to appreciate that they will increasingly need to regard the myriad challenges to those interests as conditions to be managed, not problems to be solved. Kaplan observes: “America can defend its interests modestly defined, but it cannot change the world into a version of itself.” While dropping a 21,600-pound bomb on an Islamic State tunnel complex in Afghanistan or launching 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at an airfield in Syria may reassure U.S. policymakers that they are exercising “leadership,” tactical measures such as these neglect one of the central lessons from America’s recent interventions in the Middle East: no matter how sustained and/or overwhelming, the application of military force is unlikely to achieve desirable results if it is divorced from a clear strategic objective and an equally clear plan for extrication. National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster made this point forcefully in mid-2013, as he reflected on the deteriorating security environments in Afghanistan and Iraq: “Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.”
Four Critiques
As with any synthesis as sweeping as that which Kaplan attempts, however, “The Return of Marco Polo’s World” is analytically problematic in certain respects. First, there is a recurring tension between his globalist and nationalist conclusions. He speculates that “[g]eographical divisions…will be[come] lesser because the differences—and particularly the degree of separation—between regions like Europe and the Middle East, the Middle East and South Asia, and South Asia and East Asia will decline.” Later though, he reminds readers “just how much old-fashioned geography still matters.” He speaks of “an emerging global culture” but also posits an emerging “clash of artificially reconstructed civilizations”—which would suggest that the former phenomenon is not, in fact, materializing. He contends that “the basic unit of our world, the state, is itself in decline,” but observes that “new borders [are] go[ing] up throughout [Europe] to prevent the movement of Muslim refugees from one country to another.”
Second, some of the groupings Kaplan proposes feel contrived. It is difficult to discern, for example, much “semblance of Eurasian unity among China, Russia, and Iran,” outside of their shared opposition to the intrusion of U.S. influence and the influence of Western institutions. Similarly, it seems dubious that “a de-Westernized Europe, Russia, Turkey, and Iran” could develop into a coherent strategic unit that dominates the Eastern Hemisphere: for such a coalition to emerge, they would have to converge upon and move towards a clear alternative to the postwar order. That imperative is especially pronounced in the case of China and Russia: while Kaplan does not explicitly speak of a strategic condominium between the two countries, he does not distinguish sufficiently between the challenges each country poses. As a resurgent power that has benefited immensely to date by integrating itself within the postwar order, China seeks external equilibrium as it attempts to stabilize its economy, consolidate its preeminence within the Asia-Pacific, and nurture a global economic system that is more commensurate with its size and consonant with its norms and arrangements. It has no immediate desire to overturn the postwar order, and it wants to avoid a fundamental deterioration in its relations with the United States. Russia, meanwhile, is a declining power that is struggling simply to maintain its present position within Europe. It increasingly appears to have calculated that it is more likely to maintain relevance in world affairs by destabilizing the present order than by attempting to revive its role within that system.
Third, while Kaplan’s overlay of an integrated Eurasia reflects important elements of the emerging world order—the progression of China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, for example, and the contribution of the refugee crisis in the Middle East to the ascendance of European populism—his framework discounts important differences between the strategic dynamics that animate each of the world’s three principal strategic theaters (Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific). It consequently yields problematic conceptual groupings and strategic prescriptions. If one believes, for example, that “Europe, North Africa, the Near East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent are destined to have less and less meaning as geopolitical concepts,” it is unclear why one would believe in the analytical coherence of even larger geographical units: it seems overly reductionist to contend that “we may now speak of Afro-Eurasia in one breath” or that “the Eurasian supercontinent [is becoming], analytically speaking, one fluid and comprehensible unit.” It is also difficult to conceptualize what it would mean for the United States “to extend the concept of the Asia pivot to encompass the entire navigable rimland of Eurasia,” or to merge its “presence in the Persian Gulf region with that in the South and East China seas.”
Fourth, it is unclear why “empire remains the organizing principle of world affairs.” Kaplan’s focus on past empires and their present remnants produces a discussion of Turkey and Iran that seems disproportionate to their strategic heft: while they are important mid-level powers, it seems incongruous to discuss their imperial legacies in the same breath as those of two global powers, China and Russia (the preface to his essay cites “older, imperial legacies—Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Turkish,” and the body notes “the imperial experiences of Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China). While he rightly critiques “the logic of Cold War area studies around which the U.S. defense and security bureaucracy remains organized,” his essay seems predicated on an attempt to foist concepts of centuries past onto what he variously calls “a new world,” “a new strategic geography,” and “a new medievalism.”
One could argue that there a range of “organizing principles” at work, which the National Intelligence Council recently assembled under three questions:
- How will individuals, groups, and governments renegotiate their expectations of one another to create political order in an era of empowered individuals and rapidly changing economies? To what extent will major state powers, as well as individuals and groups, craft new patterns or architectures of international cooperation and competition? To what extent will governments, groups, and individuals prepare now for multifaceted global issues like climate change and transformative technologies?
Concluding Thoughts
The ambition of Kaplan’s essay virtually ensures that his narrative feels discursive: the reader is treated to meditations on “[t]he slowly vanishing West,” “state legitimacy in Central Asia,” “China’s new Silk Road,” “[t]he city-states of the Persian Gulf and Singapore,” and Bulgaria’s reputation as “a compromised country whose political integrity nobody trusts,” to name but a few topics. Nonetheless, his analysis is one of the most creative, thought-provoking efforts in recent memory to characterize the present flux in world affairs.
It is not immediately apparent who the winners would be in Kaplan’s envisioned world order. While the United States “will remain the most potent individual power,” that status “will mean less and less as powers on the same [Eurasian] supercontinent find themselves more closely linked by trade.” China and Russia are “weaken[ing] internally from economic stresses of a profound and structural kind.” Turkey and Iran are “both slowly calcifying under very different types of authoritarian regimes.” “Corporations will be the beneficiaries of this new world, but being (for the most part) unable to provide security, they will ultimately not be in control.” It is safe to assume that the marketplace of geopolitical innovation will grow more vibrant; one only hopes that the attendant competition—between and among countries and nonstate actors—does not reverse the strides that humanity has made in recent decades. Most objective assessments conclude that the world continues to grow healthier, wealthier, and safer. But Kaplan’s essay should serve as an antidote to the presumption—or, at a minimum, the confidence—of “techno-optimists” that current trends will continue. Progress is not guaranteed; it is contingent.
Ali Wyne is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and a new leader with the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs.