Robert Kaplan and the New Face of Geopolitics

More than 30 years ago, Robert Kaplan wrote "The Coming Anarchy." More than 30 years later, the face of geopolitics has changed radically, in ways even Kaplan could not have predicted.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the Cold War provoked three texts which “predicted” the future of world order: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” (1993), and Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” (1994).

Of these it is Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s texts that are referenced and invoked today, perhaps because Huntington’s essay – published as a book in 1996 – was a response to Fukuyama’s and the two can be read with each other.

Huntington was primarily countering Fukuyama’s optimism, and he did it with a kind of intellectual vehemence that has made his essay one of the most influential, though perhaps not altogether accurate, post-Cold War texts ever written.

That intellectuals as disparate as Gunadasa Amarasekara, writing in the midst of civil war in Sri Lanka, could find in Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilisations a kernel of truth, shows how universal it had become, though ironically the universality of his ideas lay in his belief in the inevitability of fragmentation, along ethnic and cultural lines, in the post-Cold War setup.

And yet, for all his cynicism, Huntington was nowhere near Kaplan. The Coming Anarchy, first published in The Atlantic Monthly, predicted the emergence of forces in the non-West which neither Fukuyama nor Huntington foresaw, or could foresee.

“At fancy conferences and in the major media of the era,” Kaplan later reflected, “people spoke breezily about how democracy would soon be overtaking the world.” How quaint that world seems to us now. Yet in the 1990s, it took no less than a prophet to predict that.

By the end of the 1990s Kaplan’s article had become, as someone observed, “the most Xeroxed article of the decade.” It gave Kaplan the career boost he needed. Writing decades later, reflecting on the article, he argued that “my aim was to expose the illusion of knowledge where none actually existed among elites.”

No doubt he was taking potshots at both Huntington and Fukuyama, though to be fair, when one considers their claims today, Kaplan’s contentions seem more accurate – even if they do suffer from the same myopia that the Western “elites” he countered has.

Kaplan has since been writing at a prolific pace, travelling all corners of the planet, including to Sri Lanka, where he pondered on Chinese intentions for his book Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and The Future of American Power (2010).

While travelling in Sri Lanka he penned an article to The Atlantic which came under criticism by a number of Sri Lankans, including the anthropologist Michael Roberts. Yet as Roberts himself put it, Kaplan remains “a master of prose”, unputdownable even if one disagrees with what he is saying. His worldview is as Orientalist as one can expect from a Western foreign policy scholar travelling around the Orient – which I suppose explains his support for, and later recantation for, George W. Bush’s forever wars in West Asia.

Yet these are minor blemishes in an otherwise prodigious career. I have been reading Kaplan for a long time, and I find his claims – especially in Monsoon – fascinating, even if those claims are undergirded by a sense of eternal pessimism and cynicism I find irritating at times. But perhaps that cynicism pays, intellectually and financially, for Western scholars of geopolitics, travelling and making pronouncements on the non-West, seem to thrive on it.

Kaplan’s argument about colonialism – that it may not have been fair or just, but that it provided the stability the non-West needed – for instance, is anachronistic – as countless historians will tell you – but it fits in with his worldview, which is that world order is not a pretty thing, that stability is not a pretty thing, but that it is often better than the alternative, chaos and anarchy. In this Kaplan is more Hobbesian than even Kissinger.

In Monsoon, Kaplan constantly implies that geography shapes geopolitics. I am not sure how true this is, but I can’t find a convincing counterargument, except perhaps that geopolitics shapes geography as well, and that these two are protagonists (or antagonists, depending on how you see them) in a cycle that never seems to end.

He also suggests that the two big powers of the non-West – India and China – need new theories to adapt to the new world order, even if at the time – Monsoon was published a year after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka – no one had an idea what that order would look like.

Much has changed since then. By 2010, the unipolar moment had long faded away, and Kaplan had come to terms with it. Today, similarly, the idea of multipolarity that prevailed in the first two decades of the 21st century is also fading away. The US under Donald Trump has shed the reticence which enabled its political elites to claim the moral high ground for decades, if not centuries.

When Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo tells the world’s most powerful head of state that the Chinese have hacked “into our telecom system; they’ve been stealing intellectual property; fentanyl, COVID, I mean, you know, all of this stuff, so how do you negotiate with obviously a bad actor and trust them on economics?” Trump’s response is simple yet profound: “You don’t think we do that to them?”

Five days ago, The Atlantic ran a piece critical of Trump’s response. “The president of the United States,” Tom Nichols writes, “seems to have no interest in appealing to a national sense of pride or honor.”

But this is a fatal misreading of Trump’s statement. That statement underlies the US’s abandonment of principles it never really cared for in the first place. This is the real coming of anarchy, in the Global North: a turning point that neither Fukuyama nor Huntington, nor perhaps even Kaplan, could have foreseen.

For the West, the likes of Trump are a rupture, a fly in the ointment. For the non-West, they represent a challenge and an opportunity. What we in the Global South need now is a radically different geopolitics, suited for us. We need thinkers and theorists who can think and theorise anew. The world has come a long way from the end of history, the clash of civilizations, and the coming anarchy. It now needs something different.