Robert Kaplan is one of our nation’s best geopolitical thinkers. He has the remarkable ability to explain contemporary world events by combining classical geopolitical analysis with an understanding of 21st-century technological and scientific advances. Kaplan has traveled the world, witnessed political and military conflicts, and read widely the works of Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and many lesser geopolitical theorists.
But in his recent article in Foreign Policy, which is excerpted from his new book Waste Land, Kaplan uses Mackinder’s 1904 “pivot” paper to support his suggestion that our current global order is reminiscent on a larger scale of the Weimar Republic — Germany’s weak, democratic form of government that preceded Hitler’s rise to power — without noting that Mackinder’s final word on global geopolitics envisioned a multi-polar world of balanced power.
Kaplan claims that China, Russia, the United States, and mid-level and smaller powers are “running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic.” Kaplan writes that “the entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.” Globally, Kaplan explains, “we find ourselves … in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.”
Kaplan proceeds to give a brief history of the Weimar Republic, a federal system that he describes as “less a government than a system of belligerent and far-flung competing parts.” Today’s world reflects Weimar, Kaplan writes, in the sense that “all countries are now connected in ways in which a crisis for one can be a crisis for all.”
Kaplan is quick to point out that he does not foresee the rise of another Hitler, but like Weimar, the world will “wallow in one emergency or another without pause, as crises seep and ricochet across the globe.” That has certainly happened during the Biden administration; it didn’t happen under Trump, despite Kaplan’s obvious distaste for the 45th and 47th president (in the article, he describes Trump as an “institution destroyer”).
Globalization connects the whole world, Kaplan explains, but there is no possibility of “global governance.” But Kaplan does not call for global governance. Instead, he suggests a U.S. foreign policy that is somewhere between isolationism and muscular interventionism — a Trumpian foreign policy. Kaplan is, after all, fundamentally a realist thinker.
Where Kaplan goes astray is in his suggestion that every place in the world matters strategically. “Every river and mountain range becomes strategic,” he writes. “[D]ifferent parts of the globe,” he continues, “now affect each other as intimately as different parts of Germany did in the 1920s and early 1930s.” He then quotes Mackinder’s 1904 pivot paper: “Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will henceforth be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements will be shattered in consequence.”
Presumably, however, Mackinder used the phrase “explosion of social forces” to mean big, world-shattering events, not every event. Yet, Kaplan writes that today “every place will become of critical importance,” and “every place is strategic.” I doubt Mackinder meant that. It is a recipe for the very muscular interventionism that Kaplan rightly decries.
What Kaplan’s article overlooks is Mackinders’ final words on geopolitics set forth in “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1943. The purpose of the article was to update the geopolitical concept first announced in 1904 and expanded upon in his 1919 masterpiece, Democratic Ideals and Reality. He reconfirmed the centrality of Eurasia to global politics and the validity of his “heartland” concept to the world balance of power.
He predicted the geographical contours of what became the NATO alliance. He prophesied the rise of China and India. He did not, however, assert that every place on the globe was strategic or equally important. He foresaw not a Weimar globe, but a “balanced globe of human beings.”
Indeed, Kaplan’s own article belies the notion that every place is strategic. He points out the conflicts that currently plague the world: the Eurasian powers of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, the Middle East crises, and the most important conflict in the western Pacific.
Kaplan, the author of The Tragic Mind, surely knows that America’s power is not unlimited. American resources should only be expended on crises and conflicts in regions that are truly strategic; “explosion[s] of social forces” that can alter the global balance of power against us. Mackinder’s final geopolitical thoughts, not Kaplan’s Weimar analogy, should guide U.S. foreign policy.
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