Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Robert Kaplan
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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The acclaimed journalist and author Robert Kaplan remembers when American presidential elections weren’t quite so existential. “I’m 72 years old,” he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “I remember presidential elections where one person won, one person lost and everyone went on. There was no real angst.”
That angst is all too present today. As Donald Trump prepares to begin his second term in the White House, Kaplan is about to publish his latest book “Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis,” which uses historical examples like that of the ill-fated Weimar Republic to forecast a potentially troubled global future.
“Decline can be gradual, it can be reversed and it only has meaning when compared to other great powers who may also be in decline.”
The decline of the United States is a key part of that forecast. It’s a decline, argues Kaplan, brought about by economic profligacy. “We have a $36 trillion debt and servicing that debt costs almost a trillion dollars a year,” he says. “This is how great empires go into decline — for economic and related reasons. And the United States has been a de facto empire since 1945.”
The other major cause of American decline, according to Kaplan, is the decay of the much-maligned “deep state,” an institution Kaplan sees as crucial to projecting American power. “Most American power is exercised not just by presidential instinct and decision, but by the decisions made below in the bureaucracy 24 hours a day,” he says. “As a de facto empire, America has crises every day in Azerbaijan and Cyprus and Georgia and Sierra Leone. There’s all these crises you never read about, but which the so-called ‘deep state’ manages and manages well. And with Trump, you’re going to get much less of that.”
Nevertheless, while America may be in decline, it should only be judged against its superpower rivals such as China and Russia, Kaplan says. “Decline can be gradual, it can be reversed and it only has meaning when compared to other great powers who may also be in decline.”
One of Kaplan’s more controversial past moments was his support for the 2003 Iraq War, a point on which Al Yafai presses him. “I couldn’t imagine anything worse than Saddam, so I supported the war,” says Kaplan, who subsequently embedded with the U.S. army as a journalist and later came to regret his earlier support. “And guess what? I experienced something that was even worse than Saddam’s rule. Anarchy.”
Further listening: The American Experiment From Outside and Within — with Hari Kunzru and Faisal Al Yafai