The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Copyright © 2018 by Robert D. Kaplan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Essays in this work were originally published in the following publications: The American Interest: “The Wounded Home Front” and “The Great Danger of a New Utopianism”; The Atlantic: “The Art of Avoiding War,” “Elegant Decline: The Navy’s Rising Importance,” “When North Korea Falls,” “Rereading Vietnam,” “Iraq: The Counterfactual Game,” “No Greater Honor,” “In Defense of Henry Kissinger,” “Samuel Huntington: Looking the World in the Eye,” and “Why John Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)”; The National Interest: “The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy,” “The Post-Imperial Moment,” “Fated to Lead,” and “Traveling China’s New Silk Road”; The Washington Post: “On Foreign Policy, Donald Trump Is No Realist.”

  Hardback ISBN 9780812996791

  Ebook ISBN 9780812996807

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page and part-title page images: Courtesy of the U.S. military. Photograph by Sgt. Ken Scar, 7th MPAD

  Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

  Cover photograph: Department of Defense photograph by Lance Cpl. Albert F. Hunt, U.S. Marine Corps

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Strategy

  Chapter 1: The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response

  Chapter 2: The Art of Avoiding War

  Chapter 3: The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy

  Chapter 4: Elegant Decline: The Navy’s Rising Importance

  Chapter 5: When North Korea Falls

  War and Its Costs

  Chapter 6: Rereading Vietnam

  Chapter 7: Iraq: The Counterfactual Game

  Chapter 8: The Wounded Home Front

  Chapter 9: No Greater Honor

  Thinkers

  Chapter 10: In Defense of Henry Kissinger

  Chapter 11: Samuel Huntington: Looking the World in the Eye

  Chapter 12: Why John Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)

  Reflections

  Chapter 13: On Foreign Policy, Donald Trump Is No Realist

  Chapter 14: The Post-Imperial Moment

  Chapter 15: Fated to Lead

  Chapter 16: The Great Danger of a New Utopianism

  Marco Polo Redux

  Chapter 17: Traveling China’s New Silk Road

  Dedication

  By Robert D. Kaplan

  About the Author

  The origins of hot wars lie in cold wars, and the origins of cold wars are found in the anarchic ordering of the international arena….Theorists explain what historians know: War is normal.

  —KENNETH N. WALTZ, 1988

  The lead, anchoring essay in this collection was written for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment in the late summer of 2016 and was subsequently released for public view. Here and there, very sparingly, I have updated it. The other essays, going back as far as seventeen years, remain exactly as they were upon original publication. Thus, the reader will find occasional repetitions in terms of ideas and of phrases even, as well as assumptions that, from hindsight, I obviously got wrong.

  At the Office of Net Assessment, I thank Air Force Colonel (Ret.) James H. Baker and Dr. Andrew D. May for their help and interest. Net Assessment commissioned the essay through the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, for which I thank CEO Michele Flournoy, President Richard Fontaine, Director of Studies Shawn Brimley, Creative Director Melody Cook, and other members of the CNAS staff. In particular, I am especially grateful for the guidance of CNAS’s director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program, Navy Captain (Ret.) Jerry Hendrix. Others who provided guidance and insights as I wrote this essay, for which I am grateful, include Dr. Shamila Chaudhary, Senior Advisor to the Dean, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; Svante Cornell, Director of the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; Reva Goujon, Vice President of Global Analysis at Stratfor; Army Colonel Valery Keaveny, Jr.; Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lyons; Marine Lieutenant Colonel Peter McAleer; Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster; Marine Lieutenant Colonel David Mueller; Evan Osnos, staff writer for The New Yorker; Karim Sadjadpour, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Navy Admiral (Ret.) James Stavridis, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; and Jim Thomas, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Any mistake or incorrect analysis herein is entirely my own, however.

  Regarding the other essays, I am deeply grateful for the support over the years of all the editors at The Atlantic, The American Interest, The National Interest, and The Washington Post, especially James Bennet, James Gibney, Cullen Murphy, Scott Stossel, Adam Garfinkle, and Jacob Heilbrunn.

  Anna Pitoniak at Random House energetically oversaw the production and presentation of this book, with good advice throughout. My literary agents, Gail Hochman, Marianne Merola, and Henry Thayer, provided their usual, exceptional support. The late Carl D. Brandt advised me well in the early phases of this book project, as did Henry Thayer in the latter stages. Elizabeth M. Lockyer, with help from Diane and Marc Rathbun, meticulously organizes my professional life. And my wife, Maria Cabral, remains there with decades’ worth of love and support.

  1.

  The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response

  AS EUROPE DISAPPEARS, EURASIA COHERES.

  The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict, as the Westphalian system of states weakens and older, imperial legacies—Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Turkish—become paramount. Every crisis from Central Europe to the ethnic-Han Chinese heartland is now interlinked. There is one singular battle space.

  What follows is a historical and geographical guide to it.

  The Dispersion of the West

  Never before in history did Western civilization reach such a point of geopolitical concision and raw power as during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. For well over half a century, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) condensed a millennia-long tradition of political and moral values—the West, in shorthand—into a robust military alliance. NATO was a cultural phenomenon before it was anything. Its spiritual roots reach back to the philosophical and administrative legacies of Greece and Rome, to the emergence of Christendom in the early Middle Ages, and to the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—from which the ideas of the American Revolution emerged. Of course, key nations of the West fought as an alliance in the First and Second World Wars, and those emergency contingencies constituted forerunners to NATO’s more secure and elaborate structures. Such structures, in turn, were buttressed by a continent-wide economic system, culminating in the European Union (EU). The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic
nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions. The end of the Long European War, 1914–89, saw those values reign triumphant, as communism was finally defeated and NATO and the EU extended their systems throughout Central and Eastern Europe, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. And it categorically was a long European war, as wartime deprivations, political and economic, existed in Soviet satellite states until 1989, when the West triumphed over Europe’s second totalitarian system, just as it did over the first in 1945.

  Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter’s conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. And because the aftershocks of the Long European War extended to the very end of the twentieth century, with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and chaos inside Russia, NATO and the EU remained as relevant as ever, with NATO demonstrating its expeditionary capability in the case of Yugoslavia, and the EU building inroads into the former Warsaw Pact to take advantage of Russia’s infirmity. This era was called the Post Cold War—that is, it was defined in terms of what came before it and what still continued to influence it.

  The Long European War, which lasted three-quarters of a century, influences events still, and constitutes my entry point for describing a new world far beyond Europe that the U.S. military now must grapple with. And because Europe’s current predicament constitutes an introduction to that new world, I begin with it.

  It was the monumental devastation of two world wars that led European elites, beginning in the late 1940s, to reject the past altogether, with all of its inherent cultural and ethnic divisions. Only the abstract ideals of the Enlightenment were preserved, which in turn led to political engineering and economic experimentation, so that the specific moral response to the human suffering of 1914–18 and 1939–45 was the establishment of generous social-welfare states, which meant highly regulated economies. As for the national-political conflicts that gave birth to the two world wars, they would not be repeated because, in addition to other aspects of supranational cooperation, European elites imposed a single monetary unit on much of the continent. Except in the most disciplined northern European societies, however, those social-welfare states have proven unaffordable, just as the single currency has caused the weaker economies of southern Europe to pile up massive debt. Alas, the post–World War II attempt at moral redemption has led over time to an intractable form of economic and political hell.

  The irony deepens. Europe’s dull and happy decades in the second half of the twentieth century were partially born of its demographic separation from the Muslim Middle East. This, too, was a product of the Cold War phase of the Long European War, when totalitarian prison-states in such places as Libya, Syria, and Iraq were propped up for decades by Soviet advice and support, and afterward took on a life of their own. For a long time Europe was lucky in this regard: It could reject power politics and preach human rights precisely because tens of millions of Muslims nearby were being denied human rights, and with them the freedom of movement. But those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies. Europe now fractures from within as reactionary populism takes hold, and new borders go up throughout the continent to prevent the movement of Muslim refugees from one country to another. Meanwhile, Europe dissolves from without, as it is reunited with the destiny of Afro-Eurasia as a whole.

  All this follows naturally from geography and history. For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the entire Mediterranean Basin, or Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”) as the Romans famously called it, which included North Africa until the Arab invasion of Late Antiquity. This underlying reality never actually went away: In the mid-twentieth century, the French geographer Fernand Braudel intimated that Europe’s real southern border was not Italy or Greece, but the Sahara Desert, where caravans of migrants now assemble for the journey north.*1

  Europe, at least in the way that we have known it, has begun to vanish. And with it the West itself—at least as a sharply defined geopolitical force—also loses substantial definition. Of course, the West as a civilizational concept has been in crisis for quite some time. The very obvious fact that courses in Western civilization are increasingly rare and controversial on most college campuses in the United States indicates the effect of multiculturalism in a world of intensified cosmopolitan interactions. Noting how Rome only partially inherited the ideals of Greece, and how the Middle Ages virtually lost the ideals of Rome, the nineteenth-century liberal Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed that “[m]odern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”*2

  Indeed, Western civilization is not being destroyed; rather, it is being diluted and dispersed. After all, how exactly does one define globalization? Beyond the breakdown of economic borders, it is the worldwide adoption of the American form of capitalism and management practices that, merging with the advance of human rights (another Western concept), has allowed for the most eclectic forms of cultural combinations, wearing down in turn the historical division between East and West. Having won the Long European War, the West, rather than go on to conquer the rest of the world, is now beginning to lose itself in what Reinhold Niebuhr called “a vast web of history.”*3 The decomposition that Herzen spoke of has begun.

  A New Strategic Geography

  As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres. I do not mean to say that Eurasia is becoming unified, or even stable in the manner that Europe was during the Cold War and the Post Cold War—only that the interactions of globalization, technology, and geopolitics, with each reinforcing the other, are leading the Eurasian supercontinent to become, analytically speaking, one fluid and comprehensible unit. Eurasia simply has meaning in the way that it didn’t use to. Moreover, because of the reunification of the Mediterranean Basin, evinced by refugees from North Africa and the Levant flooding Europe, and because of dramatically increased interactions across the Indian Ocean from Indochina to East Africa, we may now speak of Afro-Eurasia in one breath. The term “World-Island,” early-twentieth-century British geographer Halford Mackinder’s phrase for Eurasia joined with Africa, is no longer premature.*4

  The slowly vanishing West abets this development by depositing its seeds of unity into an emerging global culture that spans continents. Further encouraging this process is the erosion of distance by way of technology: new roads, bridges, ports, airplanes, massive container ships, and fiber-optic cables. It is important, though, to realize that all this constitutes only one layer of what is happening, for there are more troubling changes, too. Precisely because religion and culture are being weakened by globalization, they have to be reinvented in more severe, monochromatic, and ideological form by way of the communications revolution. Witness Boko Haram and the Islamic State, which do not represent Islam per se, but Islam igniting with the tyrannical conformity and mass hysteria inspired by the Internet and social media. As I have written previously, it isn’t the so-called clash of civilizations that is taking place, but the clash of artificially reconstructed civilizations. And this only hardens geopolitical divides, which, as the collapse of Middle East prison states indicates, are in evidence not only between states but within states themselves.

  The combination of violent upheavals and the communications revolution in all its aspects—from cyber interactions to new transportation infrastructure—has wrought a more claustrophobic and ferociously contested world: a world in which te
rritory still matters, and where every crisis interacts with every other as never before. This is all intensified by the expansion of megacities and absolute rises in population. No matter how overcrowded, no matter how much the underground water table and nutrients in the soil have been depleted, people will fight for every patch of ground. On this violent and interactive earth, the neat divisions of Cold War area studies and of continents and subcontinents are starting to be erased as the Long European War passes from living memory. 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. Instead, because of the erosion of both hard boundaries and cultural differences, the map will manifest a continuity of subtle gradations, which begin in Central Europe and the Adriatic, and end beyond the Gobi Desert where the agricultural cradle of Chinese civilization begins. Geography counts, but legal borders will matter less so.*5

  This world will be increasingly bound by formal obligations that exist both above and below the level of government, a situation that recalls the functionality of feudalism. Just as the medieval Al-Andalus region in Spain and Portugal saw a rich confection of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian civilizations, where the Arabs ruled but forced conversions to Islam did not occur, this emerging world—outside of conflict zones, of course—will be one of tolerance and pungent cultural mixes, into which the liberal spirit of the West will dissolve and only in that way have its place. As for the regional conflicts, they almost always will have global implications, owing to how every part of the earth is now increasingly interwoven with every other part. To wit, local conflicts involving Iran, Russia, and China over the decades have led to terrorist and cyber attacks on Europe and the Americas.