Weimar, the short-lived German republic preceding the Third Reich, has always provided a convenient broadside for conservatives of every stripe. It stands as a parable of reckless effulgence, the image of a society unaware of its own need for order and state power and so doomed to be visited by state power in its most vengeful and cruel form. As Robert D Kaplan puts it, the Weimar revellers, enamoured with anarchy and end-of-the-world partying, had no idea what was in store for them: “The more abject the disorder,” he writes, “often the more extreme the tyranny to follow.”
Since Trump appeared on the political scene, America has at times been compared to Weimar. The message in every instance has been the old cautionary tale: by embracing radical change and by abandoning its political traditions and norms, America is courting social and political disaster. In his new book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, Kaplan builds his argument on the image of Weimar, and his instincts are invariably fogeyish, but he is less interested in domestic politics than in the question of world order. That’s how he arrives at the highly original concept of a “geopolitical Weimar”.
What is the geopolitical Weimar? In Kaplan’s definition, it is the moment when the existing global order starts to unravel because humanity, enamoured with new technologies and limitless possibility forgets that “order must come before freedom” and “hierarchy is everything”. In a passage now quoted ad nauseam, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called the interregnum between world orders a time of “morbid symptoms”. Kaplan has a better approach: to understand our current moment, we must think of Weimar, but Weimar “in terms of the world”.
The first time as tragedy, the second as reprimand. Kaplan ends his book with a quick recapitulation of every “moody” conservative of the last hundred years, adding some praise for the surviving European monarchies and even, quoting Jeane Kirkpatrick, right-wing autocrats. It is the revolutionary, left-wing ones that are the problem. For Kaplan, it is less that history has ended, but more that we must throw every possible wrench in its way.
Kaplan’s initial premise is fundamentally sound. It is illuminating to think of the question of world order through the analogy of a single state. The fundamental political dynamics are very similar, and they are more visible and intelligible on a smaller scale. And it is true that the present moment in world politics is a revolutionary one.
But the problem with the Weimar trope is that it works more as a threat than an analytical tool: if the whole world really is heading for a Weimar reckoning, then the best advice is to slow down, return to sobriety, and stop tearing away at the fabric of the existing order.
I happened to be reading Waste Land as I was rereading The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil’s novel on the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. At times Kaplan’s voice became that of the imperial officials or respected members of the Viennese bourgeoise that, in Musil’s pages, haughtily proclaim that it is all very well to dream of a better world, but no one should actually try to bring it about.
Kaplan should know that such words are almost always vacuous. If a political order leaves more people outside its orbit than those who are content to remain within it, there is little use for this paternalistic advice. The existing global order is now so tenuous and so limited in its reach that refusing to think of what will come next betrays nothing but a failure of imagination.
If Kaplan is indeed concerned with order, then he should start with Gaza, where America, the world’s ruling power, has pursued a policy of wilful destruction, conducted in the name of some messianic vision or other. In its pursuit, it tore the international legal order down to its foundations and sowed hatreds fated to last a hundred years. But Gaza’s destruction is ignored in Waste Land, a book ostensibly about destruction. When Gaza is briefly mentioned, it is hyphenated with Ukraine, as just one more example of regional conflict: “the Ukraine and Gaza wars”. Ukraine, however, is presented as a turning point. “Of such magnitude is the Ukraine war,” he writes, “that more months of fighting there could affect Europe and Eurasia for years and decades to come.”
Kaplan denounces Russia’s ultranationalism and militarism, but misses those very phenomena in Israel. Why? One supposes that because Israel is one of “us” in the West, Russia one of “them”. He mentions the 1,200 Israelis killed on 7 October, but there isn’t a single word in his book about the many tens of thousands of innocent civilians, children and babies killed in Gaza.
Kaplan seems interested in the figure of the revolutionary chieftain, the destroyer of worlds. He should start with Biden, whose vision of a “new Middle East” did not include Gaza. But it is to Trump and not Biden that Waste Land points. Kaplan praises Israel for not wavering, for being tougher than Biden. So it turns out that vague admonitions about future chaos or tyranny are not the most effective tool to keep things as they are – but brute force is.
If we return to the analogy of a political regime under attack from revolutionary forces, then Trump symbolises the moment when the monarch decides that the growing discontent must be squashed with the direct use of force. The soft-spoken clerics of tradition advocating peace and quiet instead of revolutionary fervour are quickly dropped by the wayside.
Waste Land is undoubtedly an important book. It is significant insofar as it reveals the intellectual wing of the last-ditch attempt to preserve the existing order against worldwide unrest. In this, it is best understood not as part of a global Weimar, but a global Thermidor, the period of retreat from radical goals and strategies during the French Revolution.
After me, the deluge. It is easy for Kaplan to see the decline of the West as the end of civilisation itself, because, for him, nothing else exists. India barely figures in the book: the word appears some five times. South-East Asia, a global centre of innovation and growth, is not mentioned at all; references to Vietnam are to the Vietnam War. Africa is still seen through the prism of the mega-slum and endless garbage heaps, even though cities such as Nairobi or Accra are better run than Detroit or San Francisco. Kaplan does not seem aware of a fatal contradiction: if the great majority of the world is a story of desolation and disaster, that shows the need for a new world order, not the beneficence of the current one.
What Kaplan has to say about China is that it is a “gargantuan, high-end military complex” with its sights set on Taiwan. This is a model of the world where civilisation wanes in the West, while outside only the darkest night awaits. At one point Kaplan notes that China lost all its friends in Washington because it now likes conflict: he seems to think China is now “under Leninist rule”. Surely he cannot take these pieties seriously. Geopolitics is about power, not good and evil – much less is it about the reformed theology that says Washington should tell us which is which.
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis
Robert D Kaplan
Hurst, 235pp, £20
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[See also: Kevin Roberts’s fire-breathing American right]
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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex