The following is a transcript of an event held on January 4, 2022.

Rollie Flynn:

Good morning, and welcome to our event this morning, featuring Robert D. Kaplan, who is the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at FPRI. He’s also the bestselling author of 19 books, including the latest The Good American, which is an extraordinary story about the life of Robert Gersony. This morning, he has a very interesting topic: how the world today resembles the Weimar Republic, the German government from 1919 to 1933. One caveat, I want to make sure you’re all aware of is that Bob is going to be writing on this topic. And so we would ask you not to talk about this topic outside of this group here today—just so we want to make sure everyone knows this is Bob’s idea and his work. I’d also like to encourage you to put your questions in the Q&A box, which is at the bottom of your screen. If you have questions throughout the presentation, you can go ahead and start throwing them in there. We’ll be monitoring them and pitching them to Bob when we go to Q&A, probably about halfway through the program. Before I turn it over to Bob, I’d like to thank our members and supporters for your generous support to FPRI. We can’t do this without you. So please, if you’re not yet a member, please consider becoming one. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Bob.

Robert Kaplan:

Well, thank you very much, Rollie, for that introduction. I’m going to be talking a bit about the Weimar Republic in the early part of this talk and quite a bit more towards the end of the talk. In the middle, I’m going to try to describe the world today as it is. And, of course, the world today is not a replica of the Weimar Republic, but as is often the case with analogies, the differences are vast, but the similarities are interesting. And it’s in the interestingness of the similarities that I think it’s worth some discussion. To start with, keep in mind how quickly a nation’s character can change and how fragile a thing like civilization is. Nobody, in the late 1920s, in Germany, could have predicted what the character of the nation would be in the mid-1930s, only six years later. Just as nobody in Russia, in 1914 or ’15, could have predicted the absolute chaos after the March Revolution and what followed in the October Revolution. One thing that Lenin said is that, Years can go by, decades can pass, and nothing happens, but then years or months can pass and everything happens. And it’s in that spirit that I’d like to consider this question.

The Weimar Republic is obviously the time in Germany between around 1919 and 1933. And it was called the Weimar Republic because the constitution for the Republic was written in the historic town of Weimar in what used to be southwestern part of communist East Germany and is now, more or less, in the center of United Germany. Another thing to keep in mind that monarchy has been the stable way of the world for thousands of years, and democracy is an experiment still.

After World War I, despite all the mistakes and stupidities and venality of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Winston Churchill was reputed to have said that we should have still kept the Hohenzollern dynasty in power in Germany, because it would prevent a lot of bad things that would happen in the years to come. Yes, the Kaiser should abdicate, appoint his nephew or some other distant relative, and yes, it should be a constitutional monarchy, not a monarchical dictatorship, but there should be some presence for the Hohenzollerns, essentially. Just as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued, vehemently, in his Red Wheel series of novels that the real crime of the Russian Revolution was the overthrow of the czar, because as autocratic, as reactionary, as incompetent, as venal as Czar Nicholas II was, he was the only thing holding together a ramshackle empire of 11 time zones. And that if you remove The Romanovs completely, you would have chaos, which would lead to much worse things to come. So it’s interesting, the killing of The Romanovs and their children was the seminal crime of the 20th century because if you can kill children, you can kill millions. And the same people who killed a few children went on to kill tens of millions. The murder of the Iraqi Sharifian Royal family in 1958, with the children and the nurses and servants all murdered, there’s a direct line from that to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. 

So getting rid of royalty is serious business, and that’s where I start about Weimar because the Hohenzollerns were gone, and they came up with a constitution. The constitution was a bit unwieldy. You had The Reichstag, which was elected, led by a chancellor who had a lot of power, but above him was a president who also had a lot of power. So it wasn’t the kind of system where the president is an ornamental figurehead and the prime minister is the real power. This was divided. Then, you had a Reichswat also, a lesser parliament, and then you had the lender, the various German regents, which had their own governments, so to speak. And then you add the remnants of the very strong lender of Prussia. So it was a very unwieldy system. It was designed to prevent a dictator, but at the same time, it required a very strong, talented politician, or several of them on top, to really run the thing. And unfortunately, Germany didn’t get that for all of the time. Germany had two notable outstanding foreign ministers, Hans von Rosenberg and Gustav Stresemann in the 1920s, but the foreign minister really didn’t direct the domestic reality and really didn’t have an effect on it. 

And, as we’ll see at the end, a bunch of people who, the German historian Golo Mann, the son of the Nobel Prize-winning laureate, Thomas Mann, wrote, A bunch of people who were real lightweights, complete empty suits, who thought they were in control of the situation, appointed someone in order to use and manipulate him by the name of Adolf Hitler. And Hitler was able to run circles around all of them very, very quickly. So it turned into something different. The one overriding thing that dominated much of the Weimar Republic, that Golo Mann uses the phrase, is the permanent crisis. The Weimar Republic was, especially in the 1920s after the first crisis, certainly after the second crisis after 1929, in permanent crisis. And what does permanent crisis signify to you today? It signifies the news headlines, the world today, but why is the world any more chaotic now or seem to be more chaotic than during the Cold War or during an earlier part of history? There are always insurrections, wars in Europe up through the early 19th century. Africa certainly had them. The Middle East had them. But for some reason we think of all of those happening in separate places, as on separate planets. Even during World War II, the Pacific theater was light years away from the European theater. And there were all these debates, which theater should get the most priority in terms of men and material.

So even during a world war, which somewhat united the world in one crisis, there was still a concept of different geographical theaters. My point today is that the world is quickly becoming one system, not one government, not universal governance, but a system, an identifiable system. And because it’s a system that encompasses the whole planet, we’re always in a crisis somewhere or another, so that it’s like a permanent crisis. But let me breathe this out a bit, because it’s a bit vague, I realize. First of all, we have for the first time in history, truly interconnected financial markets, so that a crisis in one major market can ignite a crisis in another stock exchange halfway around the world and that can have political effects. So that’s one angle of it, the unity of financial markets, which of course, is brought about by technology. And I’ll be talking about technology down the road a bit. 

In all of this, when you think of technology, when you think of airplanes, missiles, all of this, keep in mind the words of a Hungarian American mathematician and philosopher of decades ago named John von Neumann. And John von Neumann said, The problem is the very finite size of the earth. The earth can’t get bigger, and because the earth can’t get bigger, it will gradually become a force in itself for political instability, because technology, markets, military equipment all work to collapse distance, to defeat distance. And populations grow, et cetera, all on the same finite earth, which cannot accommodate all these technological changes by getting bigger. It still stays the same size. So that’s one reason why there’s this sense of anxiousness and claustrophobia in the world today, that we can’t get away from things, that an Ethiopian war affects us much more than an Ethiopian war 40 years ago did, even though it still may not matter that much to us, but just look at the direction of things. And, as von Neumann said, because this change is gradual, the filling up of the earth, things that are gradual tend to be missed. The obvious gradual elements tend to be missed by analysts who much prefer to package their analysis within the strictures of news headlines and whatnot.

Someone who tackled this idea before John von Neumann was the great British geopolitician and geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder. In his great essay that made him famous, in 1904, about the pivot of history, he predicted World War I. And he predicted World War I for this reason. He said: One of the reasons why, since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the 19th century in Europe was relatively peaceful was because all these empires—Britain, France—were busy fighting their own wars and making advances in their colonies around the world. They were expanding in Africa, expanding in Asia all over, so they didn’t need to fight each other because they had more than enough on their hands with their colonies all over the world. But, as Mackinder said with this famous phrase, at some point, the earth’s map becomes completely covered. It’s all mapped out, so to speak, and the great powers of Europe will have nothing else to do except to fight each other. And it was this geographical determinism that led Mackinder to essentially predict World War I. And this goes along with von Neumann’s thesis of a finite earth that is not accommodating the spread of technology every bit as much. 

And then let’s look at the military picture, specifically. We know we don’t read much about advances in tank warfare or infantry training. What do we read about? What do all the military correspondents write stories about? About hypersonic missiles, about ballistic missiles. This is a great age in history to be a missile scientist, to be a rocketeer or something like that. And what do missiles do? They collapse distance of the earth. They go in minutes from one part of the earth to the other part of the earth, very quickly. So missile technology in and of itself works to collapse distance and shrink the earth. And if you go around the world near the equator, you will see an unbroken line of overlapping missile ranges. So many countries have missiles. It’s been argued that the real frightening development in Iran is not the nuclear bomb. It’s their missile development. I don’t know if they have hypersonic missiles or a different term is used, but Iranian missile technology has become very pinpointed. They’ve mastered the art of precision-guided missiles. And that was shown when they launched those attacks on Saudi Arabian oil facilities during the latter part of the Trump administration.

So we live in an age of missiles, missiles that can hit Taiwan, missiles from Mainland China that can hit US warships moving in the South China Sea, missiles from Korea that might or might not be able to hit the western part of the United States. And we also live in an age of battle networks. And what is a battle network? When we think of maritime, of naval war between the US and China, people think, ‘Oh, it’ll be like the battle of the Philippine Sea in World War II or MacArthur’s landing or…’ No, it won’t be because ‘naval’ is a misnomer. Naval warfare really means computerized, digitized, automated battle systems attacking each other. And the race will be on which side can immobilize the other side’s system first, hack into it, redirect it, whatever, which requires satellites in space, a whole bunch of things. Naval warfare, the naval part is just the part you physically see or where the effects are felt, in other words. And these automated battle networks, again, compress the size of the earth, figuratively.

And then we live in an age of mega cities. It used to be, when I was growing up, a city of one or two million was a big city. Now, there is something like 50 cities in the world of a few million. And then we have mega cities. And what unites mega cities? Social media. And what is the thing about social media? It’s fast, it’s quick, it’s instantaneous, and it propagates raw national hatred. Remember what Twitter does. Twitter is not friendly to reason-centric complex arguments. It’s friendly to passion, and passion is the enemy of analysis. It’s the enemy of critical thinking, of considered good judgment thinking. And we’ve seen this. Again, I’ll bring up Ethiopia, where Twitter had a significant effect in enraging hatred between young Tigrayans and young Amharas. But the recent Indo-Pakistan crisis, people were afraid, it might lead to war, precisely because they were terrified of what social media was doing on each side. So social media, again, collapses distance, is friendly to extremes. Now, all of these things, you may be saying: well, these things have been going on for years now—there have been so many new stories about it.

One thing I heard in the 1990s that always struck me, always stuck to me, was an analysis I heard from an officer at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He said, Attrition of the same adds up the big change. The fact that something has been going on for 10 years doesn’t mean it’s stable. It means by the ninth year, you’re in a completely different situation than you were in the first or second year, even though the thing that’s been happening has been the same, because it gradually changes the environment, in other words. Yugoslavia was actually collapsing in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, but it reached a point of no return only in the 1990s, even though by the mid-1980s, writing about Yugoslavia’s potential collapse was becoming an overdone, boring news story. People forget this. News cycles get forgotten. So what all this adds up to is given that the size of the earth cannot be bigger, we’re not headed towards world government. We’re not headed towards world governance. What we’re headed for the world as a same conflict system, that the various conflicts are united in some way to a degree that they weren’t before.

And in this conflict system, wars and geopolitical crises have the ability to affect financial markets as never before. Now, the first two decades of the 21st century were dominated by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then the collapse of Libya, the collapse of Syria, which came after. With all due respect to the victims of those wars, it didn’t affect financial markets very much. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange didn’t care if Libya collapsed or something. And the oil markets quickly adjusted to the loss of Iraqi oil in the market. The wars of the future will be different. A short, sharp war of a few days in the Taiwan Strait, which would involve two of the world’s two biggest economies, or a short, sharp war in the East China Sea between Japan, the US, and China, involving the world’s three largest economies, would get the market’s attention and very quickly, unlike anything that happened in the Middle East in the first two decades of the 21st century. And don’t assume short, sharp war because with battle networks, with cyber weapons, a war on the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits could quickly spread in the face of cyber attacks on the United States homeland, cyber attacks against Mainland China, attacks on missile systems in China itself. Both sides will be looking beyond, over the horizon. So it’s sloppy thinking to think that we could contain a short, sharp war.

One thing we did learn from Iraq and other places is wars have their own logic to them, and they tend to spread in various ways. And we’re in the early phase of the cyber age, where there are no rules, no red lines. It’s sort of like the world before the Cuban Missile Crisis—between the bomb at Hiroshima and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why do I say that? Because, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, both superpowers looked into the abyss, and they didn’t like what they saw. It terrified both sides. And it was from the Cuban Missile Crisis that, in short order, later on, you got a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the two superpowers. You got a hotline established. You had more regular symmetry between the United States and the Soviet Union. You had strategic arms limitation talks, and ultimately détente. All this was the fruit of the fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis that was instilled in both superpowers.

Now, we’re getting there in the cyber age, but we haven’t had a Cuban Missile Crisis yet or the equivalent of it. And then also, there’s the other issue of atomic bombs themselves. When we look back at our leaders like Eisenhower, Truman, Nixon, others, even Johnson, Cold War leaders, they had in their living memory, fresh, vivid in front of their eyes, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They could remember the minute and the day when it happened, where they were, et cetera. So it had a big effect on them. But the last time an atomic bomb has been dropped in the atmosphere against real people was 75 years ago. Leaders today don’t have that muscle memory, that fear. And now, nuclear weapons have become more tactical, more sophisticated, and there are all these in-between weapons, like precision-guided missiles, hypersonic missiles, so that major power war is actually imaginable in a way that it even wasn’t, or isn’t, as feared—or it can be complicated in a way that absolutely terrified someone like Eisenhower.

And then, finally, two other points before I go back to Weimar here. One is that we no longer live in the print and typewriter era. We live in the digital video age. The print and typewriter era produced Eisenhower, produced Kissinger, Nixon. It produced people who got their news and information and interchange with their populations and with the media through centrist thinking and long, complex written pieces done by professional journalists of newspapers that were either center-right or center-left with an emphasis on the word center. Without the digital video age, you could not imagine Donald Trump. He would not exist. He would still be a New York real estate developer. The digital video age accelerates time, even as it degenerates memory, because each news cycle is more vivid, so the previous news cycle is forgotten more quickly. So it doesn’t lead to tragic historical thinking. And all this is in one system, a world that’s increasingly emerging as one system.

Now, I want shoot over in another direction. Many of you will be familiar with The Sicilian Expedition that the Athenians mounted against Sicily in the seventh book of Thucydides. Now, The Sicilian Expedition I’ll explain in a second. It was like the Vietnam or Iraq War of the classical age. Athens went half a world away to Sicily—which then was half a world away because of the speed of sail ships—to get involved in a small struggle to defend an ally, who is in turn an ally of another ally of Athens, and they thought it would be a quick expeditionary warfare. And it turned into a major conflict that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Athenian soldiers and had a very deep, tragic effect on Athenian politics for years afterwards. And, in fact, comparing Vietnam and Iraq to The Sicilian Expedition is common now. A lot of people do it. That’s why The Sicilian Expedition has become well known among policy wonks in Washington. It’s beyond the classical scholars.

Now, why is The Sicilian Expedition compared to Iraq and Afghanistan? (Iraq and Afghanistan were half a world away. Sicily is like eight hours in a car ferry to Greece.) Because of the collapse of distance. Because getting to Vietnam, in the 1960s, was the equivalent of the Athenians sailing to Sicily in the classical age. So technology affects geography is what I’m trying to say. And if we’re in a similar system, we can use the same analogy in reverse and compare this world conflict system to the instability of what I like to say is Weimar, Germany, which also was in a permanent crisis with its constituent parts.

Now, the Weimar Republic ended with Hitler. That’s not where I’m going here because the Weimar Republic could have had many different results than it had. Golo Mann, who is a great German historian, the son of the Nobel literary laureate Thomas Mann, wrote an excellent book, I recommend all of you read, The History of Germany Since 1789. And he takes it from the Napoleonic Wars right up to the 1960s essentially. And in his part on the Weimar Republic, he basically paints the picture of the Republic was doing well. At some parts, the permanent crisis returned. It was touch and go. It could have had a lot of different endings. It could have survived, until a few things happened. The worldwide inflation and Depression of 1929, which rose the prestige of the Nazi Party dramatically in German elections. And also, the particular men who were ruling Germany in ’31, ’32, and ’33. And one of them, who is really critical in convincing his colleagues to go along with Hitler temporarily as someone we could hire as a prime minister, as a chancellor who we could hem in. He said, We’ve hired Hitler. We haven’t appointed him to anything, is the way that Franz von Papen put it.

This is Golo Mann’s description of Franz von Papen: Anything was possible in the vacuum of power created because the Nazis, on the one hand, and Hindenburg and the army on the other, neutralized each other, and the left was no longer of any account. Franz von Papen, this charming nobleman, succeeded in ingratiating himself with Hindenburg, and that was enough for the moment. This is how men had become prime ministers. von Papen was characteristic of the decline of public life. He was a well-bred buffoon, is the way that Golo Mann put it. And a few pages later, he calls von Papen such a lightweight. He uses the word such. Not evil, not good, just a complete out-of-his-depth lightweight who, by force of circumstance, became this key figure that led to the appointment of Hitler.

And so Golo Mann asked the question. He said, What is history? What is the meaning of history if such a lightweight can determine the course of world events for decades later, bring someone to power who will then get all of Europe enmeshed in a war that would kill tens of millions of people, lead to a cold war of 44 years, and affect our world still today, in so many ways? What is the meaning of history in this sense? What he’s saying is that anything is possible, and the worst outcomes are usually avoided. So there’s nothing in this talk today about all this is going to end in some horrible nightmare or even a war. It’s just that we’re in one system, increasingly. And if you don’t believe it now, in five years, it’ll be more so because technology is inexorable. And the more we are in one system, the more we have to get it right, the more responsible we have to be, despite everything. And I’ll stop here and we’ll have questions.

Rollie Flynn:

Okay. Bob, we have quite a few questions. I don’t know if you want to field them yourself or you want me to put them together and ask you.

Robert Kaplan:

Let me see here. Why don’t you ask the questions?

Rollie Flynn:

I’m going to put a couple of them together that are on the Weimar Republic. One is: could the German people have stopped their descent to authoritarianism? And together with a comment and a question: the Weimar experiment failed, in part, because its democratic institutions were too fragile to withstand the dual pressure of the Great Depression and the continuing geopolitical stresses caused by revanchism vis-à-vis France and the UK and the fears of Soviet Bolshevism. I’m going to put those together. Could the people have stopped this descent?

Robert Kaplan:

Not immediately after it started. Once Hitler was appointed, that very night, Joseph Goebbels organized the torchlight parade down Unter den Linden in Berlin with thousands of Nazis carrying torches. Within days afterwards, Hermann Göring was able to take control of the police and military of Prussia, which was still separate then, and then make them subservient to the Nazis. They were able to do this. And this is something that Golo Mann points out, that Gordon Craig, in his Germany, 1866-1945, the Stanford University professor said, because Hitler was not only politically innovative; the Nazis were criminal. Don’t think about them as extremists. They were criminals. There’s a vignette in one of them when somebody was opposing Goebbels on something, so he had him beaten up slowly to death in front of his parents, essentially, and then got the approval of everybody because everyone was so terrified. So you were dealing with criminals.

So once the decision was made that Hitler would lead the state, even in a minority situation, even with so-called checks and balances, the system was exposed to be so weak. Something else to keep in mind, not only the Great Depression, but the great inflation of the early 1920s, the dissolution of Germany after 1918, and The Versailles Treaty had created all these disaffected militias and thuggish gangs and elements who nobody could really control. And a number of these groups had been out of work, unemployed, suffering, living in flophouses, and they immediately gravitated toward the Nazis very quickly. So there was social dissolution, there was criminal leadership, and there was the complete fragility of the democratic system.

Rollie Flynn:

Bob, I’m going to ask one of my own questions that occurred to me as I was listening to you talking about the nefarious impact of social media inciting, for instance, in Ethiopia, in Tigray, how it just fueled all this. How do you balance that—for instance, our first amendment freedom with, for instance, what China’s doing with its Safe Cities technology, which they would argue, creates greater peace and limits the ability to fuel these tensions?

Robert Kaplan:

This is the ultimate question because once it’s out of the box—once the genie is out of the box—you can’t just un-invent Twitter, which is essentially what you have to do. It puts even more pressure. We’ll have to develop a new way of thinking about shame. What is shameful? Hating someone through Twitter or something, if that’s considered shameful, then you can control these things through moral and social inhibitions, but it puts more pressure on family structures, on community leaders, and others, because the very nature of the medium does not encourage critical thinking.

Rollie Flynn:

Do you see the growing localism and decentralization of supply chains and energy distribution being a mitigating factor that plays into the growing influence of mega cities and cultural divides?

Robert Kaplan:

Yeah. This is a fascinating question. Obviously, my whole talk was about the centralization of the system, but there’s all this decentralization that’s going on at the same time. Yeah, in that sense, in a good way and in a bad way in certain place. Germany works so well today because it doesn’t have one major city. It has about eight of them. And it really is an historic product of its regions, that each are of power, and they mitigate the other. And so you don’t have the disruption, the distinction between urban and rural that we have in other places that leads the political ideological divides. So decentralization, like centralization, are value-neutral terms. They’re not necessarily good or bad. It depends on the circumstances of which they’re implied. And, of course, decentralization, in some ways, it works against the singular conflict system that I’ve been trying to describe this morning. So it may be a mitigating factor towards it. These are really existential questions without any firm answers.

Rollie Flynn:

Eurasia Group cites a global political recession as a lack of global leadership. How do you correct it?

Robert Kaplan:

I should just say I’m on the website as a senior advisor at Eurasia Group. It’s a global political recession in the sense that world leadership is weak. You don’t have the concept. You have these meetings, the G7, the G20, but they don’t really say much or do much. They don’t really matter as much as they did five or ten years ago. So there’s been a recession in global leadership is really what you’re talking about. And I don’t know how to correct it, but throughout history, leadership has had a Shakespearean element to it. And what that means is it’s a question of real character. What would’ve happened to Britain if Churchill had died at middle age or something, had he not come along when he came along? He got almost everything wrong and got one big thing, right: Hitler. He got India wrong. He got the Duke of Windsor wrong. He got a whole bunch of things wrong, but he got Hitler right and early on. So there was clearly a Shakespearean element there, which is impossible to predict.

Rollie Flynn:

Looking at another historical question, in addition to the Weimar Republic, I’m trying to draw useful geopolitical lessons for today from the revolts and rebellions of the 1830s in Europe, especially during the revolts of 1848—Napoleon chaos versus Weimar, Germany chaos versus growing chaos today for initial examples. Do you see useful lessons from that era, too?

Robert Kaplan:

Well, 1848 was a tragedy because had the revolutions of 1848—which were, to a significant extent, peaceful, they were liberal (1848 was the last time that liberals and nationalists were the same people; you could be a nationalist and a liberal at the same time)—managed to carry the day, World War I may never have happened, and Hitler would not have existed, essentially. But the problem with 1848 was that the middle classes in key cities in countries in Europe were just not big enough and well established enough to carry the day against the reactionary authoritarian regimes. So the system literally just went on, and we got [Otto von] Bismarck. And I don’t mean to impugn Bismarck because Bismarck would’ve been the last person to get involved in World War I if he was in his prime and had the power. He was an interesting, tragic thinker of all the things that could go wrong in foreign affairs.

Rollie Flynn:

A map of medieval Germany is not that different from Germany of the early 20th century. Germany was dramatically fragmented regionally. How does the severe national fragmentation that characterizes the recently democratized Germany of the Weimar Republic contribute to your analogy, or does it?

Robert Kaplan:

Germany came along late in history. It was Bismarck, by essentially defeating the Austrians at Königgrätz in Western Czech Republic, in 1866, and his defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War that essentially brought the constituent parts of Germany together. So Germany didn’t really become Germany till the 1870s. It didn’t have a long tradition like France or Great Britain. It was a new country, and it didn’t have a center because pressure was always strong. Bavaria was always strong. And so this vibrant medievalism produced after the horrors of the Second World War a country, where there were, as I said earlier, many major cities, and the distinction between rural and urban was much less than in other places. And I’d just like to add, right up to the last German election, one place, which is still centrist and moderate in terms of the voting patterns, is Germany. And Germans like to be boring. They don’t like much change. They evade responsibility, in some ways, and they do what I think is a foolish thing by giving up nuclear power just when they need alternative energy sources. But whenever German voters go to the polls and people predict catastrophe, the result is always boring, and I think we should be grateful for that.

Rollie Flynn:

Robert McNamara stated that “The indefinite combination of nuclear weapons and human fallibility will lead to a nuclear exchange.” With future military technology, is human fallibility even necessary?

Robert Kaplan:

He has been proven wrong up to now. That statement is wrong up until this second, but what happens in the next second or in the next year or in 10 years may prove him right, essentially, because the concept is very compelling. And I would enlarge it to more than nuclear weaponry to hypersonic weaponry, to battle systems, to just the power of postmodern war to affect great destruction in a short period of time, that, whether it’s nuclear or not, combined with human fallibility, can easily produce a major struggle. The world doesn’t know what it’s like, what a great power’s military struggle is like, because the last time we had one was 1945, essentially. Everything else was a proxy war of some sort or another, but just like we went without inflation for decades and now we have it, and therefore, people stopped imagining what inflation was like, I think it’s a good idea to be fearful of great power military conflict.

Rollie Flynn:

The subject is Weimar and the similarities to today’s world. Are there any analogies we could also apply with failure of France’s Third Republic [until its fall in 1940]?

Robert Kaplan:

I would say that it’s different because Weimar was a permanent, intense crisis for about 15 years. And it had to deal with not one inflation but two inflations and in a terrible international environment, where the allies were really extracting concessions from a defeated Germany. And you had social disillusion, which went along with political weakness.

Rollie Flynn:

How about the role of radio and sound amplification as technologies that served as a catalyst for fascism in Germany, as well as the Soviet Union?

Robert Kaplan:

What’s happened to our media is—keep this in mind about television—the history of television is very interesting because who are our great television commentators when television was young? Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley. All of them were print journalists, because they couldn’t have come from broadcasting because it didn’t exist. I mean, Howard K. Smith authored a book about every country in Europe. It was like a gazetteer. He went through the politics and history and geography of every country in Europe, including Portugal and Bulgaria. He spoke German. He interviewed Hitler in Berchtesgaden in the 1930s. He was a true intellectual, and he became an anchorman, a TV anchorman, and that’s not a contradiction in terms for that period. But as television became established and went on for decades and decades, it produced a class of people, people who never wrote an article in their lives, essentially, who are essentially performers and, therefore, shallow in a sense. And what’s happened to TV, we can see, it’s split. It’s bifurcated according to political persuasion. There is no centrist, moderate, basic TV that anyone can trust. If you don’t like what’s on one channel, you flip to another. So it’s not a force for national cohesion. Quite the opposite.

Rollie Flynn:

You can see how the Taiwan standoff could lead to something analogous to The Sicilian Expedition. But you have mentioned Ethiopia, a couple of times, as also having a potential impact of global proportions. Can you elaborate on how that might happen? And a plug for FPRI: we’ll be having an event on Ethiopia on January 10th that would benefit from this perspective.

Robert Kaplan:

I was looking at a map at FPRI’s office just a few moments ago before this talk. And I noticed how much the political geography of the horn of Africa has changed in just like 40 years. You had an independent country. You didn’t have South Sudan. You had one unified Sudan. And other things, and so the borders within the horn of Africa are very fragile in this sense. And the war between the center of Ethiopia and Tigray and the north is ongoing. Recently, the intrusion of drone warfare, courtesy of the Turks and the United Arab Emirates, to help the regime in Addis Ababa has turned the tide of battle, at least temporarily now. And so the horn of Africa is drawing in Turkey and the Arabian Gulf. It is situated at an entry point to the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean, one of the great choke points for commerce and geography. It’s part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. You can see Chinese-built skyscrapers in Addis Ababa and a Chinese port in Djibouti. So what happens in the horn of Africa in this developing, singular global system does not necessarily stay in the horn of Africa.

Rollie Flynn:

A financial question: in your opinion, are the present financial gambits, such as quantitative easing, budget deficits, and so on, across the globe, able to cause a crisis in a context similar to the fate of the Weimar Republic, i.e. a path to war?

Robert Kaplan:

I wouldn’t put it in those extreme terms because the worldwide recession of the 1920s was of a scale where you had 40% unemployment in certain places. You had inflation in the thousands of percent. I don’t see that happening. There are more controls and consultations between financial leaders now than ever before. So I don’t see it leading on a path to war or anything remotely resembling Germany in the early 1930s. But nevertheless, will this cause a greater crisis than what we have now? Well, the answer is nobody knows. Nobody can tell you whether inflation’s going to be stabilized soon or not. Everyone has theories, but nobody really knows. Nobody. Just like nobody can time the stock market. You’re dealing with complex interactions among multiple parts of the earth, involving currencies, lending, et cetera. It’s very hard to make predictions.

Rollie Flynn:

One question that wasn’t asked but has been in the news a great deal is migration and refugee flows and having political impacts in many places. Can you comment on that?

Robert Kaplan:

That’s something I left out, and I should not have left it out because when something like billions of people are crossing borders every year, hundreds of millions are leaving their homes for some place else, and it’s not all because of poverty and war. New middle classes tend to move. New middle classes in Africa that suddenly they can vote with their feet and have frustrations caused by rising expectations and can say, “This country is taking too long to reform. Let’s move to Europe or someplace like that.” So migration also shrinks the earth, in a psychological sense, because you have more people among you from other parts of the world. Just look at how Germany has changed. It used to be in the Cold War terms, they had a Turkish minority and that was that. That was it. Now it’s become a universal society all its own with migrants and refugees all in, all learning to speak German. So migration is a factor in the psychological shrinkage of the earth.

Rollie Flynn:

I’m going to end, since we have about three minutes left, on a positive note with a question: what’s the most optimistic thing you can say about the current US political system? And I think I’ll expand it to the world as well.

Robert Kaplan:

The US political system, it survived 2016 to 2020. It survived January 6th. It’s more flexible than people realize, I think. The question of the US political system is, can it function as well in the digital video era as it did in the print and typewriter age? Because really, from George Washington right up through the 1970s and ’80s was what I call The Greater Print and Typewriter Era. So that’s the question. Can it function as well? But America has had several bouts of progressive upheaval, starting with Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. So it’s shown itself to be capable of reinvention in one form or another.

And in terms of the world, COVID-19, which I didn’t mention my whole talk, and which I also could have included, because it sort of unified the planet—you see people in the most remote regions of the Middle East or Africa wearing masks that look surprisingly similar and, in fact, are similar to the masks we’re wearing. So, yes, it’s divided society, and it’s clearly had a politically divisive effect here in the United States, but it’s also unified the world in this sense. It put everyone on the planet earth into dealing with the same problem. Even if some could deal with it faster than others, better than others, and even some were in more fortunate circumstances, everyone on earth was working against the same problem.

Rollie Flynn:

Bob, thank you for an extraordinary conversation this morning, and thank you, again, to our supporters and members. Happy new year to all of you, and I hope to see you at future events as well as on our website. Take care.

 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.