Waste Land

By Robert D. Kaplan

Random House, 224 pages, $31

T.S. Eliot wouldn't have minded Robert D. Kaplan's expropriating the title of his most famous poem for "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis." The decline of the West and the birth of modernism are among the poem's themes; Mr. Kaplan's book, on the unhappy and precarious state of the globe, is similarly pessimistic on many fronts.

Mr. Kaplan, a scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the author of many books on global affairs, makes three broad points. First, he analogizes the current world, all of it, to Germany's interwar Weimar Republic. He argues that, as Weimar was in permanent crisis, so the entire planet is now "an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules." That has long been true, but the extraordinary density and rapidity of modern communications now create a "closeness" that people in earlier eras did not experience. And since "complexity leads to fragility," as Mr. Kaplan says, instability and conflict are riskier and more pervasive than in bygone days when geography prevented local conflicts from becoming global.

Second, Mr. Kaplan argues that America, China and Russia are all in decline, although at varying rates and for widely different reasons. The U.S. suffers from "decay in the culture of public life, especially the media," Mr. Kaplan writes. "As the media has become less serious, so have our leaders." He compares Dwight Eisenhower, general and war hero, to Donald Trump, whom the author calls "the epitome of self-centered, emotional impulses."

Drawing an analogy with the late Ottoman Empire, Mr. Kaplan thinks contemporary Russia is the "sick man of Eurasia." But he stresses that Russia's decline "is on a different scale entirely" and that it's "in a far more advanced state of rot" than the U.S. Both America and Russia had their own "disastrous wars of choice," in Iraq and Ukraine respectively, but Iraq was not nearly as important to American interests as Ukraine is to Russia's. U.S. decline, he says, is "subtle and qualitative," while Russia's civilizational slide is "fundamental and quantitative." Tracking China's worsening political leadership, Mr. Kaplan contrasts the "underrated" record of China's Deng Xiaoping with that of his successor Xi Jinping, "a Leninist ideologue" who has returned China to a "die-hard authoritarianism" comparable to the totalitarianism of Mao Zedong.

This competition among great powers, even receding ones, may sound like most of pre-20th-century history, but it sets the stage for Mr. Kaplan's third point: that the West is in decline. He sees global urbanization as "the primary change in geopolitics," with cities as "the conservative's worst nightmare." Although we shouldn't need a reminder, Mr. Kaplan provides one: Technology and civilization are not the same thing.

Crowd psychologies and excitable public opinion create a kind of mob, both through physical and communications proximity, thereby accelerating especially America's decline. Some obscure tweet, for example, goes viral, speaking for masses of people who have dangerously abandoned their own individuality. All this is compounded, as George Orwell depressingly writes in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," by the "erasure" of history: "Nothing exists except an endless present." In the U.S., Mr. Kaplan distinguishes between the conflicting views of those living in cities versus those dwelling in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "that vast obscurity . . . where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

Mr. Kaplan's analysis has enormous implications for U.S. strategy abroad. It's telling that the author of "The Revenge of Geography" (2012) now concludes that "the finite earth is gradually losing the race against technology and population growth." The closeness he describes brings everything, for good and ill, near. "Every place, every river and mountain range," he writes, "will be strategic." The cyber age means "the enemy is now one click away rather than thousands of miles away."

The isolationist impulse on the American right has never been healthy, but in the world Mr. Kaplan describes, it is nonsensical. Policies sensible in a world in which enormous distances meant conflicts could be contained are today not merely outdated but dangerous. This shift has been under way for some time, of course. Neville Chamberlain was wrong for many reasons to describe Germany's lust for Czechoslovakia as a "quarrel in a far-away country" when the conflict was already in Great Britain's backyard. Vice President JD Vance's recent condescending lecture to Europeans in Munich referred to election controversies in what he labeled "remote Romania," reprising Chamberlain's glib, arrogant and ultimately destructive lack of situational and strategic awareness.

In light of the existence of major nuclear-armed and adversarial powers, and numerous lesser threats along a broad spectrum, America's grievances against its allies must be seen in perspective against broader menaces. Complaints that allies aren't carrying their fair share of the common-defense burden are justifiable and have domestic political appeal, but mere complaining is not strategic thinking. The right course, in Mr. Kaplan's "close" world, is not for us to do less and our allies more -- that's Mr. Trump's hazy view -- but for everyone on "our side" to do more to confront multiplying global threats.

Contemporary policy prescriptions are not Mr. Kaplan's immediate objective, but his analysis will provoke them. His seemingly inexhaustible capacity to analogize and extrapolate is compelling and helpful, even if some of his parallels, like the one with Weimar Germany, don't bear the load he imposes on them. A better fit to today's closeness might well be Europe's post-Reformation religious conflicts, or Archduke Franz Ferdinand's 1914 assassination, which ignited a continent-wide conflagration, literally laying the groundwork for Eliot's poem.

Despite Mr. Kaplan's pessimism, his conclusion is the only right one: "We have no choice but to fight on, as the outcome is not given to any of us in advance." Here Eliot's line remains inspiring: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins."