“Few events can be as debilitating as a great victory,” wrote the eminent liberal Israeli journalist Amos Elon in his 1971 book, The Israelis. Elon was referring to the Six-Day War of 1967, which gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories. Israelis rejoiced, unaware that they had been given a poisoned chalice. America’s victory in the Cold War in 1989 followed a similar pattern: when Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed one after another, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and its policy elite basked in triumphalism, seeing democracy as the natural order of things to come. The war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties did not shatter the smug belief in a linear direction of historical Progress entertained by the powers-that-be; both events were horrific, but they were localized. Convinced that no geopolitical threats existed anymore, America sold its military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new kind of war, whose goal was purely humanitarian. Such was the misleading effect of the victory in the 44-year-long Cold War.

The realization that the end of the Cold War had given us not peace, but an even more dangerous and far more unstable world occurred in stages. And 9/11 was the first shock, magnified by the technology of television, which repeatedly showed the twin towers in lower Manhattan collapsing into a fiery pile of dust and rubble. The event hit Americans, lulled into the complacency of the Nineties, with the psychological force of Pearl Harbor, to which it was repeatedly compared. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the world was already at war. The Nazis had already occupied France, and were at the gates of Moscow. The Japanese had already invaded China and committed the Rape of Nanjing. Thus, for Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on the Axis Powers was not only the right thing to do, but also the natural thing.

Suggested reading

America is lost without idealism

By Robert D. Kaplan

The direction of history after the attacks of 9/11 was not so clear. The world was otherwise at peace. The Chinese were still in the early phase of building a great navy, around which their military capability would be oriented. Moreover, China was still governed by the reformer Jiang Zemin, a leader friendly to the United States. Vladimir Putin had been in power less than two years and was still consolidating control. It was unclear in what direction he would take Russia. Great power conflict was the furthest thing from people’s minds.

And so, with China and Russia out of the mental picture, the public debate went from unreflectively assuming democracy was about to overtake the world to falling in line behind the Global War on Terrorism. In this way, 9/11 was incorporated into post-Cold War triumphalism. Indeed, as 9/11 had demonstrated, and as the conventional thinking went, the Arab world was politically sick, and the cure was to bring democracy to the greater Middle East.

The administration of President George W. Bush was actually slow to come to this conclusion. Caught off guard by the devastating attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House, burdened by guilt and thus determined that no chances could be taken in protecting American security, immediately conceived of a war to topple the Afghan regime of the Taliban, the hosts of the 9/11 killers. Two months after the attacks, the US military and its Afghan allies occupied the Afghan capital of Kabul. Victory had come easy, perhaps too easy, owing to an innovative, economy-of-force strategy emphasizing special operations forces and local Afghan fighters. But again, without much reflection, rebuilding Afghanistan was turned over to the big, conventional US Army bureaucracy, whose conception of Afghanistan — despite inventive interludes under certain commanders — would turn out to be analogous to that of the Soviet occupiers in the Eighties, who themselves withdrew in defeat.

Because Afghanistan was too easy (as it was then thought), and 9/11 still reverberated in a loud, deafening manner, a bigger response was conceived: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime in Iraq. After all, from a human rights perspective there was no worse regime in the world except for North Korea’s. And Bosnia and Kosovo had set the pattern for humanitarian interventions. As I can attest from reporting on the ground in the Middle East, Iraq back then was actually far more repressive than Iran, which had an element of democracy built into its theocratic system under the reformist president Mohammed Khatami, and more repressive even than fellow-Baathist Syria. Though the proof of Saddam aiding al-Qaeda was very flimsy at best, he was certainly supporting many other Arab terrorist groups. Then there was the issue of Iraq seeking a nuclear bomb, which not only the American intelligence community but other Western intelligence agencies assumed to be the case. This is not a defense of invading Iraq — a war I initially supported — merely an argument of how it was not outright madness to consider such an action in sequence, considering that China and Russia were not yet on the radar screen as great power threats, and 9/11 still overwhelmed the public debate.

History is ironic. Had 9/11 not occurred; had Saddam not acted like a guilty man, trying to convince the world that he had a nuclear program even though he didn’t; had the Bush administration’s guilt over 9/11 not led it to a take-no-chances approach in the Middle East, there likely never would have been an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

History is also governed by odd contingencies. Had several Arab armies not threatened Israel in the spring of 1967 — specifically, had King Hussein of Jordan heeded the many warnings not to open a military front against Israel in the West Bank — Israel would not have come into possession of an Arab population totaling 1.25 million at the time. The Jewish settlers’ movement never would have been born, forever deforming Israeli politics in the process. Egypt would have stayed stuck with ruling Gaza. And later on, Iran’s clerical regime, despite its hatred of Israel and the Jews, would have had much less propaganda material to work with. The results of the 1967 War could well be interpreted as a tragedy for Israel; just as the effect of 9/11 could be interpreted as a tragedy for the United States even beyond the initial, massive loss of life, spawning as it did a long and misconceived occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous war in Iraq.

The problem is that extremism can be emotionally satisfying, especially after a great event or catastrophe. Moderation does not do well when people are literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem like after the 1967 War, or baying for blood like after 9/11, or likewise after 7 October 2023 in Israel. Calls for regime change in Iraq or flattening Gaza appeal to the emotions and not to the intellect. That is their strength. The nuanced, middle-of-the-road technocrats and area specialists are at their weakest in such moments. The last American president who after a great, foreign outrage pursued limited objectives was the moderate conservative George H. W. Bush. Following Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked aggression of Kuwait in 1990, Bush decided to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule but otherwise leave Saddam in power and not invade Iraq, where America would likely have been bogged down for years to come. By saving his successor, President Bill Clinton, from this fate, Bush allowed Clinton to inherit a largely pacified geopolitical climate that, in turn, allowed Clinton to focus on humanitarian wars-of-choice in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the relatively benign geopolitical climate bequeathed by the elder Bush was largely responsible for the naïve hubris of much of the American policy elite in the Nineties.

Remember that after the Napoleonic Wars, it was enlightened conservatives such as the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, the British statesman Viscount Castlereagh, and the French statesman Talleyrand who, by not pursuing extreme and vindictive solutions, however emotionally satisfying they would have been at the time, bought Europe almost a century of peace. Ironically, it was the assumption that peace was the natural order of things that led several great European powers to stumble naively into the First World War.

Similarly, the success of limited interventions in Panama in 1989, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 allowed significant sectors of the American elite to believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the US military could do anything in a world ordered to American goals and interests. It was this delusion that allowed the United States to stumble into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond the gargantuan loss of life and treasure that the 9/11 wars cost the United States and the affected local populations, perhaps the greatest catastrophe was America’s grand strategic distraction while Russian and Chinese power grew exponentially. The decade of 9/11 wars was the decade when the Chinese military, especially its navy, unleashed its momentum of growth which continues to this day. Meanwhile, Putin consolidated his power in the Russian military and intelligence services, permitting him to rebuild the armed forces under virtual one-man rule for the first time since Stalin.

Suggested reading

The cost of Russia's collapsing empire

By Robert D. Kaplan

The result of all this has not been pretty. Terrorism has certainly not been eliminated. As Joseph Conrad showed in The Secret Agent (1907), all it takes is an angry, politically motivated individual or two, burrowing in the heart of a city, anonymous to their neighbors, to perpetrate great atrocities. And great power conflict now exists alongside terrorism. Despite the attempts by middle-level powers to navigate between the United States and China and chart a course of their own, the very survival of the global system is now in jeopardy. This is the world that has followed what was believed to have been the triumphant end to the Cold War. And 9/11 was a crucial inflection point in this tragic process: distracting us when we should have been focused on Russia and China. It was indeed a great head fake.

Alas, there is no relief from history. The rise and fall of great powers is never-ending, and policymakers’ tragic mistakes are baked into the process. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was avenged by the US victory over Japan in 1945, the United States is still searching for some sort of meaningful historical reply to 9/11 a quarter-century later. Indeed, our 9/11 wars, particularly in Iraq, only emboldened clerical Iran and enlarged its geopolitical footprint. The current war with Iran is part of the process that began with 9/11. The attacks brought us into a generational military struggle in the Middle East that shows no sign of abatement. And it isn’t only the Middle East’s inherent instability that is the problem, but our very obsession with it. Tragedy, as Shakespeare repeatedly shows, is borne of obsession.

The United States is no different. Ever since it became (in functional terms) an empire following the Second World War, it has had its own vision of a universal world state built on the ideals of liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism was not only for liberal Democrats, but for Republicans, too, even if they have since abjured the term. Both major parties believed in spreading democracy, or at least paid lip service to it, even if they differed when it came to the pace and methods. American diplomats often dealt with dictators not because they preferred to, but because they knew they had no choice. Of course, that universal world state of democracies was a distant and unrealistic goal: not an immediate objective. But it was, nevertheless, a goal. And that goal made all the difference to the way that America saw itself and the world saw America. The fact that the world was frequently disappointed with America was precisely because it expected better of it. For better and for worse, the American imperial experiment had values at its heart: whether it was “a city on a hill” that would mind its own business and yet shine as an example to other nations, or aggressively seek to implant democracy abroad.

This was true of even our most flawed post-Second World War presidents. Take Richard Nixon, whose opening to China was not a case of naked, cynical transactionalism. Far from it. Higher principles were involved. They were rooted in an essay Nixon published in Foreign Affairs in October 1967, “Asia After Vietnam”, in which the future president argued that global stability required inviting Communist China into the family of nations. In fact, there was relatively little transacted in Nixon’s historic February 1972 trip to China. Basically, both sides stuck to their principles while the Taiwan circle was virtually squared, with the United States essentially recognizing only one China, while Beijing’s rulers essentially accepted that they could not conquer Taiwan by force. The point of Nixon’s trip was less to negotiate than to make it clear to the world, through a series of ceremonial meetings, that the United States now had a civil relationship with Communist China and sought an understanding with it. This gave Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the leverage they needed to achieve détente with the Soviet Union and stabilize the Cold War.

Nixon’s ideals were masked behind a complicated and at times sordid reputation, which would be forever tarnished by Watergate. But America’s yearning for a more democratic world was more obvious in the Carter and Reagan administrations, where openly expressed ideals were a vital element of national power. Kissinger and President Gerald Ford negotiated the Helsinki Accords with the Soviets, which subsequently provided a vehicle for Jimmy Carter to hold the Eastern Bloc to account on human rights. Ronald Reagan’s stark rhetorical differentiation between the American and Soviet systems gave hope to tens of millions in Communist Eastern Europe, as I can attest from being a reporter there at the time.

American power mixed with idealism held fast, even when it least seemed to. In July 1989, a few weeks after the Tiananmen Square massacre, with the media and intellectual community outraged at China and demanding tough action, President George H. W. Bush sent his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and deputy secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, on a secret visit to Beijing to reassure Chinese officials that relations would not be broken. This laid the groundwork for stable relations as the Chinese regime proceeded to further liberalize the economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen, as well as sending more and more students to the West to be educated, creating untold prosperity for its people. It also helped stabilize the Asia-Pacific region. Bush’s action, though it seemed cynical, actually wasn’t. It was built on a realistic interpretation of American ideals.

The three Democratic presidents of the post-Cold War era — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — may have made mistakes in office, as all presidents do, but they were consistent in their support for democracy, human rights, and compassion for refugees. It infused their foreign policies, perhaps to a fault, as critics allege. But what stands out is the prominence given to the human rights, refugee, and international development bureaus in the State Department under their watch. Those bureaus were legacies of both the Cold War and its aftermath. They were legacies of the Cold War in the sense that such bureaus were meant to telegraph the humanitarian concerns that differentiated the ideals of the United States from those of the Soviet Union. They were legacies of the post-1991 age because of the way they addressed what came to be called global concerns: those beyond great power politics. Those bureaus may have lost their way to an extent since, and were certainly in need of reform and belt tightening. But their decimation by the Trump administration does violence not just to the tradition of Democratic presidents, but to Republican ones, too. Some of the greatest work done by those bureaus was under the Reagan presidency, as I detailed in my 2021 book.

Obviously, there was Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But all these wars were, in addition to much else, about idealism run amok. They began as quixotic struggles and ended up destroying presidencies. Poignantly, in painting portraits of military veterans, George W. Bush may have found a way to psychologically deal with the foreign policy disaster he unleashed. Though a requirement for American greatness, idealism can also be dangerous, since it can lead one into unnecessary fights.

More from this author

America is lost without the centre

By Robert D. Kaplan

That leads us to Donald Trump, who says his policy is to avoid leading the United States into more wars. That is an admirable goal. But shorn of any vision for a better world, it can be interpreted as mere weakness or isolationism. After all, the United States is not Sweden or Canada. It is a great power. And great powers project force in defense of principles. Those principles may involve cynicism and self-delusion, but the very fact of having to morally justify one’s actions can be disciplinary. Russia does not even bother to defend or justify its mass killing of civilians in Ukraine. In America’s case, a certain amount of idealism has led to great periodic miscalculations throughout the decades, in which presidential reputations have been held to account, but idealism remains the basis on which power is employed in the first place.

This is because without ideals or principles there is no trust, and therefore no reliable allies. What has held NATO together for three quarters of a century has been a large dose of idealism. When the United States, led by Trump, stopped believing in NATO and the ideals that sustain it, the Western Alliance was undermined.

In a claustrophobic world, where geography has been shrunk by technology, a weakened Western alliance in Europe will only make America’s Asian allies nervous. This is because in terms of geography, population, and economics, China is the natural organizing principle of the Asia-Pacific region. The United States, situated on the other side of the globe, is present in the Asia-Pacific only because it wants to be. And it wants to be because of a vision of free societies — call it liberal internationalism, if you will — which works in tandem with economic and strategic interests, strengthening them rather than conflicting with them. It is all of a piece. Were America to remove values from its relationships with Japan, South Korea, and its other Pacific allies, it could force them to seek greater accommodation with China, their biggest trading partner. This is how transactionalism turns on itself. A nakedly transactional world is a world of no rules, and, therefore, no order.

Actually, none of this conflicts with realism. True realists, like Nixon, Kissinger, and the elder Bush, had a sense of history that provided them with a mature sense of the tragic. They knew that things could go horribly wrong if they were not extremely careful. In foreign affairs, they worshipped truth because the truth of a situation is often unpleasant. Trump is no realist because he has a disregard for the basic facts. He believes in nothing beyond a mechanical exercise in dealmaking. Whereas true realism is not merely a technique but something more, which is ultimately not in conflict with America’s idealistic mission.

Trump may succeed here and there, in making this deal with the Saudis or that deal with the Qataris. But because there is no higher purpose to anything he does, American power itself — a blend of material interests and moral values — is undermined. The presidencies from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Joe Biden, including both Democrat and Republican, with all of their mistakes and disappointments over 80 years, manifested the apex of American power because of the higher purpose they aspired to. That era is over and has been replaced by something consciously amoral and therefore decadent. This is what decline looks like.

In his book The Inevitability of Tragedy (2020), Barry Gewen shows how Kissinger’s doubts about democracy ultimately accounted for his world-weary view of geopolitics. Likewise, the great philosophers of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance well understood that without the minimum virtue on the part of its practitioners, democracy, like any system, was vulnerable. That is why Arendt and Strauss were particularly unnerved by the ideological witch-hunts of the McCarthy era in the late Forties and Fifties in the United States. But at least back then there was the rectitude of presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to ultimately protect the system. Now, it is the occupant of the Oval Office himself who constitutes the mortal danger.

Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, the killer of Weimar. But he is a destroyer of institutions, of constitutional safeguards, and of the very demeanor of political life in America. He is the impresario of American political decline for a reason that is so obvious it goes virtually unnoticed: the loss of the center in American politics, leaving the system at the mercy of both Right- and Left-wing ideologies. The late Polish philosopher Czesław Miłosz, in surveying the pathologies of Cold War-era communism, noted that the great attraction of ideologies was a “fear of thinking” for oneself, so that the masses had extreme ideas prepared for them by others. We have reached a similar moment in today’s America, where the advancement of communications technology has produced social media mobs driven by simplistic messages and passion. And passion is the enemy of analysis. It is impossible to imagine Trump outside of the digital-video age.

It turns out that what protected America for so long was the more primitive technology of the print-and-typewriter age, which led to a deeper exploration of issues and generally avoided simplistic thinking, and was thus a barrier against mass ideologies. The print-and-typewriter age upheld America’s vibrant and stable democracy for most of its history. It is unclear whether American democracy can succeed as well in our new media era.

Another reason the center has vanished is the fact of globalization itself. Rather than unite the world, globalization has split countries down the middle. In the United States that has meant the creation of a cosmopolitan, wine-sipping, European vacation-oriented upper-middle-class intimately connected with the outside world, and a working-class stuck in the old nation-state. There is even a geographical basis to this divide, with the globalized half inhabiting the two coasts, as well as the urban areas and college towns in-between, and the non-globalized half living in that vast rural obscurity defined as flyover country.

Finally, there is a flaw in democracy itself that the Founders well understood. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison preferred a republic to a democracy: that is, he favored a limited democracy with elite safety measures. One could argue that America remained crucially a republic for as long as the party bosses chose presidential candidates. But that ended some decades ago, when the primary system was gradually established, allowing voters to choose their own candidates for the presidency. Because of low-voter turnouts in primaries, the new system favored the extremes who were more motivated to vote. In fact, the party bosses never would have chosen Trump in 2016; they would have preferred the boring but supremely competent Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who would have governed like his father and not like his brother. America is now a fully fledged democracy and the result is Trump.

Since mass democracies function best in the political center, it is worth exploring what the center and the loss of it has meant to American politics. For that loss is the real fruit of globalization and the digital-video era, justifying the fears of Kissinger, Arendt, and Strauss.

Suggested reading

China is ready for battle

By John Rapley

The center made Congress work, both as a balancer against the executive branch and as a producer of good laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. When the Republicans were a center-right party and the Democrats a center-left one, there was always a large philosophical overlap of senators and congressmen from both parties that got things done. That is no longer the case, as the Republicans have become a radical populist Right-wing party and the Democrats a radical progressive one.

The center also produced a vital unity in foreign policy, so that the party out of power in the White House generally supported the foreign policy of the party in power. Politics, it was said, stopped at the water’s edge, so that America spoke with one voice when it came to matters on the other side of the two oceans. That is long gone, too. Now America’s foreign policy oscillates by 180 degrees between one administration and the next, so that foreign governments no longer wholly trust the United States.

The center produced a dedicated and competent federal bureaucracy, including a Foreign Service elite that staffed the many dozens of embassies and consulates abroad: so that problems in a myriad of countries, especially in complex and troubled ones like Pakistan, Nigeria, and Colombia, were well handled before they reached the level of the secretary of state and the White House. The Trump administration is in the process of gutting this bureaucratic cadre which for decades kept American foreign policy far removed from both Left- and Right-wing ideologies. The so-called deep state, as I have written elsewhere, based on my own experience as a foreign correspondent for decades, is vastly superior in knowledge and common sense to the Right-wing ideologues who are now suspicious of it.

More from this author

Will America share Rome's fate?

By Robert D. Kaplan

Finally, and most profoundly, the loss of the political center has meant that elections have been invested with dangerous existential significance. Whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans who are in power, there is now the phenomenon of the tyranny of the majority, with the 52% who voted for the winner tyrannising the losing 48%. In normal democracies, elections don’t — and shouldn’t — matter so much.

The United States has experienced the same phenomenon and worse in its nearly 250-year history. There was the presidency of Andrew Jackson from 1829 to 1837, and the Civil War itself from 1861 to 1865. Jackson was a rather rough-hewn military commander from Tennessee, with much Native American blood on his hands, who scandalized the genteel Virginia and Massachusetts elites who had run the country up until then. It was a geographical factor — the country’s westward expansion — that brought him to the fore as a man from the frontier; just as it was a geographical issue — the question of whether new western states entering the union would be slave states or not — that instigated the Civil War. And it is, in part, a geographical issue — the encroachment of the outside world upon American shores through globalization — that is key to the country’s present dysfunction.

In each case, the country’s physical horizons have expanded, discomforting the elites. But the American West was ultimately absorbed into the body-politic of the nation in the late 19th century and a new political consensus arrived at, with all of its variations. Similarly, globalization, which despite the new tariff regime is inexorable in so many subtle ways, could absorb all of America and help lead eventually to a new consensus. But that very process could itself require new battles and upheavals. In any case, the German-Jewish intellectuals who had personally experienced the end of Weimar were right to worry about their newly adopted land.

Over time, a weakened Russia will likely be a harbinger of chaos across its periphery. Empires since antiquity have provided a solution to chaos. But empires, as they collapse, leave chaos in their wake. History has provided no solution to this conundrum.

The pattern is usually the same. An imperial hegemon cobbles together a domain of many ethnic groups, forcing them to lay down their arms against each other. An empire may last hundreds of years and yet build nothing except a tenuous inter-ethnic truce. This has been the story of the Russian Empire and its shadow zones in the Caucasus, the Balkans, stretches of Central and Eastern Europe, not to mention stretches of Siberia and the Far East. But as the hegemon weakens, fights for control of territory between one group and another commence.

The case of Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus is the most telling. Stalin put this ethnic-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan for the same reason he burdened other Soviet republics with large ethnic minorities: to make it impossible for any of them to secede from the Soviet Union without inter-ethnic war tearing them apart. Fighting between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis (Azeri Turks) began following the weakening of the Soviet Union in the late-Eighties under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, leaving the Armenians in control of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since then, Armenia has looked to Russia as a patron who could not only keep the regional peace, but also keep their ethnic compatriots in place.

But sensing Russia’s growing weakness, the Azerbaijanis took back the enclave last year by force of arms. The President, Ilham Aliyev, provided assurances over the decades that he had no aggressive intentions. But, having built up his armed forces with money afforded by massive oil revenues, and sensing an opportunity provided by Russia’s distraction in Ukraine, he pounced. Next, Aliyev may send his soldiers across southern Armenia to link up with the ethnic-Azeri enclave of Nakhichevan, bordering Iran. Or, he will use the implicit threat of doing so to extract a corridor-of-sorts through negotiation.

Meanwhile, in the Balkans, violence flared not that long ago between masked Serbian gunmen in the north of Kosovo, home to a large Serbian minority, and Kosovar Albanian police. The Kosovars blame organised criminal elements supported by neighbouring Serbia for the attacks, while authorities in Belgrade struggled to deny their involvement.

More from this author

The tragedy behind Kissinger's realpolitik

By Robert D. Kaplan

Throughout his time in power, the Serbian President, Aleksandar Vucic, has played a delicate game, serving in turns as an ethnic arsonist and quickly thereafter offering himself up to European interlocutors as a firefighter. But while he seems to have pulled off the same trick this time, Vucic, or someone even more extreme in his government, may judge that a Nagorno-Karabakh moment could be within reach for Serbia, and that it would be in their interest to more thoroughly stoke the flames of war in the region. And, should open conflict between “breakaway” Serbs in Kosovo, Bosnia or Montenegro force the redrawing of borders once again in the Balkans, it’s not clear where that trend would stop.

All this may just be a prologue for trouble across the longitudes of the Russian empire and its shadow zones from Europe to Asia, a curtain-raiser for ugly unrest elsewhere. Just as Aliyev smelled the Kremlin’s relative weakness as he moved into Nagorno-Karabakh, others might act similarly, motivated as they are by separatist tendencies.

Indeed, small Albanian minorities are to be found in Serbia and Greece, with a much more significant number of ethnic Albanians clustered in the west and northwest of North Macedonia, bordering Albania itself. Demographically speaking, a greater Albania already exists glaringly on the map, and this is why the western Balkans are so ripe for Russian meddling, which is what declining empires do in order to throw their weight around.

A Russian attempt to further undermine the already weak state of Moldova could also ignite a few irredentist voices in Romania, who may ultimately want a union with this largely Romanian-speaking territory formerly known as Bessarabia. In Moldova, there is already measurable support for a greater Romania. At the same time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is fixated on the massive loss of territory in all directions inflicted on the Kingdom of Hungary by the post-First World War Treaty of Trianon. The greater Balkans remain a tinder box because of the ugly combination of official borders that don’t coincide with ethnic ones and economies that in many places have not enjoyed the stabilising effects of middle-class life.

The Russians have historically been a major player in the Balkans, and Putin is broadly backing Serbian irredentist claims across the region — in Kosovo and Bosnia — even as Belgrade tries to stay in the West’s good graces. Whereas Putin lacked the economic and military capability to protect the 120,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, threatened by an oil-rich Azerbaijan, it costs him little to stoke petty violence in the western Balkans as a way to keep the region on the boil and out of the arms of the European Union.

More from this author

Will America share Rome's fate?

By Robert D. Kaplan

While the greater Balkans remain fragile, and therefore susceptible to Russian mischief borne of bitterness, Russia itself, as it continues to be militarily and economically preoccupied with Ukraine, could be weakened in its Siberian and Far Eastern back-of-beyonds. This is where republics such as Buryatia and Tuva which have provided troops for the Ukraine war — who have died in proportionally much greater numbers than ethnic Russians from places such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg — could experience breakaway tendencies. Remember: we are dealing with a vast swath of the map that fundamentally lacks the social and political stability of the West and has been relatively stable only on account of an imperial straitjacket.

Disorder might not just spring up from local strongmen pursuing their narrow goals in upending longstanding imperial ethnic understandings. Russia itself may be tempted to overturn things. There is an assumption that the current battlefield stalemate inherently favours Moscow. But even if it does, it continues to drain resources from the Kremlin, making the system over time more militaristic and brittle. And history, from ancient Assyria to Prussia, has been clear that militarism signals the eventual demise of imperial rule.

In other words, an age of imperial decline is upon us. And while an era of new-found freedoms for all the peoples of the former Soviet empire may lie somewhere in the future, for the moment we are facing the greatest threat to world order since 1945. The First World War gave the 20th century its monstrous and tragic direction precisely because it went on for four long years, killing close to 20 million people. Had it ended in 1915 or 1916, Corporal Hitler would not have won his Iron Cross First Class (as he did in 1918) and the Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires might not have collapsed as they did, leaving a vast and unstable void that Hitler, the war hero, was able to ultimately fill. Every month that the Ukraine War drags on, and however well Russia appears to be surviving the war, the potential for unintended consequences grows. The only thing more frightening than a Putinesque Russia is a slowly crumbling Russia with its nuclear arsenal intact.

We are truly living in times that defy simple analysis. We have to be able to imagine the unimaginable. Who could have conceived of nearly two years of trench warfare in Ukraine before it actually happened? Russia’s brutal invasion, replete with vast human rights violations, was met by a Ukrainian populace clearly unwilling to bow down before their former imperial masters. This left the United States with little choice but to come to their aid. After all, the United States may not conceive of itself as an empire, but since 1945 it has been in an imperial-like situation, given its global power.

Suggested reading

Will Britain lose World War Three?

By Aris Roussinos

Yet the Ukraine War, by forcing Russia to lean increasingly on China for support, has fused the conflict zones of Europe and Asia, so that there is now a single Eurasian battleground in a more claustrophobic and crowded world. For its part, China, another former empire, is facing a historic economic crisis that could at some future moment ignite a social crisis, even as Xi Jinping’s regime distracts its population by stoking imperial grievances over its determination to capture Taiwan.

For all the similarities it might have to an empire, the United States certainly cannot ultimately provide order in former imperial hinterlands. It lacks the geographical proximity and the instinctive cultural-historical knowledge to do so. And as the last few decades have bitterly shown, “liberal democracy” is not something that can be quickly and effortlessly implemented in troubled, unstable regions. At best, it’s a rough blueprint for decades of peacetime nation-building.

As a result, US policy needs to be delicately balanced. The US military and economic support of Ukraine must ultimately find a way to continue, whatever Congress does. Completely abandoning Ukraine to Russia would only further whet Russia’s imperial ambitions, even as the material basis for its empire’s continued existence continues to degrade.

At the same time, however, we should not want the war to grind on indefinitely. We should aim to leave Russia chastened but not collapsed, since that would lead to second- and third-order effects from Europe to China even more serious than those I have just laid out. Indeed, we face no choice but to manage the interlocking wars and crises afflicting the Eurasian land mass — for, ultimately, they can’t be fixed.

Once we became friends I did not write comprehensively again about Kissinger, except for one long tribute to his career, meant as an obituary, which The Atlantic decided to publish upon his 90^th birthday in May, 2013. Between that piece, and the superior work on Kissinger’s life and thoughts published by Niall Ferguson, Barry Gewen, and Martin Indyk, I have little to add, except for personal reminiscences of dinner discussions, with Kissinger calling on his several guests to offer their opinions of the great issues of the day — and then replying to them.

At Kissinger’s dinner parties, organised by his brilliant and formidable wife Nancy, whose own presence filled the room, the headlines were often ignored. Discussions ranged from the historic dilemmas of China, Germany, Russia, and the United States to the challenges of the universities to the attributes of great leaders. You got a preview of his later books by being in his presence.

But I think it necessary here to reprise some of my interpretations of his philosophy which I find so crucial — enough so that they bear repeating from my previous essays. For it is Kissinger’s philosophy that I find most important about him, and which constitute a rough guide to his statesmanship: because it is a philosophy whose origins lay in his experiences as a young Jew in Hitler’s Germany and as the son of immigrants in challenging circumstances.

In fact, Kissinger had internalised the lessons of the Holocaust, though they were different lessons from those learned by the liberal elite of his era. Kissinger saw Hitler as a revolutionary chieftain who represented the forces of anarchy attempting to overthrow a legitimate international system, as imperfect as it was. For in Kissinger’s mind, his first book about the diplomatic response to another revolutionary chieftain, Napoleon, offered a vehicle for him to deal, albeit obliquely, with the problem of Hitler. Morality and power couldn’t be disentangled, in Kissinger’s mind.

Suggested reading

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

In fact, Kissinger, as a practitioner at the highest levels of US foreign policy during some of the hardest days of the Cold War, thought more deeply about morality than many self-styled moralists. And the ultimate moral ambition during that period was the avoidance of a direct military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union through a favourable balance of power. The Cold War may now seem ancient, but for someone like myself, who as a journalist covered Communist Eastern Europe, with all its grim, freeze-frame poverty and pulverising repression, it will always remain quite vivid. And were it not for Kissinger’s realpolitik, which allowed for a truce with China in order to balance against the Soviet Union, even as he and President Richard Nixon achieved détente with the Kremlin, President Ronald Reagan would never have had the luxury of his subsequent Wilsonianism.

Indeed, Kissinger was a realist internationalist, like the other great Republican secretaries of state during the Cold War, George Shultz and James Baker III. Realists today have drifted toward neo-isolationism, and have grown literally smaller because of it.

Kissinger’s beliefs, which emerge through his writing, are certainly not for the faint-hearted. They are emotionally unsatisfying, yet analytically timeless. They include:

• Disorder is worse than injustice, since injustice merely means the world is imperfect, while disorder tempts anarchy and the Hobbesian nightmare of war and conflict, of all against all.
• It follows, then, that order is more important than freedom, since without order there is no freedom for anybody.
• The fundamental issue in international and domestic affairs is not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of self-righteousness. For it is self-righteousness that often leads to war and the most extreme forms of repression, both at home and abroad.
• The aim of policy is to reconcile what is just with what is possible. Journalists and freedom fighters have it easy in life since they can concern themselves only with what is just. Policymakers, burdened with bureaucratic responsibility in order to advance a nation’s self-interest, have no such luxury.
• Pessimism can often be morally superior to misplaced optimism. Pessimism, therefore, is not necessarily to be disparaged.

It is true that much of the above is derivative of the great philosophers, especially Hobbes. But it is to Kissinger’s credit that he consciously activated it in the daily conduct of foreign policy.

Of course, Kissinger continues to be hated because of Vietnam. But as strange as it may seem, Kissinger and Nixon, in withdrawing from Vietnam in the bloody manner that they did, demonstrated real character: they believed that they were serving the national interest and proving their toughness to China and the Soviet Union, even as they knew they would be vilified in the media, in all the books written by liberal historians, and in the opinion polls for acting thus.

Suggested reading

Kissinger's final warning

By Thomas Fazi

Their bloody and methodical withdrawal in the face of liberal demands for total and immediate capitulation and a conservative flight from reality (a belief in fighting till victory) had a demonstrable effect in terms of America’s reputation for power in China, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. For Nixon and Kissinger’s foreign policy was all of a piece. You cannot disentangle Kissinger’s brilliant peace-making in the Middle East from his actions in Indochina. Nevertheless, the withdrawal from Vietnam was still faster than De Gaulle’s from Algeria, for which the French leader has been lionised by historians.

As for the judgment of history, Kissinger’s own memoirs, with all of their faults, are vaster, more elegantly written, and far more intellectually stimulating than those of any other American statesman of the period. Kissinger may not have the last word, but he will have something close to it.

Kissinger was a “genuine statesman”, to use the German philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler’s definition: that is, he was not a reactionary who thought that history could be reversed, nor was he a militant-idealist, who thought that history marched in a certain direction. Kissinger’s conclusion was more grounded: he believed less in victory than in reconciliations.

Like the United States during the Second World War, Rome in the course of the Punic Wars became an empire. The First and Second Punic Wars saw Roman power established over Sicily, Sardinia and a good part of Spain — all former areas of Carthaginian influence. Rome also gradually extended its sway over greater Greece and Numidia, the latter coinciding with modern Algeria, to the west of Carthage on the North African coast.

Again, somewhat like the United States, imperialism helped lead to a dramatic increase in wealth in Rome itself, as a class of nouveau riche in the capital benefited from war booty, overseas trade, money lending and the like, according to the late British classicist S. A. Handford. Eventually, the Roman legions would evolve from a mass conscription military to a more professional, volunteer fighting force in order to regulate the vast territories under its influence as an imperial behemoth. The rough parallel with the development of the United States as a great power is hard to ignore, given how Washington itself has developed into a money-culture of well-heeled think tanks and flashy lobbyists, even as the mass conscription army that fought Second World War and Vietnam has morphed into a highly professional volunteer force of working-class youth, culturally divorced from the well-bred policy nomenklatura in the capital.

But the comparison becomes especially eerie when one considers that following the Punic Wars and Rome’s becoming an empire, it immersed itself in small wars against tribes and other chieftains that brought little glory and much political complications to Rome, and were a factor in its gradual decline. Of course, that is the common fate of empire, since to influence large and varied regions of the Earth naturally requires military as well as economic and political involvement. In the oft-quoted words of the mid-20th century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr:

“The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire.”

The young Winston Churchill was reading into the worst nightmare of Niebuhr’s and America’s imperial future when, in 1897, he described Afghanistan in The Story of the Malakand Field Force: “a roadless, broken and underdeveloped country; an absence of any strategic points; a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerrilla tactics. The result… [is] that the troops can march anywhere, and do anything, except catch the enemy….

Suggested reading

Test article

By Freddie Sayers

“The impractical”, the young Churchill wisely continues, “may wonder why we, a people who fill some considerable place in the world, should mix in the petty intrigues of…border chieftains”. Some, whom Churchill calls “bad and nervous sailors”, would simply cut and run, even though that would be impossible under the circumstances, whereas others call for “full steam ahead”, that is, a dramatic increase in military resources until the frontier valleys “are as safe and civilized as Hyde Park”. But, as Churchill intimates, there are usually neither the troops nor the money nor the will to do any such thing. Therefore, “the inevitable alternative” is a system of “gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions”.

Subsidies and small expeditions? Now we are at a point of concision that defines the ancient Roman imperial past and the modern American one. Arguably the signature Roman imperial expedition, which vexed Rome and contributed to much political turmoil in the capital, was the so-called Jugurthine War, which lasted for seven years near the end of the second century BC. We owe our account of it to Sallust, who was born a few decades later in the first century BC, a time when this war fought by the Romans in Numidia against its king, Jugurtha, was still recent and presumably hotly debated. The geopolitics of the Jugurthine War were straightforward. Numidia, to the west of Carthage, had been an ally of Rome and their common hostility to Carthage had cemented their alliance. Yet, following Rome’s destruction of Carthage, Numidia suddenly no longer required Roman protection. That set the context for Numidia’s efforts at erasing Roman influence from its sprawling and difficult geography.

Jugurtha was a brilliant and devious king who fought against his adopted siblings over the spoils of Numidia, and bribed his way to victory time after time by his intrigues with Rome. He corrupted Rome and concomitantly gained power in Numidia. At first he was Rome’s ally. Then he became Rome’s enemy. By the time the Roman power structure realised he had to be destroyed it was too late to avoid a major war in a faraway territory. Sallust describes the war as “a hard-fought and bloody contest in which victories alternated with defeats”. The struggle, he goes on, “played havoc with all our institutions… For Jugurtha was so crafty, so well acquainted with the country, and so experienced in warfare, that one never knew what was the most deadly — his presence or his absence, his offers of peace or his threats of hostilities.”

There are shades of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Jugurtha, in terms of the unconventional threat posed to Rome and the United States. In some cases the imperial power was ultimately victorious, as was Rome against Jugurtha; in some cases not. But the overall effect over time was to subtly and not so subtly weaken the empire.

Suggested reading

America's empire is bankrupt

By John Michael Greer

An analogue from British imperial history was in Waziristan of the Thirties and Forties, when British troops tried and failed to capture the Faqir of Ipi, a radical cleric who, because of his narrow tribal base, appealed to pan-Islamic ideals in the struggle against colonial occupiers. The Faqir, or holy man, whose real name was Mirza Ali Khan, hid out for years in the caves straddling the Afghanistan and Pakistan border, inspiring his troops with sermons on religious war. Despite British aerial bombardment, the Faqir died a natural death in 1960.

Churchill’s comments ring loudly here. A great power cannot often cut and run, nor can it achieve total victory in these small wars. Britain, whose days as a great empire are over, no longer faces this dilemma. But the United States surely does. America is not a country like Sweden or Belgium. It would be simple if it were. Instead, it is, to repeat, a great power. Despite Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States cannot merely withdraw from the developing world, whose very size, political and cultural variety, and general instability guarantees that Washington will regularly face wrenching choices about how to proceed.

The problem is compounded by the nature of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, often disparaged as the “Blob”, because it often thinks according to a single, well-rehearsed mindset. The Blob wants to do great things in this world, because its heroes — those it particularly wants to emulate — were “present at the creation”, as the saying goes. I refer to the American inventors of the post-war order: men such as George Kennan, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and so on. The alliance structure that these men built would eventually, over the course of the decades, win the Cold War. The Blob wants to do something similar: create a new and long-lasting American order.

The difficulty with this grand ambition is that the United States is not the country it was in the Fifties. During that period, America was the only major industrial power in the world whose infrastructure was not severely damaged by the Second World War. This gave the United States a comparative advantage that would last for decades. Back then, it completely dominated the world economy. Its robust middle class underwrote a great navy. It was a real nation-state with a military draft. This was long before the American middle class divided into an upper-middle global elite and a lower-middle trending toward poverty. Moreover, this middle class had just gone to war in Europe and the Pacific, and was consequently understanding of rebuilding Europe and Japan. And the foreign policy elite that guided America, the elite that was “present at the creation”, had themselves just gone through the Second World War, holding key positions. They had a comprehension of the world and the tragic choices involved that the American elite of today often lacks.

Suggested reading

Elbridge Colby: China is more dangerous than Russia

By Freddie Sayers

There is a pattern in all of this: great power wars strengthen a nation and relatively smaller expeditionary wars dissipate it. In our age, a small war means a professional military in fierce combat and a nation at the shopping mall, oblivious to what is going on overseas. When the population at home cannot relate to the fighting overseas, it is probably best if possible not to do it.

The question becomes: can great power conflict over Ukraine and Taiwan rejuvenate America, as it did after 1945? In that way, America would avoid the fate of Rome. Possibly. Of course, there is no mass conscription military anymore and President Joe Biden — despite all the military aid he has been sending — has wisely not committed American troops to the defence of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the national interest in defending Ukraine and Taiwan is clearly much more obvious than toppling an Iraqi dictator or staying militarily engaged in Afghanistan for two decades.

And yet, the Biden Administration is going beyond merely defending Ukraine and Taiwan with arms shipments. It is actually demanding that all countries in the world become democracies, something that the great secretaries of state of the late-Cold War Era, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker III, never would have done. Those diplomats were more interested in reconciliations than with issuing ultimatums. Issuing ideological ultimatums is a sign of decadence, that befits a country that is splitting at the seams politically and with an out-of-control national debt.

The Jugurthine War helped presage the end of the Roman Republic. Will America recover from the stain of its Middle East adventures? It’s an open question. Yet, great power rivalry that will likely continue for years, by engaging the whole society and economy, may change America in unpredictable ways, possibly leading to more political and social cohesion. Meanwhile, possessing a memory of Rome and what it went through can only help.