Ep 198: Robert D. Kaplan on Crisis

Robert D. Kaplan, Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Robert D. Kaplan, who is the author of, is this right? 23 books?

Robert Kaplan:

Yes.

Aaron MacLean:

23 at this point on all sorts of things. Folks may remember, Balkan Ghosts, The Revenge of Geography. I first became aware of your work probably about 20 years ago now, Robert, when you were doing a lot of writing for The Atlantic on the US military after 9/11, and that had a big impact on me. It's a delight to have you. Thank you for joining.

Robert Kaplan:

My pleasure, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

I would not describe your most recent book, which is called The Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, as the most cheerful read someone might do in 2025, but I think it's an important argument. Before we get to that, though, can I ask just a bit about your career in your life? You grew up in New York, right?

Robert Kaplan:

I grew up in Queens-

Aaron MacLean:

In Queens.

Robert Kaplan:

... like Donald Trump, but I'm much different than Donald Trump, in Far Rockaway, Queens, and that's... and I went to school at the University of Connecticut.

Aaron MacLean:

When you were a kid in Far Rockaway, what did you think your life and career were going to be like? And did you have any inclination in the direction of how it actually turned out? What were you picturing?

Robert Kaplan:

I had no inclination, really, but I had likes. I liked books. I liked all kinds of books, especially fiction, and I grew up... Oh, just I learned an early habit, which was to always read seriously. Never read pulp bestsellers, never read what everybody else is reading. If you only read what everybody else is reading, it doesn't matter if you've had the greatest Ivy League education, by middle age, you'll be a mediocrity in a sense.

So I learned how to search out books and to develop reading habits. I learned about bibliographies and how to find gems in bibliographies and all of that. And to this day still, I read a lot of fiction. I find that literary fiction, especially from the 19th century, the Russians, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, can tell you a lot more about the world than political science.

Aaron MacLean:

Did you figure out this style of reading and in the way to direct your curiosity on your own? Or did you have a teacher or teachers who helped you here?

Robert Kaplan:

I had some teachers, but it was mainly on my own. I did have... I had two very memorable teachers at the University of Connecticut who taught courses that you cannot teach anymore because it was like a survey course about great early 20th and late 19th century literature, and these are books that are just passé now, or all the authors were male, that kind of thing. You couldn't find a course like that anymore, but it was just wonderful. It was worth its weight in gold.

Aaron MacLean:

And then, you go into journalism, you start writing books, and it's what? It's Ethiopia and Afghanistan are the first two, and then-

Robert Kaplan:

Correct.

Aaron MacLean:

... Balkan Ghosts is the third one.

Robert Kaplan:

Right. Yes.

Aaron MacLean:

Balkan Ghosts it's still read, it's still discussed. How does... I don't know exactly how to frame this question, but there are any number of people who are interested in politics, interested in books, and are interested in international politics, who would like to write a book that people will still be talking about 20 or 30 years on. Did you have a sense when you were working on it that it was important in some way, or what came together there?

Robert Kaplan:

Well...

Aaron MacLean:

Or was it sort of timing? Tell me the story there.

Robert Kaplan:

Yeah, the backstory is that I lived in Greece in the 1980s, and Greece is right next to the Balkans. It's part of the Balkans. And throughout the 1980s, I made constant trips throughout the Balkans. Now, in the 1980s, the media had no idea of the Balkans.

The media was obsessed with wars in Central America and Nicaragua and El Salvador with the ongoing civil war in Lebanon with the Soviet invasion and mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan. The Balkans hadn't been heard of in a news media sense since the Second World War, and even then, really the First World War.

So I started doing pieces, and then I had a long piece in the Atlantic in 1989, not only before the Balkan War started, but before the Berlin Wall even fell. And before even the first crisis that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall had even fell.

So in fact, I'll never forget it, I started out the piece saying, "Places like Sarajevo and Belgrade are the Managuas and San Salvadors and Beiruts of an earlier world," meaning echoing back to the First World War. And anyway, it turned into a book.

And because the book was the only thing out there that was recent and relevant about the Balkans, even though there was almost nothing about Bosnia and Herzegovina in the book, I just ignored those areas because I didn't know that those were going to be the centers of conflict, the book became a bestseller.

And the lesson there is don't go to a headline place and write a book, because by the time the book is published, there'll be headlines in a different place, and nobody will care anymore. But I wrote a headline book before it became a headline. It was out on the market then. And since then, the book has become both famous and highly controversial and hated all at the same time.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, right.

Robert Kaplan:

And therefore still sells.

Aaron MacLean:

The President, President Clinton was photographed carrying it. I vaguely remember this too. I mean, I'm [inaudible 00:06:54]-

Robert Kaplan:

I don't remember at all.

Aaron MacLean:

... quite in this phase of this story.

Robert Kaplan:

I remember that he misinterpreted the book-

Aaron MacLean:

Right.

Robert Kaplan:

... as did many other people. But as a wise editor told me, "You don't get to choose how a book is interpreted." You know?

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Robert Kaplan:

"All you can do is write a book and get it out there, and people will interpret it any way they please."

Aaron MacLean:

So well, let's talk about the most recent volume then. You've written a lot in the last 10 years or so about the... well, to quote you, "The revenge of geopolitics," the way in which the linear progress of the post-war era and of globalization, which you call in this new book, Globalization 1.0, seems to be running a ground on old realities. And this book is kind of... it's like an extended essay in the crisis or the nature of the crisis, a kind of permanent crisis.

Robert Kaplan:

That's what it is.

Aaron MacLean:

[inaudible 00:07:58]-

Robert Kaplan:

You got it perfectly. It's an essay, but you cannot call a book an essay anymore. You have to call it a book, because essays don't sell. I mean, so you have to call it a book, but it's really an extended essay, and it's a think piece about our world today. And it was finished before the presidential election, before Joe Biden even decided not to run again.

So I kind of skirted Trump, and I even skirted Gaza a bit because that had just started when I finished writing the book. But nevertheless, the book is relevant for the Trump era, I feel, because it basically paints a world of permanent crises where we can never catch our breath. And it explains why that is so.

And it's because of the way that technology has not just defeated geography, but has shrunk geography so that we're all in... we all inhabit this claustrophobic, anxious world where we're all stuck with each other and we have to try to make it work, but of course we can't. So there's a crisis everywhere. And a crisis in the Far East can affect the Middle East, can affect the United States, and we get impassioned about things half a world away and argue with each other about it.

And this is the effect of geography and technology kind of crushing into each other, if that makes any sense. And I compare the world today to Weimar, Germany, not in the sense that there'll be another Hitler, but in the sense that Weimar was this place of constant crises, loosely governed, badly managed, where there was one catastrophe after the other. And yet, at the same time, it was full of magnificent writing, poetry, arts, architecture, and possibilities, and people had no idea where they were headed to.

Aaron MacLean:

Say a bit more about Weimar. This is ostensibly a history podcast. Just help listeners who may not be up on the details understand a bit about how it came to be. How did this constitution come to dominate Germany to the extent it could after World War I?

Robert Kaplan:

Yes. Well, after World War I, a group of scholars, constitutional experts, politicians, and others in Germany got together in Weimar, which is in central dirt Germany in the region known as Thuringia, which was in southwestern East Germany. If you can remember East Germany during the Cold War, as I vividly do. And in this town, they devised the Constitution, and they were terrified of having a ruler as powerful as another Bismarck or another Kaiser Wilhelm II.

So what they did is something we all do from time to time. We overlearn a lesson. We say, "I'm not going to repeat this. This'll never happen again." And we go too far. The pendulum swings too far. And so the Weimar Constitution not only made it difficult for a dictator to rise, but basically made it hard to govern the country at all in the first place. You had such a division of power, so many interlocking points, so much power given to Prussia, to Bavaria, to other places that nobody could really adequately govern it.

And if you put that together with a lot of vivid politicians at the time, but ultimately mediocrities, when you think about it, like our world today, I mean, we rattle off the names of Clinton, Obama, Keir Starmer, and Britain and all. They're all. They're not world historical figures in any sense. And Weimar limped on from one permanent crisis to another, on and on until it was all shattered by the Nazis. Now, that's where the similarities between Weimar and our world today end. There's not going to be another Hitler leading the world or anything even close to that. But because of the way technology has shrunk, geography, we're one big Weimar now.

Aaron MacLean:

There's a lot there, and I want to get to different pieces of it, but just to start with the mediocrities, just accepting the premise for purposes of conversation what's up with all the mediocrities? Why... I remember, probably about 10 years ago now, Kissinger talking a lot about a crisis of leadership, but in the West. He was quite specific at that time.

This is before Ukraine 2022, obviously. And his case at the time was people like Putin and Xi seemed, from a point of view of strategic decision-making, seemed to constantly be a step ahead of the West. But if you look at us at the Europeans, et cetera, there's something there something was something that didn't live up to the standards set by his heroes.

Robert Kaplan:

First of all, my position is similar actually by a world historical leader. I don't mean somebody good. It could be somebody terrible, somebody awful, but somebody who just has power and influence over a significant time in history for many years. And Xi and Putin fall into this category. And so, actually, does Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel when you take into account he's been Prime Minister longer than anyone else in Israel's history. Israel is an impossible country to govern in many respects. He's juggling 20 things in the air at the same time, and he deals with levels of stress and criticism that would immobilize the average American politician.

But you wouldn't call him a good guy either. He's a world historical figure, and so is Trump in a way. But if you look back at the last really significant in a positive sense, American president was George H.W. Bush. He was the last aristocrat in the White House, essentially. It wasn't the good things that he did, it's the bad things that he prevented from happening, like a Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe during the ending of the Cold War, a break in relations between the US and China after Tiananmen, and a few other big things like that. But after the Cold War ended, people were in this nirvana for a period of time, and you got presidents who were vivid and we argued about and were interested in at the time.

But my point is that from a standard of 50, 75 years ago... from now, people are going to think of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as sort of like we think of James Garfield and Rutherford B. Hayes. Now, George W. Bush was a significant president for a bad reason because of the way he mismanaged the Iraq War. Otherwise, he would fall into this category too. And I think so. I think that Trump, Netanyahu, Xi, and Putin are all world historical figures, and that says something very depressing about our world because we don't have anyone in the West really who rises up to that level of dominance or... I don't want to use the word greatness, but just of significance.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm mindful of your thoughts on reading when we started this conversation. Does a failure to read in a certain way have something to do with the mediocrities? I mean, I just want to ask you what's the cause of this? Because it's-

Robert Kaplan:

No.

Aaron MacLean:

... an interesting point.

Robert Kaplan:

It's more complicated than that because Barack Obama is a very serious reader. So is Bill Clinton, and Obama is probably an intellectual. He probably rises up to the level of an intellectual in that sense. So it's not just reading, it's also a life experience, the juice of one's personality.

It's a lot of factors that go together. Donald Trump doesn't read. He's post-literate. He can look at a spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet or something like that, or send a social media post on a smartphone, but he doesn't read books. So he makes decisions that have world historical consequences without at the same time being aware of his own significance.

Aaron MacLean:

Do you think, though, just to press my point a little bit, that an Obama or a Clinton, for that matter, are reading things in the way that you describe needing to read things? That is to say, reading unconventional view. It's the unconventional approach that seemed important in the way you were outlining things earlier. I have pretty-

Robert Kaplan:

It's also about reading deeply.

Aaron MacLean:

Oh.

Robert Kaplan:

Reading deeply. And philosophers say very simple things, but you have to think about it. It's very, very deep. Like Friedrich Nietzsche writes that most people are not ready for independence. And you say, "Well, that's a dumb thing to say. Most of us are independent and all of that." He said, "Most states are not ready for independence."

90% of the states in the world are independent. He doesn't mean it that way. What he means is they're not rising to their proper capability because they're not extraordinary in any way. And the only reason they exist is because nobody bothers or sees it in their interest to attack them. So it seems simple and outrageous, but it's actually a deep thought.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. So, back to Weimar, a lot of the parallels that you draw seem relatively clear. I guess when we're looking to be optimistic and push back a little, we don't have, at least since '08, we don't have the kind of economic problems that they had with hyperinflation early on.

Robert Kaplan:

No.

Aaron MacLean:

And even '08, honestly, wasn't. [inaudible 00:19:29] it was bad, but it wasn't that bad. So that's in the good news category. COVID was bad, but it wasn't exactly the First World War, I think.

Robert Kaplan:

Right.

Aaron MacLean:

So I guess one [inaudible 00:19:43] pushback, Robert, would be, it could be worse or would have to be worse for it actually to be Weimar.

Robert Kaplan:

For it actually to be Weimar, yes, but the similar... This is one of those, why do we use historical analogies? Because in most cases they're wrong, but in small cases they're very striking and revealing. So it's the similarities with Weimar that I find revealing, even though the differences are great.

Aaron MacLean:

For somebody who's a large chunk of your career has been spent sort of offering at least what others would describe as realist, correctives to over-enthusiastic visions, you care a lot, it seems, it's evident in this essay, it's evident in other things you've written about authoritarians versus liberals. You prefer the liberals. You have real thoughts on individual leadership.

You have a great line in this book that seems to me to sum up something important, but I want to ask you to explain it, where you say, I think it's history. "History is geopolitical, but it's also Shakespearean." There's a human dimension to the case you're making and a focus on contingency that to me is a little different from the sort of cookie-cutter academic realism that at least students are exposed to. What are you after here?

Robert Kaplan:

Yeah. All right. In another book that you haven't mentioned, The Tragic Mind, I wrote that it's all about maps until it becomes all about Shakespeare. And what I meant by that is it's all about vast and personal forces, you know, big pieces of the map colliding with each other in a global chessboard, natural resources, big population movements, oil and gas, and all of that.

It's all about those things until it's all about what happens at a summit meeting between two leaders, or between what is it about the personality quirks of this leader that changes history, so to speak? So the vast and personal forces of geography, economics, et cetera, are the backdrop, the stage setting on which individual... significant individuals act out history where just an expression or a phrase or a wink of the eye can change the direction of a part of the world every bit as much as the big map can.

Aaron MacLean:

What is your prescription? What are we going to do?

Robert Kaplan:

And let me just add, Donald Trump is Shakespearean. I mean, you could imagine Shakespeare dealing with a character in a way like Trump. Of course, Trump is of the digital video age. He's... We can't imagine him outside of that technological era, but in a way, it's the kind of... these kind of mysterious personalities that really make Shakespeare what he was, when you think that Shakespeare invented human character in a literary way.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, actually, let me go in a slightly different direction then. I certainly... I haven't been around for quite as long as you have been. I've been around for a little while, and I certainly share the general view that things seem to have reached a kind of pitch, like a kind of cacophonous intensity that seems like it can't go on, but it actually seems to keep going on, if anything, to be getting slightly worse year to year.

And no one, I think, rational could deny that technology plays some role in that. Of everything that's happening right now, and I feel like I could ask this question a different way each week these days. But obviously, you have war in Ukraine, you have war around Israel, you had something coming close to a war in India, Pakistan, you have the Pacific, which we're all waiting for. We're all waiting for something terrible to happen there. How do you prioritize these threats for yourself? What worries you the most?

Robert Kaplan:

All right. What worries me the most, and which I'm now writing about in a book is if you want to look at it cynically, the war in Gaza, the Middle East, and Israel's wars, the war in Ukraine, have not affected stock markets or financial markets much. In fact, it's been very impressive how financial markets have priced in these wars with barely a ripple to someone's retirement account statement. India and Pakistan's the same way, unless, of course, one or both sides uses nuclear weapons, but that's unlikely.

And also, even if it happened, it probably wouldn't be like a permanent downturn in the market. But the one part of the world where a shooting war could be devastating for financial markets and therefore for all of us, and also for our world and our lives, our lifestyles would be a war in the Western Pacific in Taiwan or the South China Sea because there you have the world's largest economies, the US, China, Japan, all with high-end weaponry. You have the most important global supply chains.

Just for example, the Taiwan Semiconductor in Taiwan that produces the trip, the chips. You have the world's most... from an economic point of view, the world's most congested and critical sea lines of communication, trade, all of that. So geopolitics doesn't really all that much, I would argue, affect financial markets, but it could. It could. That's why you have to put the Taiwan question in a higher and different category than the ones... than about the Middle East or Ukraine.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, I've heard it argued. In fact, I'm pretty sure President Biden said this at some point, at least in some fashion, that what you just said actually means there won't be a war because, of course, collapse of international markets would be bad for China economically as well as for the United States.

Robert Kaplan:

Exactly. In fact, the backend of my argument is that it's precisely this fear that works on both sides that would make war unlikely, just like it was the fear of hydrogen bombs that prevented war in Europe during the 44-year-long Cold War. The fear of economic catastrophe on both sides would prevent a military conflict in the Western Pacific.

Aaron MacLean:

And you're not worried... You're working on this right now. I'm very curious to know that we here in the West prioritize markets, wealth, material outcomes more than Xi, but or more than sort of generic Chinese communist nationalist leader that they like, Putin, for example. Putin...

I remember debating with friends in the lead up to the 2022 invasion, what was going to happen, obviously, but what could his goals be? And I remember colleagues of mine saying, "Well, what could he possibly be after here?" And another colleague of mine chimed in, "Guys, what if he's just after Ukraine? What if that's what he's after?" And I actually thought that that was one of those sort of simple but deep points. What if Xi's just after other things?

Robert Kaplan:

First of all, Xi is committed to getting back Taiwan, but it doesn't mean that he's committed to an invasion. The two are very... The two could be very different. He could adjust his timeline for it. Number one. He could do it by little, little salami tactics, the way they're taking the South China Sea, the way they have been taking islands in the South China Sea for the last 15 years now.

So it doesn't necessarily mean conflict, but keep in mind that wars have begun in history even though that neither side wanted it to happen. Wars occur through miscalculation. So that's an important point to keep in mind. I mean, Gaza is a terrible human catastrophe, but it doesn't affect our world in the way that a military conflict in Taiwan or the South China Sea or the East China Sea would.

Aaron MacLean:

No, I just wanted to push back a little bit on that last point because again, your reputation and your contribution has been in so many ways to be a corrective to... well, to liberals in a way or a certain kind of liberalism. But there's a version of we won't have a war because it will be very costly. That is a kind of... It's sort of Norman Angell 101. War is impossible because it'll cost everybody money. And so obviously it won't happen.

Robert Kaplan:

It's irrational.

Aaron MacLean:

Some-

Robert Kaplan:

It's impossible [inaudible 00:29:32]-

Aaron MacLean:

... listeners may know. I think he published that in 1911.

Robert Kaplan:

Yeah.

Aaron MacLean:

It was a unfortunate timing for his book.

Robert Kaplan:

Yes. There was actually a very perceptive essay in The Wall Street Journal about half... four or five days ago, maybe a week ago, by Barton Swaim. And his point was that neither Trump nor Steve Witkoff understand, at any level, Vladimir Putin. They're completely in over their heads because they think Putin is just a wheeler-dealer like a Western politician. If you give him what he wants, he'll take it. It's a matter of making a deal.

And what Barton Swaim wrote was that, according to the... if you know anything about Russian history and Russian culture, in Russian tradition, there's this savage obsession with sacred honor where human life means something much different than it means in the West. That, in Russia, newlyweds go to war cemeteries together to be photographed. There's this obsession, which we don't do in the West, which there's this obsession in honorableness to violent death that doesn't exist in the West. So, Putin doesn't care about all the civilians he's killing. That's not what keeps him up at night.

What keeps him up at night is losing power and the consequences of that. So I think the liberal corrective is to think that, because it's logical that all of us want a better, more democratic, more human rights-oriented world, the world wants the same thing. It's sort of an example of, because we've had a happy experience with mass democracy over 250 years, our experience with mass democracy is more important than Libya's historical experience or Chad's historical experience. In other words, it's the mistake of projecting your own assumptions and values onto every other country in the world.

Aaron MacLean:

Have you had a chance to meet Putin or Xi or any-

Robert Kaplan:

No.

Aaron MacLean:

... of these other characters?

Robert Kaplan:

No, no, no, I haven't.

Aaron MacLean:

Okay. So we haven't gotten actually to the reason for the title of your book, which obviously is a reference to T.S. Eliot, but you write a lot about cities in the postmodern city. Speak to that, and that we have a few minutes left. You're not an enormous fan of the postmodern city, as you put it.

Robert Kaplan:

No, no. Well, I do talk about somebody who was, at length, Jane Jacobs, the great Canadian American urban scholar on urbanity and urbanism and all of that. And Jacobs was warning against the very things that in many cities in the world have become, which is just places for wealth and crowds. What scares me the most is the combination of social media of urbanization that leads to a kind... that intensifies crowd psychology and that diminishes the individual.

Remember, it's always been the individual rising above the crowd that is the essence of liberalism, that is the essence of freedom. If you go back to John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, it's all about the individual and the right of the individual not to have to buy into what everybody else is thinking or what everyone else is demanding that they think in other words, and it's this intensification of crowd psychology that bothers me.

Aaron MacLean:

AI and the intersection of AI with education terrifies me. I've been hearing about plans to sort of integrate AI into student composition. And that's one element of it. Another element is obviously the students, like students everywhere.

And this was just covered in, I think it was a New York Magazine piece, a harrowing piece about how basically students just aren't doing work anymore as you and I would have understood it in our student days, because to get a good grade, you want to produce something polished, and it's safer to get ChatGPT or whatever to produce something for you.

So there's this combination of sort of across-the-board surrender and total hollowing out that's sort of occurring at the same moment. And it makes me wonder if anyone's ever going to read anything ever again on some level. It sounds a little hysterical, but...

Robert Kaplan:

I mean, I just struggled through a rereading of Dostoevsky's Demons and of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Now they're both some of the greatest works of fiction ever written, but they're not easy to get through. Not even for me. It takes a certain amount of discipline, and that's for even people of our generation.

There are riches beyond what you can imagine if you can do so. But it's hard. And in today's world, a student being assigned The Brothers Karamazov or something would probably just go online to get a summary of it enhanced by ChatGPT, or if not enhanced by it, almost doesn't matter. There are so many cheat sheet summaries of all of this that they don't even have to read it.

So what I do is if you have to assign something, assign a good summary, a literary summary, a brilliant summary written by someone like Northwestern University Russia expert Gary Saul Morson, writing about The Brothers Karamazov, at least then the students can gains and get something out of it rather than just going to an AI-generated summary. But no, this is our ability to think and analyze, and remember might become atrophied because of artificial intelligence.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, yes, indeed. And that seems to me to... potentially aggravate the already difficult situation that we're already in when everyone is a kind of... everyone of good feeling is a kind of mediocrity because they were never made to be anything else. And I actually wonder, Robert, the extent to which the degradation is kind of already pretty well set in before this wave of things. Here you and I are sitting here sort of implicitly comparing the educations that we had positively compared to the educations that young people are getting.

But the truth is, I was looking to some... there's this interesting Twitter account that has a old exams, both university and school exams from the turn of the 20th century say, and I saw one just the other day that was demanding students comment using quotations from the original Latin on whether or not [inaudible 00:37:24] societies produce better literature or not, or something like that. It was more literate than that, but it was a kind of an interesting, thought-provoking question where the student was clearly going to have to perform with some pretty extensive recall of original Latin text. And I never sat through anything like that in my education.

Robert Kaplan:

I know.

Aaron MacLean:

We're just going to progressively lose the ability to even assess how bad we've got it.

Robert Kaplan:

Yeah, we will muddle through, though. I think the most profound... In recent readings of mine, the most profound statement I came across was by the British Philosopher John Gray, who's very much with us and extremely wise. And in his book on Hobbes interpreting Hobbes for the modern world, it's called The New Leviathans, he writes that not only is there no end of history, there's no direction for history, that we will have more democratic times, we will have more authoritarian times, and one will reverse and another will start.

We'll have decades where, which will seem optimistic, we'll have decades that will seem pessimistic. As long as you accept that there is no direction, you can escape this kind of liberal determinism where everything has to get better. And that's what progressive ultimately means, belief in progress with a capital P, so to speak. And that's in a way what John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin were battling against, and also Albert Camus when they wrote that it is up to each of us ultimately to struggle because the outcome is not given to any of us in advance.

Aaron MacLean:

Robert D. Kaplan, author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you very much.

Robert Kaplan:

Thank you so much for having me.