Not content to mangle readers' understanding of crises in Ukraine and the Middle East, Kaplan turns to Asia-Pacific. Outside predictable and banal generalizations about the rise of China and India, Kaplan has an uncanny capacity to get his every claim wrong. There's "the unprecedented arms race being undertaken by East Asian states" which he tries to square with the fact that the region spends but 20% of the globe's share of preparations for war. He describes Asia-Pacific as "the most important part of the world for the US" but fails to explain why there are more Americans under arms in Europe or Afghanistan, or that NAFTA is more important to the American economy than APEC.
"Notice," Kaplan tells us, "that all these disputes are, once again, not about ideas or economics or politics even but rather about territory," as if territory was somehow disembodied, separable from political and economic systems or nationalist ideology. "Nationalism, especially that based on race and ethnicity, fired up by territorial claims, may be frowned upon in the modern West" but you know those East Asians. Kaplan must pay zero attention to American, French, Italian, Canadian, Scottish and Spanish politics.
An India led by the BJP "will likely pursue a fiercely geopolitical foreign policy," as if there were another sort, and as if previous Indian governments were easily pushed about. China "faces profound economic troubles in the coming years." Show me a world leader who wouldn't trade China's economic troubles for his or her own. China has problems with its Uighurs and Tibetans although 90% of Chinese are of the Han persuasion. Show me a Republican politician who didn't wish white people made up 90% of the American population.
And so on. Why does John Kerry's "nineteenth century" live on in the twenty-first? Because US foreign and defense policy, among other forces, regularly reanimate it. Neither Kerry nor Kaplan can admit that American (neo)imperialism and gunboat diplomacy existed both before and after the demise of superpower competition, and are the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world. The collapse of the Soviet Union permitted even more reckless behavior by a United States no longer wary of Moscow's reaction. George H. W. Bush's "new world order" was but hypocritical rhetoric to cover his Gulf War and invasion of Panama, coming mere months after regime change in Russia. Kaplan omits inconvenient facts that run counter to his "naà ¯ve Western elites" thesis, like decades-long development of the Empire of Bases, that worldwide network of facilities, depots, ports and landing strips that underpins US global dominance, originated before the Cold War, and has grown ever larger since.
Kaplan is blind to the failure of "Western elites" to kick their addiction to fossil fuels. There's no reference here to how they've plunged the extraction syringe into ever more remote, ever deeper "territory and waters." It's "cold-blooded analysis" of this "geopolitical" choice that explains a great deal of contemporary global competition and strife. Kaplan offers instead some eyewash about living "in a world where geography is respected," where "the worldwide civil society elites thought they could engineer is a chimera." A worldwide civil society would globalize liberty, equality, and democracy. Citizens would organize across borders for minimum and maximum wages, ecological sustainability and alternatives to planetary suicide, education and health care as human rights, universal improvements in the status of women and girls. How many Davos devotees are trying to engineer such a world?
Why bother with Kaplan if he's so wrong about so much? Because he's useful to the same elites he gently (if falsely) lampoons. He's another "imperial messenger" (Bà ©len Fernà ¡ndez's label for Tom Friedman), clogging up establishment communications channels with contradictory, clumsy, and clueless messages of support for American Empire. Who'd want someone as ham-handed as Kaplan for a pitchman? He writes better than Friedman, and he justifies maintenance of the political-economic-military status quo; he'll do just fine. Exposing Kaplan also matters because some readers are surely impressed by his apparent (wrongheaded) facility with history. Imperial propaganda masquerading as steely-eyed realism, even if sophomoric and supercilious, should be revealed.
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