The New Age of Tragedy

Robert D Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson

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The post-Cold War moment, a 30-year period when globalisation and free trade were orchestrated under the aegis of American supremacy, is ending. As the historian Anders Stephanson has written, “One could not deny that geopolitics reduced to a set of mopping-up operations was a historic achievement of US power.” Today, great-power rivalry, war and the competition for diminishing resources are old realities reborn, revenants of history that now define a present of increasing peril and uncertainty.

In The Tragic Mind (2023), the American correspondent, author and foreign policy adviser Robert D Kaplan argues that we must learn to think tragically to avoid tragedy. We need what he calls anxious foresight. The wisest among us fear disorder and anarchy as much as tyranny.

But thinking tragically is not fatalism. It is understanding our limitations and acting with more effectiveness.

For this wide-ranging exchange, we asked Kaplan, the Cambridge political economist Helen Thompson and the philosopher John Gray to explore what we are calling this new age of tragedy, and how societies might navigate and endure the gathering storms.

Weimar Germany connotates the ultimate doom: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. More specifically, Weimar was an unstable political system that existed between late 1918 and 1933, born in the ashes of the First World War and ending with the ascension to power of Adolf Hitler. Our world is unlikely to be headed for such moral darkness. Nevertheless, Weimar constitutes a model of sorts. It was a system composed of a parliamentary upper house, a lower house, small states, and two large ones – Prussia and Bavaria – that were to some extent laws unto themselves. Complex and prone to bickering, Weimar was a classically overloaded political regime that existed in a state of perma-crisis. Such is our world today.

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We do not have a world government; nor do we have any truly effective world governance. But owing to the shrinkage of geography caused by technology, there is an emerging world system, in which crises can migrate from one part of the Earth to another. Greater interconnections mean that any place or continent can be considered strategic and affect all the others. It is a global Weimar, where there is always a crisis.

The 20th-century computer scientist and polymath John von Neumann once said that the finite size of the Earth would become a source of instability. As populations rise in absolute numbers, as more and more human beings live in complex urban settings, and both weaponry and communications – especially cyber – develop and become more sophisticated, the Earth will eventually become just too small for its volatile politics. That is why, like Weimar, our world today seems so anxious, claustrophobic and unstable.

There is surely trouble ahead that will require anxious foresight and tragic thinking on our part. Tragic thinking encompasses many things, among them the realisation that fear is useful. We have to use fear without being immobilised by it. Above all, we must realise that given such a claustrophobic and overloaded world system, the assumption of linear progress is a dangerous notion to entertain.

The idealists among us say that geography is not determinative, and that fate is ultimately in the hands of human agency. But human agency need not have positive outcomes. Individuals such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are human agents who have caused a vast and bloody war in Ukraine and are driving Asia toward a high-end military conflict over Taiwan. In fact, as world geography shrinks, the price for human error and human malevolence grows. The margin for error narrows, so thinking without illusions becomes necessary.

In such a world, all political leaders must be realists, aiming for the lesser evil rather than for the ultimate good. And yet unbounded idealism mixed with hubris still threatens disaster. Suez, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so on constitute a drum roll of avoidable disasters. And precisely because of the shrinkage of geopolitics produced by technology, there will be increasingly greater, even cataclysmic costs for such failures in the future. That is why in Ukraine and Taiwan we have to find a middle ground between acquiescence to authoritarian rule and inflexibly demanding perfect democratic outcomes. We have to get used to the prospect of many disappointments ahead.

John Gray

Aglobal Weimar riven by new technologies and resource scarcity is our default condition. The task is not to shore up a semi-imaginary and defunct Western-led “rules-based order”, but to avoid catastrophic conflict in a post-hegemonic world.

The US will remain a great power. Even so, American decline is a trajectory human agency cannot alter. The idea that a nation now so intractably divided could construct a new international order is far-fetched.

Intensifying political polarisation poses a question about the capacity of American government to execute any long-term strategy. Even if it is defensible in legal terms, Trump’s indictment confirms that the justice system has become a weapon in partisan political warfare. As the next presidential election approaches in 2024, the US is entering a legitimation crisis.

This implosion forms the background of an accelerating international retreat. Saudi Arabia’s joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, Brazil, South Africa and Malaysia opting for closer ties with China, and India being increasingly non-aligned testify to America’s rapid descent. China’s proposals for peace in Ukraine may be vague and not altogether serious, but Russia cannot be restrained without Chinese intervention. A multipolar international system is already in operation.

American strategists are fixated on a world that belongs in the past. China has major vulnerabilities, including an economy weakened by Xi’s ruinous Zero Covid policy and an army that has not had combat experience since the Sino-Vietnamese border war of 1979. The US, despite the drawdown of some of its armaments for use in Ukraine, retains formidable military capabilities battle-honed in decades of almost continuous foreign conflicts.

Yet America is unprepared for the war so many in Washington think is coming. It has offshored much of its industrial base to China. It continues to be heavily reliant on China for medical supplies and on Taiwan for high-end computer chips. Even if a national industrial strategy of the kind Joe Biden has launched is consistently implemented, remedying this self-inflicted dependency will take many years.

The world situation is similar to that in the run-up to 1914. New technologies have not overcome rivalry over scarce natural resources, only shifted its focus. A new version of the late-19th-century Great Game is being waged for strategic metals in Africa and the resources of Siberia and central Asia. Beginning as a response to russian aggression, the conflict in Ukraine has morphed into a proxy war between great powers in which resources are as important as ideology.

The least illuminating way of understanding this conflict is a collision between democracy and autocracy. There will be democratic states and tyrannies, along with myriads of hybrid regimes, in any foreseeable future. The hubristic fantasy of a global liberal order must be replaced by realism, restraint and an unceasing struggle to stave off disaster.

Helen Thompson

If we live on a finite Earth, we live in a geopolitical world in which the competition for resources creates winners and losers. The Weimar Republic began after Germany was defeated in the contest to control the energy source on which modernity would depend in the 20th century: oil. Victory in the Great Game in Eurasia between the late 19th century and the First World War went first to Britain and France in the Middle East and then to the Soviet Union when it reconquered the Baku oil fields in 1920.

Weimar’s answer to Germany’s defeat was to apply technology to the energy resource that Germany did have in abundance: coal. The first synthetic oil produced at the Leuna plant during the Weimar years was a triumph of German science and engineering. But technological success could not save German democracy. The Weimar Republic still needed to import oil as well as other resources, and that required a world economy in which Germany could be a trading power. When the 1929 stock market crash saw American investors retreat and the start of the economic depression, the Nazis easily exploited Germany’s humiliations. Hitler then sent Germany down the path of total conquest to procure resources and agricultural land by annihilating the populations whose lives already depended on them.

Today the Weimar problem is global because no state is protected from the hard world of resource competition that Hitler drove to such hideous finality. The shale oil and gas boom of the 2010s gave the US a respite from the foreign energy dependency that had trapped it in a succession of disasters in the Middle East. But the growth rate of shale output has slowed, leaving the Biden administration at the mercy of decisions made by the Saudi-Russian-led cartel Opec Plus. For the best part of two decades russia has been the world’s energy-exporting superpower. But the imposition of Western sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine has made it harder for russian companies to develop the Bazhenov shale basin in western Siberia, without which the russian oil industry will decline. Meanwhile, as governments across the world attempt to direct a low-carbon energy revolution, this competition for resources includes an ever growing list of raw materials.

The idea of linear progress always hid the problem of resource depletion under an a priori assumption that technology would ride to the rescue. Our tragedy in the West is that, for all the catastrophes of the 20th century, we still carry this hubristic world-view, blinding us to the complexity of our collective human predicament on a finite Earth.

Robert D Kaplan

Indeed, a finite Earth will feature a zero-sum contest for resources. Think of our present and future world as we do early modern Europe: competing states rammed up against each other, periodically at war, with little extra physical space to manoeuvre.

The late military historian John Keegan explains that Britain and the US could champion freedom only because the seas protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty”. But continental Europe through the middle of the 20th century had no such luxury (and only afterwards because of an American security umbrella). And now that technology has contracted distance, reducing the protective power of expansive waters, the world itself has rediscovered the fate of an earlier Europe, where realism and pragmatism reigned.

The new Saudi-Russian Opec Plus is an example of this process, in which the contraction of distance has encouraged de facto alliances across yawning regions so that, with China moving closer to both russia and Saudi Arabia, a true Eurasian power system has come into being. It will be a claustrophobic world where technology won’t always be able to rescue us. That is why linear progress is a delusion – since even when technological fixes arrive to solve problems, they often arrive too late to prevent conflict and suffering.

Unlike in the two world wars, America will no longer be able to act as an unencumbered policeman on the world stage. As it is today, the US was intractably divided in the 1930s, when racism, anti-Semitism and right-wing hatred of Franklin Delano Roosevelt were prevalent. But the Second World War, a total war involving mass conscription, gave the US dynamism and unity.

When the war ended, the American economy dominated the world. That is no longer the case, particularly because China is a full-spectrum great power, with the world’s second-largest economy and a technological base that manufactures both high-end military and consumer products.

Yet, China faces grave economic, social and political problems of its own. Indeed, since the Ukraine War has dramatically weakened russia as a great power, it may be that all three powers – the US, China and russia – are in decline, though in different ways and at different speeds. But decline is relative, so one or more of these powers may continue to maintain leverage over the others in the foreseeable future.

The Royal Navy began its decline around the turn of the 20th century, yet Britain went on to help defeat Nazi Germany almost half a century later. That’s why decline itself may be overrated. Therefore, in this increasingly smaller and conflict-prone world, just as we should not become idealists ideologically demanding democratic systems everywhere, neither should we become fatalists, as there is much work to do.