Robert D Kaplan
Forget multipolarity. A worldwide, bipolar military conflict has begun. It will unfold in stages, feature hot war in certain places for extended periods of time, and cold war in other places and times. It will be the organising principle of geopolitics for years to come. It is not a “clash of civilisations” as the late Harvard professor Samuel P Huntington put it in the early 1990s, but it is a clash: a clash of broad value systems that, while emerging out of national cultures and age-old traditions, are essentially modern and postmodern in their origins.
It is a bipolar struggle that combines the global war on terrorism with great-power conflict. Rather than the latter supplanting the former – as the conventional wisdom had observed – following the end of America’s post-9/11 Middle East wars and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two dramas now run together. One side of this bipolar world features gangster states such as Russia and North Korea; totalitarian states such as China and, again, North Korea; a revolutionary and terrorist state such as clerical Iran, with all of its proxies in the Middle East; and a movement that is at once age-old, industrial and post-industrial: anti-Semitism. These enemies of the West are more formidable and nihilistic than the old Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China.
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