The World in 2025 with Robert Kaplan: Finding A Way Through Permanent Crisis (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part two of our recent live event with Robert Kaplan for the World in 2025 series. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed.

I mean, I share your perspective and insight, as it were, into the change of the nature of the last four Chinese leaders. But when you look at Xi Jinping's China, even as it is, as you say, increasingly a state whose organizers are sort of trying to run by the precepts of Marxist-Leninism,

Nonetheless, it is also taking revolutionary steps in technology. It may be the first electric state, effectively. Quite something, given the size of China's population. It is also, of course, developing year by year an ever bigger and better equipped navy and army.

Just this week, there were these exercises around Taiwan, including a massive Chinese aircraft carrier, Shandong or something. I mean, could it be actually the case that on this one thing, a focus on China, that the Trump administration is right, that for America...

the big issue in terms of its competitor is China and it needs to prioritize that. - Yeah, no, that's a very fair argument, but how do you deal with it? Let me make the case for Joe Biden's foreign policy regarding China, which I think was very smart and very well executed.

The Biden administration got two historical enemies, Japan and South Korea, to agree to a trade deal and more or less dampened down their hostility and allowed them, though this went unspoken, to focus on the Chinese threat.

It brought Australia over to our side with the agreement to, with the help of Britain to build the nuclear-powered submarines for Australia. You know, Australia was a country that was getting rich off China and being protected by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. So it was sort of a little bit in the middle. Now under Biden, it jumped to our side. It created the

quad, all this. It was a way of strengthening alliances against China, but without threatening China, without creating an atmosphere of instability, so to speak. And I think when you

When you, for instance, institute tariffs or rhetoric, or... This is not... Economic warfare can lead to military warfare. This is one of the things that history teaches.

So I'm very worried about the stability of the Western Pacific as the Trump administration's policies evolve. He's not paying attention to alliances as much as the Biden administration did, though the defense secretary had seemed to have made that point in the last few days. That was a welcome change of perspective. So this is the former Fox TV host who turned boss of the Pentagon who went to

Tokyo in the last few days and delivered the first kind of vaguely reassuring comments to any of America's East Asian allies since Trump took office. And as you say, they are in a state of deep conflict

consternation and wondering whether they need to totally rethink... Because Japan cannot totally trust Trump and because of that Japan, despite its history with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is actually contemplating going nuclear at some point. And not just Japan. No. Poland, Germany.

Right. And all these countries can develop nuclear weapons in the snap of a finger because they have the technological know-how to do so. They don't need advice or imported scientists from elsewhere. So, when we started talking about autocracy, you referred back to the First World War and you seem to imply that

that it would have been better if the empires had survived, if the Austro-Hungarian Empire just kept going? What I mean about that was obviously what I'm talking about is the key thing was the monarchies. The monarchies may have been corrupt, the monarchies may have been tired, but like the Russian monarchy, they were a force of stability and tradition.

And after the First World War, Churchill wanted to keep the monarchies in Europe as constitutional monarchies, like you have in Great Britain now. But it didn't happen. And Churchill's argument was that had the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs, and the Hohenzollerns

been allowed to keep their thrones on a constitutional basis, there probably would have been no Hitler. Because it would have imbued politics with a greater seriousness and stability in all those countries. And, you know, people, empire is not a...

is not a popular word now. But keep in mind that the empire, as I just mentioned, protected minorities much, much better than the mono-ethnic, than the uni-ethnic states that came into being that practiced the tyranny of the majority under democracy. You know, the democracies of Central Eastern Europe were a shambles.

And I ascribe it partially to the fact that the monarchies were just completely done away with rather than kept in a constitutional manner. I'm going to quote your book at you, Robert. A very striking line when you're reflecting on

on the importance of order and stability and how governments have to weigh up their priorities. You write this: "We believe we have morally progressed in our values with an unprecedented emphasis on human rights and environment, but this says little about the stability of a global system beset by clashing interests." So, how do you reconcile those

priorities in your mind. What is a modern government meant to do? I mean, the environment is obviously essential. But care and interest in the environment is not a replacement for a balance of power.

It's just something on the side of it. It's not a security argument. Just like globalization in the 1990s, people thought was a new security system. It was nothing of the kind. It was just an evolution of American capitalism worldwide after the end of the Cold War.

Yes, I look back on that period of the 90s and I was discussing it actually with a contemporary of mine and we both worked in the Balkans and in other parts of the world, including South Africa when apartheid ended. And my friend concluded that we were probably too caught up in a teleology of hope

And you implicitly refer to this actually in your book where you quote from Roger Scruton and you say this, you say, "Hope detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history is a dangerous asset and one that threatens not only those who embrace it but all those within range of their illusions."

So you're pretty down on people who are too hopeful? Unless they're not marshalled by evidence, kind of. It requires evidence and a strategy, and a strategy that's realistic.

One of the reasons why in the 1990s the late Richard Holbrooke was so beloved by journalists and intellectuals was because he was seen as very hopeful and humanistic but with a very hard-headed bullying, I would say, strategy. Well, I'm going to stick to the issue of hope because on the back of your book

an author writes that you offer both warning, and there's certainly a lot of warning in this, and hope that America amidst all this confusion and danger will be all right. I didn't, in all honesty, find much hope in this book. And I just wondered if you could...

Help. Yeah. Present where amidst all this, and I agree with, as it happens, that really matters, but with this, what I took as a bleak prospectus, then where is the Kaplan hope? The hope is in one specific, but one very general. I'll give the general first. The book ends on a note of defense of historic liberalism.

that historic liberalism, more than mass democracy, will keep us safe. Because mass democracy, as we've already talked about, and as the great...

German Jewish philosophers of the 20th century said was not it is not ultimately a solution You know the solution was virtue and where did where does virtue in the modern era come from? I argue that it comes from historic liberalism John Stuart Mill Isaiah Berlin people like that because a liberal is someone who lives in uncertainties and

And if you live in uncertainties, it means you're open to different points of view, as long as they're reasonable. And we all have to recover historic liberalism, because that's where the hope is. Now, the very specific event on hope, I think, is I think there's a fair chance that over the sometime over the next half decade, we will be pleasantly surprised by what transpires in Iran.

I mention this in the book, that Iran's clerical regime is tired. It's in its late Brezhnev phase, as I put it, referring to the late Soviet leader. And that Iran is 85 million highly educated young people waiting to be unleashed into the global economy.

And Iran, I think, if it did have an experimentation with democracy, once the regime was from internal causes only, I'm not talking about an invasion or anything like that, from internal causes only to be displaced or weakened, I think it would be, I think that what happened in a number of countries in the Arab Spring would not be a model.

Because Iran is more urbanized, more developed, more institutionally developed than any of those countries were. So...

You think liberalism just has to... we just have to keep the faith, those of us who believe in it. And liberalism is moderation. Liberalism is about moderation, remember. It's not about... What really scares me about today and about... In fact, the book I'm travelling with now that I'm rereading, it's called The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish intellectual.

And he said that the problem is that too many people are afraid to think for themselves. So they get caught up in ideologies which think for them, in other words. And I think we're seeing that mostly on the right in America, a little bit on the left.

And fueled by technology. And helped along by technology. Because technology presents you with the opinions you should have. What do you make of just thinking of technology and that...

picture of all the tech titans lined up at Trump's inauguration. Is it right to some people have depicted them to see them as the new robber barons of the Gilded Age who just...

running their monopolies? Or is this worse? I think it's more intense. Look, there's always been any system, democratic or not, always has a collusion of money and power. I mean, there are pictures of Herbert Hoover, I think, and Warren Harding, presidents in the early 20th century over 100 years ago, meeting with Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie and others like that. There was always a bit of that. But

This is on a more intense, extreme level. I think that picture of the inauguration will live in history. Of all the tech titans, all of them put together worth maybe $100 billion, right close up, clustered with the Trump family, which has aspirations to be billionaires as well.

And Trump and Musk, two titanic egos, I mean, you've studied presidents and leaders. Can they stay together or do you think it's... What worries me is that Trump

may not be such a rich man as we think. His finances are very murky and messy. And he wants to be. Yeah, and Elon Musk is worth like, what, $40 billion, something in that order. Tesla's gone down a bit actually, I think it's gone down 13% in the last three months. And so he has a hold over Trump that's very unnatural, I think.

Yeah, we're going to come to questions in a sec. I just want to end with one of your historical analogies. So actually you were talking about Gibbon earlier. The most powerful European empire of all time was the Roman Empire. It took a long time to end. It decayed for a very long time before it finally fell. And Byzantium lived on for a thousand years.

often forgotten and it was the new Roman Empire. So America, everyone thinks of the 20th century as having been the American century, but not many people believe that the 21st century will be known as another American century, may or may not be known as China's century. But be that as it may,

back to the Roman analogy, empires can fade very, very slowly. Is it possible that despite this shock to the system, that actually America remains preeminent for quite a long time, that it's had this, it'll have had this dramatic four years under Trump's second term, and then it sort of

gathers itself together again and reconstitutes the alliances and that we shouldn't be too apocalyptic when looking at what's happening. Because America is a mass democracy, it has more flexibility than rigid autocracies like

China and Russia and Rome, you know. So that America went through this in the Jacksonian period in the 1820s and 1830s when Andrew Jackson was president. He was the first president from the frontier. He came from Tennessee. And the first president to follow six presidents who were all members of the Virginia, Massachusetts aristocracy.

And he was very rough-hewn, very corrupt. People thought the country was just gonna collapse under him. And he turned out to be a transformational president because the country was expanding to the west and he embodied this western expansion, so to speak. So, sure, America can recover. It's flexible, provided that Trump doesn't do too much damage.

And then the final thing before we come to your questions, because again, you've observed Trump, you've written about American presidents. One of the big questions on the perplexing the leaders of Trump's allies and indeed the leaders of America's enemies is,

how to deal with him, what's the best approach? And obviously, we know this talk, well, practice your golf swing, which Japan's former prime minister Shinzo Abe was a very good golf player and that was deemed to have helped him massively. But what would be your advice on dealing with Trump? - I've never had any dealings or meetings with Trump. So, what I say is less important than people who have.

show respect, be polite, and gradually insinuate other points of view so that he may adapt it as his own and to think that he came up with it, you know?

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I'm going to turn to the floor now. Please raise your hand. There are microphones around and ask questions. I'm going to start with one. Well, hands are being raised. I'm going to start with one on the screen. Does Trump have a particular political belief?

I don't think so. People have asked me a related question, which is, is Trump a fascist? And I said no, because he's not serious enough to be a fascist. Trump is post-literate. He can read a smartphone, but he doesn't read books. So he knows nothing about the Atlantic Alliance or anything, because that's too long ago. You have to know it from books or whatnot. So he's...

I think he's a pure opportunist who saw in 2015 that the system was grinding down, that people were living terrible lives, and the elites were all for free trade, which was hurting the average working man. And he found a big audience on television.

So he trusts television, he doesn't trust books. In other words, he appointed his defence secretary because he looked good on television, essentially. So I don't think he has any deep, rigid beliefs, which may be a good thing. Are there any hands out there? Yes, I see a gentleman there in the red top. You've remarked about the absence or the loss of the American Centre.

When we've just had, what, over $100 million spent on a Wisconsin Supreme Court appointment, which is supposed to be a non-partisan appointment, the justice system itself has become so polarized.

How and when can America find its center again? - Yeah, well, what the center helped guarantee was institutions that work, legal institutions, the Federal Reserve. And what we've seen in recent years is that the Federal Reserve, the courts, the Supreme Court have become more and more politicized. We have the same group of conservative judges faced off against the same group of liberal judges.

and judges are supposed to be impartial, but most members of the court all find the arguments to always vote in the same way, whether it's conservative or liberal. Finding the center will be, I think it'll follow a process, and the first process is, you know,

These tariffs and the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers. People are going to wake up and they're going to see much less money in their savings accounts because everyone owns stocks nowadays in America.

and they're going to try to call up the Social Security Administration to see about their pension, and there'll be nobody to answer the phone, or they'll be put on hold for five hours, or something like that. And I think as average people, you know, appreciate the depths of

to which their life has gone because of an extreme leader. There may be a craving, a movement back to the centre. But first it has to get worse before it gets better, I would say. I see a hand here, in the front. Where does India come in on all this, globally and in respect to China?

Can I go first, Robert? What? Can I go first, very briefly? Because as it happens, I spent two hours talking to India's foreign minister just the other weekend, the erudite, silver-tongued Jaishankar. And I think it's fair to say that sitting in quite a pretty position...

The relationship with Trump could get tested. Trump's already putting pressure on them on trade, but at the moment they're watching and saying... We've been saying that the...

Western liberal order is hypocritical and in need of a kicking for a long time. We'll watch and wait. I mean, they're obviously worried about their relationship with China, but Dzerzhankar was just been on a tour of the West. He'd been to the Munich Security Conference. He'd been to Trump's inauguration, and he was just doing a little tour of Britain.

pretty happy to watch the, shall we say, difficulties that Europe is facing right now. But Robert, you will have a longer view. I would say a few things about India. India is the ultimate pivot state. The ultimate pivot state between China and the United States. It's, I think, more consequential than the other members of the global south.

and it's led by their first geopolitically minded leader in their history since independence. Because the Nehruvian prime ministers all had, well, somewhat of a chip on their shoulder because of colonialism, all of that. Modi doesn't care anything about that, essentially. I did a long interview with Modi in 2008 when he was state minister of Gujarat.

And he was very clear that he thought in terms of like Curzon, in terms of the way Lord Curzon manipulated British India, but in various ways. I thought he was too optimistic when he said India will be the next South, South Korea.

you know, or the next Singapore. I think India has manifest problems, you know, that prevent that. Just keep in mind, most young Indians, many of them have no jobs. There's an enormous amount of poverty there.

And the global south is not all it's cracked up to be, in my opinion. Because, you know, when you take who's in the global south, the United Arab Emirates, which is behind the scenes, pro-Israel, and South Africa, which is anti-Israel, more or less,

There's not geopolitical coherence between such far-flung places as India and Brazil and South America. But I think India is in a very good position because it's very geopolitically minded. I think if the United States and China got, if Trump suddenly made peace with Xi and got really together with China, India would feel threatened.

India will feel threatened, but if the United States and China were far apart, India would feel more leeway to maneuver between them. So as long as the U.S. and China have very fragile, troublesome relations, I think India's in a very good position. There are more hands in the back there. I see two hands. Hello. You talked about the variety of institutions in America and whether they...

will be prepared to stand up to Trump or to just do Trump's bidding. You've talked about the justice system, judges, Congress, academia. What about the military? Ah, the military. Well, the Pentagon had a very storied, great outfit built within it called the Office of Net Assessment.

whose job was to prepare the military for things they had not thought about, crises that hadn't yet happened.

The Office of Net Assessment predicted in the 1990s that China would not be a responsible stakeholder, would enter into a cold war with the US. The Office of Net Assessment predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. In other words, it was the in-house think tank of the Pentagon. Well, the new Defense Secretary has just ended it. He's closed it up completely.

without really giving a reason for it. Even though it costs only about 10 million dollars a year and the Pentagon's budget is 830 billion dollars a year, something like that. It's not enough to say that, alright, so he wants to make the military less woke, more masculine, more warrior, that's his phrase. Well,

You can do that in a morning or an afternoon just by issuing directives if you're the defense secretary. It's not a policy. It doesn't replace all the tough decisions on procuring new weapon systems on the Pentagon's industrial base, which is a fancy word for saying, does the U.S. have enough bullets for both Ukraine and Taiwan at the same time?

He said almost nothing about any of this. So the military is a very conformist institution. It tends to conform with whoever is in power, in other words. So I'm worried about the military, and I'm worried about the administration of the Pentagon. I'm going to...

I think most will go along with whatever it is. He's the commander-in-chief. Also, keep in mind, in the American system, once you get above colonel and you become a brigadier general, you become a politician.

Because all future promotions have to do with politics. In other words, with Washington politics, with military politics. That's why the most interesting people you meet are colonels and below. In other words, generals generally are not...

Yeah, are not interesting. I think overall, most will go along with him, whatever it is. And the ones that don't won't get promoted or they'll take early retirement or something.

Are there any generals in the audience? I want to just slip in a quick question because we haven't talked about Ukraine. And I spend a bit of time in Ukraine going back and forth there and the Ukrainian government is steeling itself to having to fight on with as much European support as possible and building up their own defence industry.

It seems to many people looking at America from afar, it seems sort of impossible to imagine that America could totally step away from Ukraine and as a result empower Russia, the traditional enemy from the Cold War and so on.

Outside the MAGA groups in Congress, what is the popular perspective on this? Or has everyone just been following MAGA feeds or whatever and so they're not seeing it? There are several aspects to this question, Alec. One is that the way the American system operates is so much power is in the hands of the president and his instincts.

You change a president, you can radically affect change policy. Now that hasn't happened often because generally there's been a cooperation between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy which has gone away with this center going away, with the political center going away. Also, as I said earlier, Ukraine has actually drifted off the news in the United States to a certain extent.

Because it's without novelty value. It's grinding World War I style combat that continues. You know, I've watched this happen. It's become normalized in the American media in a way. And that helps allow Trump to totally change policy. Ukraine...

energize the country because they said Russia is at war in 2022. By now it's become like the new normal.

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