The Return of Marco Polo's World

welcome to CSIS it must be the beer and wine on a Friday afternoon this is a good a good group nice to have you all here welcome also to our online viewers my name is Matthew Goodman I hold the Simon chair in political economy here at CSIS and am delighted to welcome you all to this book launch for Robert Kaplan's new book the return of Marco Polo's world which you have an opportunity to purchase at the end of this event signed a copy but before I introduce Robert fully although he really does need no introduction I think to this kind of an audience let me just make a few administrative announcements first the usual please if you have any phones I assume most people have a phone please silent it make it silent if we have any kind of an incident there exit doors back here and we assemble by National Geographic around the corner or out the front if we have to go out that way and fun sort of follow me and we will have a reception beer and wine after the after the show so please stick around for that in a book signing so I think that is it in terms of administrative announcements so in the Simon chair we have been very interested in the story of connectivity across the Eurasian super continent for a couple of years now we launched a project about 18 months ago called reconnecting Asia and I think we actually have a map of from our website which and the URL is down there which we launched this website which has behind it a database of about 2,200 hard infrastructure projects at the moment just transport infrastructure roads rails ports dry ports we're going to eventually be adding ICT infrastructure power grids energy pipelines it's a work in progress but we think it's the least an ambition the broadest database on this interesting maybe historic set of developments of connectivity infrastructure the projects run by my colleague John Hillman who's here and who welcomes input from folks correcting our data or adding data or showing us photographs if you've been along some of these pads and and and pathways and trading routes we're very interested in that and you'll find examples of those things on the site and so and we are kind of asking in a way McKenna's Mahon question at the origin of this which is you know prior to Vasco da Gama sailing around India to to Asia in in 1497 more or less 1498 okay sorry good I'm glad he's here and you know the most of the connections across Eurasia were by land but that changed everything and for 500 years we've been doing it a different way and so today 90% of global commerce goes by by ship and big uber question we were trying to ask here you know as an economic program we're interested in what's driving this and what its implications are and we're particularly interested in in you know is that sort of 90 percent number gonna come down because you've got now land connections being re-established and so so that's sort of the it's it's a mix of I'm gonna say one more thing and then I'm an intrusive Robert and ask questions of him but this was inspired by a love which I think both Robert Kaplan and and Speke Brzezinski who until last summer came in every day to CSIS and inspired this project are interested in the the intersection of history geography and international relations let's let's say broadly strategy and and this story really evokes that as does this collection of essays which is wonderful so Robert Kaplan I think everybody knows has written about 18 books I think so far this is the 18th on Foreign Affairs and travel as his bio describes which is an interesting combination of disciplines and I think people are familiar with a lot of his his work whether it's whether it's Asia's caldron or the return of geography or the coming anarchy many well-known books in this space he is a senior fellow the Center for a new American security around the corner and a senior advisor at the Eurasia group and has served in various government related roles as well used to write for the Atlantic for many years and so again a well-known figure in the space I have the delight to be able to interview him and ask some questions up here in fact I have 18 questions I think here but I'm not going to get through all of them and then I will bring all of you and after we've had a chance to chat for for half an hour so so let me first ask Robert this is a diverse collection of essays I mean diverse topically geographically in terms of the length and even though genre I mean it sort of ranges from deep academic thinking to a travelogue and biography what sort of unites the essays that are in this book what made you want to bring them together well Matt first of all it's a great pleasure to be here with all of you it's CSIS I think what unites all of these essays is it's two things one I wanted to describe the world as it is on the ground to get away from abstractions what's really out there that's going on and what's going on is not the defeat of geography by technology but the shrinkage of geography by technology so that the world is more anxious more claustrophobic more nervous than ever before crises zones across eurasia interact as never before we can actually talk about Eurasia as a unit as a system of trade and competition and rivalry in a way that even ten years ago we couldn't because of the way technology has defeated distance so while stock markets are doing great there's a sense of geopolitical fragility that it's going on and that comes for the it from the interconnectivity of crises crises zones we think of interconnectivity is something altogether positive but it has troubling aspects to it in terms of geopolitics so I wanted to describe this world but on the other hand I wanted to describe what approach should America take to it and that means doing various things profiling what in my mind were some very serious foreign policy thinkers to define realism to define what America is functionally and as I say in one of the essays were in naval power because you cannot use nuclear weapons there's a moral taboo against it and you can't move ten or twenty thousand army troops around the world without a front page story in The New York Times but you can move aircraft carrier strike groups from one part of the earth to another and it's public but nobody cares almost so that we're in a ville power that's what we are and everything else emanates from that so it's who we are what functionally we are what mistakes have we made and what does what is really going on in the world and that's what I should that's that was my you know my idea in terms of picking out these essays rather than others that I've done great well that's a great overview of a lot of the themes and points that we're gonna hopefully cover in our conversation so you have an anchor piece which I guess is a new piece that that it leads the the collection which is called the return of Marco Polo's world and I want to focus in large part on that because I think it touches many of those themes so you start with Europe and you talk about the disintegration the decomposition of Europe and you say it's it's it's reunited with its destiny with the destiny of afro-eurasia what does that mean that's a no what it means is that European stability and prosperity during the Cold War came from a lot of things but you know the American security structure but one thing that it also came from that nobody wants to admit was Europe was cut off and thus protected from North Africa from the Middle East and even from the Soviet Union because the United States dealt with the Soviet threat and you had all these totalitarian or dictatorial prison states in the Middle East so that migration was impossible and and so that Europe could lecture the world about human rights because it was protected from tens of thousands of Middle Easterners coming to Europe because they didn't have their human rights and then but there was a great French geographer in the middle of the 20th century Fernand broad del who said that the southern border of Europe is not Greece Italy Spain it's North Africa and that the real southern border of Europe is where the Sahara Desert meets the coastline of North Africa that ultimately you know Europe would be read the Mediterranean would be reunited and in this migration that we've seen over the last few years and I don't only mean war refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and Libya I also mean the natural influx of sub-saharan Africans across the across the Mediterranean into Europe which is going to go on throughout the 21st century Europe is being reunited with Afro Asia in terms of human migration terms it it will have it's a band flows but for various demographic reasons it's going to continue ok and then you know you have sort of one of your money lines is that as Europe disappears as a kind of a distinct unit Eurasia coheres and so and and you say that you know instead of sub regions you know like Europe North Africa Near East Central Asia East Asia you now have a you've subtle great gradations I think was the term you use and and you say the map will become more fluid and baroque can you explain you know what is this thing's first of all I was just in Albania and Montenegro which basically function to Western Europe the way Mexico and Central America functioned to the United States they're technically in NATO but in fact there's little or no rule of law there you know they you know their institutions or government are very early in the very early stages and you see the beginnings of the Near East already inside NATO so what's going on is two things a human connectivity and Technology are bringing together what use that they are kind of bridging these formerly hard divisions of Europe the Middle East Central Asia South Asia East Asia North Africa are all united together or becoming so but it on the other hand you have the rise of regions you have the rise of regions all over you know not just in Europe with Catalonia and notably but all over the Middle East you see the rise of regions so there are more and more human communities coming into being even as the hard borders between largely between large parts of the earth start to collapse so the map is more fluid in one sense because of human migration and technological upheaval but it's also baroque in another sense because it's filled with all these little peculiar little particularity x' interesting well you you talk about connectivity and our story of hard infrastructure has I mean I assume that's what you mean in part by technology that it's sort of pulling people together through these roads and rails and so forth but you then say it won't defeat geography in fact it will make geography more oppressive and claustrophobic which is an interesting turn of phrase let me just read something from the book you say connectivity rather than simply leading to more peace prosperity and cultural uniformity as techno optimists like to claim well a much more ambiguous legacy and go on to say that medieval travellers on the Silk Road encountered a world that was complex tumultuously but nonetheless porous consequently with each new travelers account European saw the world not as smaller and more manageable but as bigger and more chaotic and you said this is a perfect description of our world today but it's actually the world that Marco Polo also really saw and so that's really I mean that's your central right that is that I use Marco Polo's journey as a geographical framing device to talk about the you know the increasing unity or you know or creation of the Eurasian system because Marco Polo traveled during the time of the Wong dynasty in china the mongolians dee Kubla Khan was Emperor and and and and if you look at the pathways for instance the projected pathways in the existing pathways of China's belt and Road initiative they approximate very well the Wong dynasty and even the Tong dynasty in you know it you know in many formulas so so it's not just the geography of Marco Polo's route but it's the fact that the very the very you know connectivity and in in the high medieval period because of the Silk Road that created a feeling both of not how unified the world was but how nervous and anxious and unmanageable it was at the same time and that more or less defines our own time interesting and you know I want to come back to the modern silken Silk Road story again but but you talk about over this space of this map you have these faded empires you've already mentioned the Mongols and and even the Tong dynasty but you also talk about Iran Turkey Russia explain what you mean by faded empires what I mean is that the word Empire or imperialism is a dirty word on university campuses it's a politically incorrect word and the reason it is is because we're only in the second generation of a post imperial world it you know in a post-colonial world so all this unk's and hatred of empires has to come out in other words but think of it this way it's Empire more or less in one form or another more or less organized humanity for about 95% of human history uh and things like the European Union the International Court of Justice NATO Davos the World Economic Forum you name it are all attempts awkward attempts to replace the function of empire and why and if you want to understand the secret sauce of Chinese foreign policy of Iranian foreign policy of Russian foreign policy of Turkish Foreign Policy you have to study their Imperial traditions because their Imperial traditions really teach much about why the Chinese authoritarianism is different from Russian authoritarianism and it also teaches I mean look at Iran Iran sphere of influence extends basically from the edge of the eastern Mediterranean in the Levant all the way to the center of Afghanistan you know now if you mapped out Iran's sphere of influence down to Yemen in the south up through the caucuses in the north you would get all most of the former Persian speaking empires of history you would get the emanates the sassanids or you know many many of them the Parthian is the Medes you you know Iran's Imperial tradition goes on and on even if the current rulers emphasize religion publicly okay and one of those empires was China and and you say that they have a distinct Imperial mindset that they sort of take for granted their superiority and and the the the the only problem they had was this this these so-called barbarians in the steppe lands sort of been circling as you described it han China's arable lowland culture or cradle sorry so you mean Tibetans Weaver's Inner Mongolia these are still issues for China today that the challenges it is because what I mean by the arable cradle is the heart of China the heart of Han China in the north in the West in the southwest you get more arid upland regions where the inner Mongolians live in the north the Turkic Uighur Muslims live in the West and the Tibetans live in the southwest alright belton road is a lot of things one thing it happens to be is a way for China to deal with its internal demons by building roads railways pipelines and into Turkic former Soviet Central Asia China is surrounding the ethnic Uighur Turks in its own West and at the same time building them up economically and what this serves to do or at least China's hope is this will dampen the fever's for ethnic nationalism within the Chinese border it wasn't quite actually could we put up the Chinese vision of belt and Road for a second yeah this is our impressionistic map of the Chinese you know broad vision for belton road but I'm not sure where you come out on the point about how successful the Chinese have been and in sort of stabilizing this places because you talk about on the one hand it's still kind of uncertain and unsettled and China still faces this challenge but you at another point and maybe a couple points you say the China's current maritime expansion is based on the fact that for the first time in their history they actually feel secure about their land-based control is there a sort of contradiction in tension there no because China historically has very little of America tradition there was a big exception in the early part of the Ming Dynasty in the early 15th century under the treasures fleet admiral chung hua who whose ships brought trade and commerce all the way to you know the man to the red city basically to Yemen to Oman but that was an aberration for most of history China didn't didn't venture far with it ships because it didn't have land security because of these because of these adversaries in the uplands surrounding the arable cradle all right but if you look at China today and you look at the map of China today you you more or less have China as its most expansive in terms of land it's getting better control over the Uighur Muslims partly through belt and road and repressive tactics and things like that so China now has the luxury to go to sea and what is it doing it's building the second largest you know the world's greatest land-based Navy in history by the 2030s at the rate that they are going but Belton Road is that way I look at it when I look at all those pathways what I see is some of them have already been built and they're successful other parts are pragmatic but other parts I think are fanciful and I'm not sure that the Chinese will succeed and one of those that we were talking about in the green room I wanted to ask you about it feels like the sort of jewel in the crown of Belton Road if that's not a mixed metaphor am there a lot of mixed metaphors in Belton Road so maybe it's okay I can get away with it is Pakistan the Pakistan corridor cooking kind of kashgar to Gwadar is the is the connection I'm sure everybody in this room knows where those places are and can draw them on a map and you say that Pakistan is quote the chief register of China's ability to join its Silk Road across Asia with its maritime Silk Road so this is really critical to their vision but you then go on to say but you're doubtful that China can save Pakistan yes yeah it's the chief register because the the Chinese plan for the for Belton rode through Pakistan goes from West the extreme western China the town of kashgar South all crossing in the Pakistan border south all the way through Pakistan from northeast to southwest to the port of Gwadar in the southwest corner of Pakistan not far from the from the entryway to the Persian Gulf all right so that connects the land Silk Road with the maritime Indian Ocean part of the Silk Road that china envisions and in fact is already building with its building and financing of state-of-the-art ports throughout the Indian Ocean so that's why it's you know it connects the two it'll be the chief register because if China can do this China is really going to be a world power but I don't I'm very doubtful that they can for a very blunt reason I've been to Gwadar and Gwadar is very impressive but the minute you get outside of Gwadar you're in the you're in the territory of balut separatists and much of the territory that that Belton Road has to go through from northern Pakistan to the Indian Ocean takes you through areas and spaces that the Pakistan Army has never managed to control you know this was the American dilemma getting control of the tribal areas now the Americans failed will China succeed what I understand is that the Chinese have approached this very gradually first they built Gwadar then they refused to run it but they got the Singaporeans to run it and of course the Chinese relationship with Singapore is very close then the Singaporeans opted out and then the Chinese decided to run it directly and then only when the Chinese got buy-in from the Pakistan Army did they decide to go ahead with this projected forty six billion dollar project of belton road from kashgar to Gwadar so so because the Chinese never trusted the Pakistani girl it's the army that they thought that they think they can trust but if China can do this it will mean that they've indirectly stabilized Pakistan which Pakistan has never managed to be a hundred percent since its creation so next door in India they seemed worried enough about the possible possibility or even if it isn't completed just Chinese activity in Pakistan worries them and there's a broader historical tension between China and India you know you talk about the fact that the Chinese as you've just said want to go sort of vertically between down south to the Indian Ocean whereas India the extent it's playing in this space is going east west horizontally across the Indian Ocean so talk a little about the China India riot uh yes first of all India is competing with China Pakistan it's it's linking up it's aligning with Iran to build another north-south pathway of roads railways pipelines from Chao Baha which is south eastern Iran it's only about a three hour drive from Gwadar if you cross the Pakistan Iranian border and Chabahar would go up through Western a through North through Iran on Newton Iran's eastern edge you know cross into Afghanistan which India likes because it means India can have some some leverage in Afghanistan to counter Pakistani leverage there and then go up into the hydrocarbon rich areas of Central Asia so that's one thing India is doing but as I wrote think of China going vertically south towards the Indian Ocean and India countering China by moving horizontally east and west a lot you know along the Indian Ocean competing with China for Iranian natural gas in oil fields and competing with China for influence in Myanmar to the east of India fascinating okay can you put the map back up not the original slide but the map our map yep and just leave it there for the rest of the conversation thanks guys so let's talk about the u.s. so you said you say the u.s. may not be able to do what its sought to do for a century which is to prevent anyone power from dominating the eastern hemisphere in the way that we dominate the Western Hemisphere and you throw in interestingly Bulgaria into that story can you explain how Bulgaria fits yea the u.s. Bal United States great power dome began actually in the Caribbean where because it was by dominating the greater Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century that the United States got to have strategic control over the whole hemisphere because the Caribbean borders the most populous parts of South America on its southern on its southern seaboard so and by gaining strategic control over the Western Hemisphere the United States was able to influence outcomes in the eastern hemisphere two world wars the Cold War all right and at the end of the Cold War in the decade after US power which says was at its apex take Bulgaria I use a country that very few people in Washington think about or you know elites even deal with but it's a great indicator it's tucked away in southeastern Europe it's close to Russia it's close to Turkey and yet it but you know but soon after the end of the Cold War it became a member of NATO it became a member of the European Union so geography did not seem to matter anymore but in the 1990s if you were Bulgaria you thought history had ended because you know the Russians were conveniently chaotic under Boris Yeltsin's rule on the European Union was had no problems in its future it looked like and the Americans were you know had it were a unipolar power alright fast forward to today the European you is much more troubled Russia is not conveniently weakened chaotic anymore and so despite being a member of NATO and the EU Bulgaria finds that its destiny is being challenged and fought over by Russians and Turks who are right next door Russians because of the linguistic affinity and the historical affinity and sympathy and Turks because of the tradition of the Ottoman Turkish Empire which extended into the Balkans deep into the Balkans and because of turkey's proximity and stronger economy so that even bulgaria is so that geography does matter at the end of the day i wish we had more time to talk about turkey maybe in the questions we can I was in Istanbul a couple years ago and somebody said you know talking about Turkey's prospects that you know you've got a challenging geography or you're you know in a difficult neighborhood if you're if you're best neighbor is Bulgaria if you look around Turkey they're in a tough neighborhood but so let me you let me read another piece here that is really kind of prescient you say it's time now to extend the concept of the Asia pivot so this is about American policy to encompass the entire navigable Rimland of Eurasia including not only the western Pacific but the Indian Ocean as well with our influence following exactly the path of Marco Polo's return by sea from China to Venice sea power is the compensator a compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics to the extent that it can be shaped in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land here is where the ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan meet those of Halford mackinder so first of all that seems very prescient about the Trump administration's strategy of a free and open Indo Pacific it sounds like you were writing there their briefing here but also you know you you you I just want to talk about a bit about Mahon and McKendry I'm sure and sort of where you come down on that debate that seems pretty obvious here but you talk a lot of in the kinder terms and in the book but you know at the end of the day you're sort of I'm a honnest I guess yeah well Halford mackinder was a great british geographer at the turn of the 20th century who basically believed that World War one didn't settle anything that you would have a return war between um you know maritime Europe Western Europe and and the interior empires you know including the Soviet Union the emerging Soviet Union and Germany and that the the chief register of world power would be the heartland of Asia he didn't mean that the heartland of Asia would dominate the world what he meant with something more subtle if you look at Central Asia and you see who's powerful there who's weakening who's strengthening you can get a really good sense of the map you know of the strategic situation in the world because of the way that rail lines were emanating you know we're connecting Eurasia so he talked in terms of a Eurasian whole he talked in terms of a world where on which was already completely populated and discovered so that the conflicts would be in Europe you know because the colonial powers couldn't fight anymore in Africa or Asia because all that land was carved up so he was very clairvoyant about the coming of two world wars and all but he emphasized land power Mahon was different he's like the spiritual Godfather of the American Navy in the 20th and 21st century he was all about sea power and what he believed was the Rimland and what is the rim land the rim land are all those countries on the map bordering the Indian Ocean because maja and and of course the western Pacific because Mahon believed that the rim land connected the interior of Eurasia with the great sea lines of communication so whoever controlled the Rimland would be dominant so and Mahon to his credit was also very clairvoyant because that's where George cannons containment policy came from what was containment it was about the competition over Turkey Iran Pakistan India the Koreas Southeast Asia between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War so so both men were very clairvoyant one emphasize the Seas the other the land but where they meet in the 21st century is because of what I said at the beginning the shrinkage of geography because of Technology so you can no longer make a distinction between the the influence of the Interior and the influence of the coastline especially when you look at these pathways from the Indian Ocean deep into Central Asia that the Chinese and the Pakistanis the Indians and the Iranians are now contemplating well there's a lot more just in that essay but let me just quickly and then I want to bring the audience in but talk about two or three of the other essays that sort of struck me there's a very little short one right after the the first one that we've just been talking about called the art of avoiding war a 2015 piece you wrote and it's all about the Scythian and again I'm sure if we have a pop quiz everybody will remember this if Ian's nomadic horsemen from the 3rd to 7th century BC I think you say take your word for it in the Black Sea region whose military strategy or tactics were to draw enemies in but never to really fight to keep withdrawing and they famously kind of destroyed the Persian armies in the 6th century or something BC without firing a shot and you warned about not being drawn I mean I guess my question to you is what is why are you talking about this in 2015 because the Persian the Persian leader Darius invaded Sofia and he wanted to give battle so he went in search of the Scythian forces assuming they would condense they were concentrate so there could be a set piece battle and they kept withdrawing they kept withdrawing and withdrawing and the Persians got further and further away from their supply lines started to suffer hunger couldn't find the Scythian 's and withdrew in disarray and were defeated by the land so what does that have to do with the 21st century if you look at the battles in in Iraq for instance and in other places killing the enemy is easy it's finding him in the first place that's difficult you know the battle spaces is enlarged instead of concentrated thousands of soldiers in one place fighting a set piece battle you have whole deserts and in cities and Middle Eastern cities where you're looking for people who you cannot find so that you know what I'm trying to get across in this essay is don't go searching after ghosts you know you know don't just act on impulse the way that Darius did you know think five or six steps ahead as to what happens once you get there and wait and you go looking for the enemy and you cannot find him he's elusive he's hiding among civilians for instance I mean so I think this story of Darius is army and how it never found the Sith ian's is relevant so you say the US should return to its roots as a maritime power in Asia and a defender of land in Europe where there are fewer Citians and more ordinary villains which is another good line so then you have a piece or actually you have a series of essays about defending some of your fellow realists Henry Kissinger drowned Mearsheimer and and Samuel Huntington and and but I sense that you're kind of a reluctant realist when you're writing this or you sound a little defensive about some of the things and having feeling you have to defend what they're saying well I am a reluctant realist because I'm not a card-carrying realist so to speak but I feel I wanted to defend these men simply because they were brave enough to be attacked you know so much of what they have written him never gotten nice book reviews you know their books come out and they're attacked and over time there's a grudging acceptance of the truth of their work there we certainly true of Samuel Huntington whose books were almost never celebrated at the time they were published never won awards never got nice reviews but if you look at them 15 years later you see how just incredibly clairvoyant they were just for instance I couldn't write about this Huntington book because he hadn't written it yet at the time I did this profile it was the last book before he died who are we and he painted a scenario of unlimited immigration from Mexico that would anger people in the heartland even as the coastal elites became less and less nationalist and more and more global cosmopolitan and that would lead to a populist explosion he actually published this in 2004 wrote it in 2002 it got uniformly awful reviews nobody had a word to say it was almost like destroyed his reputation and now now if you go online and search this book has become like a cult item you know in terms of what he was able to foresee so I take three men who've had very troublesome careers in terms of public opinion and tried to judge them through their works and hell and how and how well their books have aged and I find that they've aged rather well well Henry Kissinger is a trustee here at CSAs and and so we we don't we always appreciate his books when they come out and read them read them faithfully so I you know there are more things I want to ask you but let me just put the book down and just ask I mean I'm I'm still also coming away trying to figure out if you're optimistic or pessimistic I mean there's you know actually if you read the titles of your books you know their terms I was sort of going through them and underlining you know you've got shadow Cauldron revenge monsoon Anarchy ghosts yeah I mean it all sounds pretty gloomy but there's optimism and as well and so where do you kind of cook up well actually monsoon is an optimistic title okay because it's not a storm it's a weather system and that brings prosperity to crops right without the monsoon cycle you couldn't support large populations in in the monsoon belly so that's an optimistic title but but generally I don't think it's important to be an optimist or a pessimist I think what's important is to have what I call can you know is to have anxious foresight or try to have anxious foresight to always think about what can go wrong in order to prevent it from going wrong because I think in life we're all constant warriors and much of what we worry about never comes to pass and that's because we adjust our actions and behavior because of our worrying and then bad things do come to pass periodically but there are things we never considered you know that just hit us over the back of the head you know that we're total surprises so I think there's a lot to be said both in personal life and in foreign policy with with constructive pessimism with anxious foresight okay so you're always pleasantly surprised right okay one final question which is you know you as I mentioned the beginning your don't bioW describes you as somebody writes about foreign affairs and travel and travel has been integral to what you've done in geography as well and I think everybody I'm guessing most people in this room share that sort of bug but in America talking about problems about which you know one could be anxious we don't teach geography in school we don't some people specialize it in a university like my former colleague Grace in the front row who did a degree in geography but but it's it's that's a rare thing it seems in fact people I think we're surprised that you can actually do it an undergraduate degree in geography is this Minoo and I sense among younger people including my own sons that they don't have the same sort of travel bug that we had maybe because they think they can connect through the internet or something you know is this important I mean does it matter I think it's we think it's crucial to study geography in the nineteenth century sense of the word which means geography is a base as a baseline as a starting point for studying cultures civilizations topography trade routes pipeline routes everything starts with the map it doesn't end with the map because if it ended with the map you would be a complete fatalist but it starts with the map because if you don't start with the map then you think anything is always possible and it isn't you know a West Africa is always going to have a different history than northern Scandinavia you know you know it to be the most obvious so I think geography anchors you with a realistic sense of proportions and I think and and also the danger of the Internet in the cyber world is it leads to too much abstraction it leads to this false belief that you think you know what's going on all over the world but you actually don't it creates an illusion of knowledge that doesn't really exist it's one thing to have an email called relationship with someone in Egypt you know and and it's also one thing to read about everything about Egypt on the internet but it's another thing to live in Egypt or to travel by Egypt or try to take a bus through the Nile Delta or or to travel through Upper Egypt by train that's a complete different thing and that will teach you intrinsically subtle things about Egypt that you can never get from you know from going online great I'm gonna play this back to my sons who need to need to get out more so this is fantastic and I have a lot more myself but I want to give the audience a chance to ask you questions as well so if you have a question please raise your hand we have microphones identify yourself and ask a question I saw this gentleman here first we just wait for the microphone Cadia the second row here Thanks hi thanks very much um it's not a question dude oh my name is Holden Triplett so your theme of especially in the first essay of kind of increasing chaos and kind of hint at the potential thinness disintegration of both China and Russia Russia more likely than China but there's not a whole lot of don't go into it very much could you talk a little bit about that it seems like that could have a pretty monumental effect on so the entire how well everything coheres actually if I can just say the last page of the book in the last essay I was going to read and I just ran out of time you were talking about going to kashgar and those parts of China and you say the places that I visited may increasingly comprise a police state controlled from Beijing or they could be at the forefront of China's subtle fragmentation in which China reverts back by degrees to its arable cradle I believe the former former possibilities more is much greater than the latter one but the latter one cannot be ruled out yeah all right let me take let me take Russia first actually Russia and China may both be dictatorships but that's where the similarities end they're both vastly different systems Russia is very weakly institutionalized it's a camarillo of oligarchs around the leader where if if Putin were to get ill or incapacitated or simply grow old which he will do and his closest allies grow old along with him you really have to wonder about Russian stability over the near and mid oh not over the near term but over the middle term you know will rush us at the fringes suffer the a low-calorie fate of the former Yugoslavia for instance so I'm not all that impressed with Russian stability China will face a much more subtle problem which is what I call the Sam Huntington in 1968 Huntington published the book political order in changing societies where he said that turbulence in societies never stop it's just the more developed the country gets the more the turbulence becomes more sophisticated and goes to a higher level um and he said that when you enrich people when you create a mass large middle class which the Chinese are intent to do and you don't at the same time liberalize or make more responsive or more flexible the institutions of government the very creation of that middle class can actually be politically destabilizing rather than stabilizing and I think we you know especially with the news of the past two weeks with Xi Jinping effectively making himself president for life I think this really creates a possible dilemma for China in the 2020s or something yes technology will help the dictatorship because it will allow all kinds of intrusive means of surveillance of in the you know of their citizens whether it's tracking their internet searches or facial recognition or giving them social scores which is really creepy I mean when you think about it but I think in the middle term and certainly the long term Chinese authoritarianism will face its crisis so I see that both China and Russia will have crises in the future and the and both those countries are the organizing principles of Eurasia that if you have instability in China or instability in Russia all of Eurasia becomes threatened interesting okay this gentleman in the front row and then I'm gonna go back and over so mr. Kaplan my name is kami but um but the Pakistani spectator and my question is about a very good piece that she wrote like five or ten years ago you basically justified it was titled I forget the title but it was like just a geographical justification for the creation or existence of Pakistan what do you think about your argument and the argument of dr. people like halil's odd or my Indian friend who think that Pakistan is a abnormal and artificial state created by Churchill after Jenna Muhammad Ali Jinnah lost the election and Bombay it was Churchill who instigated Muhammad Ali Jinnah to come and demand a Muslim state so only since its foundation our formulation is very on the wrong basis this is the reason this country has been ruled by international you know a class crook you can have general like General Kayani General Musharraf they all have you know very expensive real estate in London or those kinda they are so they blame civilian and then civilian do the same thing most civilian elite and Pakistan have British American are you a passport and you know basically they are ripping they are stealing from you know people so how do you justify the existence a creation of of a country on the basis of geographical justification don't you think California taxes should be independent country on the base of your aluminium I think remember that Pakistan basically overlays the frontier area of British India it's an area where the British civil service never really got to it was under army control even a during British rule whereas the part that the part that's all India was was run by the civil service so that the frontier areas constituted a natural division on one hand on the other hand the very fact that they have remained frontier areas has made Pakistan very hard to govern and it's because of the the intractability of the tribal zones and the fact that there really is no natural border between Pakistan and Afghanistan between the high plateaus of Asia and the subcontinent because it's very gradual the descent has made Pakistan extremely difficult to rule and that geographical fact has has has essentially aided the fact that Pakistan has often been ruled by the military and and even when Democrats are in power the military really runs things behind the scenes that has been the case in Pakistani history since 1947 we're entering a new phase of Pakistani history because of the Chinese involvement with belton Road you know it's not you know when you build a road railway pipeline from the northern part of the country right through the center to the south you're really getting involved in the internal affairs of the country and the United States failed at this with its war on terrorism you know we'll see how the Chinese do and how the Chinese affect not just belton Road but how they affect Pakistani politics in the first place okay let me try over here is there somebody over here there's a gentleman there in the sort of third row okay go friendly already other I don't understand this sorry sorry I thought she thank you I want changing the subject quite dramatically I wanted to ask you about a quote that that you said here today and you were talking about actually let me get it just right you were talking about don't just think on impulse either would you need to think five or six steps ahead we've always been blessed by leadership on a bipartisan basis in the United States that takes that approach and I hate to go there but this this this quote kind of begs the question how does the current leadership at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue impact your analysis of the region and and the u.s. role in the region how has this changed since January 20th 2017 yeah I think there are several phases to it back to Alfred Thayer Mahon who wrote over a hundred years ago that democracies historically are not nearly as good as authoritarian systems in terms of thinking in terms of future thinking as he put it authoritarian systems are always better at long-range planning than democracies because democracies work on election cycles and especially in an age of referendums of constant polling it's very hard to get a kind of grand strategy or strategic planning it gets harder and harder and in this way the technology of polling etc has made has made this even more difficult instant talking I think we saw a decline a dramatic decline at the end of the Cold War I think the last you know the last classic foreign policy president who thought ahead of the curve in terms of not breaking diplomatic relations with China after tnmn because he was looking ahead not beating his chest and making a victory tour of Europe when the Berlin Wall fell cuz he was afraid of what this the Soviet military would do down the road I think George it's not at coincidence that George w HW Bush was both the last forward thinking foreign policy present and also the last cold war president at the same time I think I think whatever the strengths and weaknesses of Clinton the younger Bush Obama and Donald Trump there if you take the four of them together they're really on a much weaker level in terms of foreign policy than people like HW Bush Reagan Eisenhower Nixon Truman etc and I think now we've come to an even lower level with this president and I think it's also not accidental because of the way the digital technology and video technology has affected the character of the American voter I think you cannot imagine President Trump except in a video digital age so you know the question is out there can America have forward ahead of the curve thinking and leadership the way it had in the print and typewriter age in the digital video age and I think the jury is out on that I think the jury is in it may be impossible but yes sir hi I'll bring it back to the region I'm Jack bantha I am with the World Bank but I'm also from Manipur which is like the border state to Burma and one of the areas where China is thinking about building its you know belt and road my question is getting back to the frontier part of the subcontinent part like a lot of the frontier areas where frontiers precisely because of the geography argument essentially it couldn't be governed my place certainly there's a lot of non-traditional non-state tribal actors and identities very localized there now with geography shrinking because of connectivity you are definitely going to see movement or both labor capital as well as influence along with it now the question is of course first of all the risk of because influences are going to clash across border because of connectivity how would you rate the risk of you know big Parklawn conflicts in the region first of all and the second thing is like there's going to be another from the perspective of my own people and minorities and these regions there's going to be a lot of demographic pressures invariably and how do you see it like you know strategically for someone like us small players balancing those big powers out when yes I think that again because the world is more anxious claustrophobic nervous and more populated and you know and more connected the chance of the chance of leaders acting on impulse out of emotion rather than the liberation goes up rather than goes down and leaders acting on impulse is a much more dangerous thing than acting out of the liberation also during the Cold War nuclear weapons were in the hands of essentially conservative bureaucracies the Soviet Union may have been Marxist Leninist but you know but but Soviet rule was rather collegial it wasn't one-man rule though they had one man up front and and it was composed of men who were all the survivors of Stalin's purges and you survived Stalin's purges by not having an opinion on anything so that Brezhnev Kosygin andropause etc were deeply conservative actors and the same you know also Mao may have been crazy internally but he was very deliberate externally I mean I'll never forget what Henry Kissinger once said to me I said to him Mao killed more people than Hitler and Kissinger said yes but you could have it you could have a serious geopolitical conversation with Mao you could not have had one with Hitler um so that um the world even though it was packed with hydrogen bombs was in a way safer than the world live in now where you have you know you know leadership's in in various countries with weapons of mass destruction but without the bureaucratic control mechanisms to really guard guard their use and also with all this emotion built up what really worries me about the world is emotion which is the enemy of analysis and the enemy of deliberation psychology is it seems to be a really significant player in a lot of international politics today there's a gentleman way in the back hi my name is Rick rowden I've been living in New Delhi India for the last 10 years and just returned to the US and I'm sort of struck by the fact that very few people talk about a new international organization called the SCO Shanghai Cooperation Organization which is really about China and Russia coming together but also very interestingly just last year both India and Pakistan have also joined could you tell us your thoughts about the SCO and within that the China Russia a story is also yeah China and Russia have a tactical alliance they're more together now than in recent history but I but I would not overestimate you know the the strength of the China Russia Alliance remember while Putin is obsessed with weakening the West and particularly weakening democratic systems in central Eastern Europe the Chinese have been beating the pants off the Russians in Central Asia and increasingly in the Russian Far East the Chinese have more money the fact that China is becoming dominant in former Soviet lingua franca russian-speaking centric republics of Central Asia shows you just how aggressive they've been and how weaken Russia's become and if you look at the Russian Far East which is losing population from 7 million going down to four and a half million in China has a hundred million people over the border in Manchuria and lusts after China's minerals and natural resources in the Russian Far East I think that the shanghai you know it's a very convenient thing it unites autocracies or or you know and and some others and you know it promises not to give moral lectures two countries the way democracies tend to do and but I wouldn't in the middle and long term overestimate you know this China Russia Alliance I see a lot of tensions between China and Russia and their systems are very very different from each other I share that view okay I'm gonna take quickly three final questions we're over the limit but I'll take him as a cluster the gentleman the middle of the blue shirt this gentleman is there anybody else especially hi I'm actually I'm a student I'm a student intern from Voice of America and I I started I used you talk about like China administration going to have a crisis I was I have a question about this so when Bill Clinton bring China into the WTO they simply think about the China will change because free market but he was simply wrong and nowadays like because I I was born in Beijing so I basically I from my perspective there's a three group of even the people in China right now fourth group of people they just basically is a nationalist say availing to follow the Xi Jinping on his own situation they are willing to give their life for taxi or the communism party since the first case and the second case is there's a bunch of the people's it just do not care about who's coming to the office they do not care about like is either seen peeing or his brother so you only care about money they only care about like what what I can get like a Kairos my kid or families on third cool people yes they do have a different opinions they do have a strong different panels with the heavy marks apart after 1989 room for a Yemen squirrels ears after killing some students there from my project for my perspective is there's no one building to stand up right now you know to risk your life when the terror family into the jail or something like that so in a question around that I mean yeah so so like under under my phone argument is I could say Chinese government's also like building like high technology around the China like they build in the DNA database they are putting cameras every single place in the China so we all the same aside like why do you think like there will be a crisis into a like China well I I said I don't see a crisis now but I think is China gets richer at the same time people's individual minds become more control you're gonna have you know you have that kind of surveillance on people you will over time build up levels of its anxiety and neurosis at the same time people are getting richer and that could lead to a crisis okay this gentleman here thank you I'm a phenomenon I'm from Israel how do you see the future of the confrontation between Iran with it's imperative that you mentioned before and the State of Israel it's 70 years old country with the lack of any experience being independent states after this 2,000 years in exile how do you see the future of this confrontation hold on one second and then just take this gentleman and then we'll wrap up you can start the answer yeah yeah okay if you look at Iranian history of Persian history and Jewish history you see for a long stretch of history Persians and Jews actually at very close relations and Israel had rather civil relations with the Shah we didn't really end until about a year after the Shah was toppled so the idea of of Iran you know Iran a Jewish state in long historical terms is not an anomaly you know in fact in the art in early modern Middle East you had like to you know you had to peacefully competing forces you had the Greeks in the Armenians versus you know the Turks the Persians and the Jews you know in in many Middle Eastern cities and what I noticed in Iranian politics are that the Palestinian cause is useful symbolically for the regime but it's not really what the regime cares about it's really nervous about what's happening on their northern border with Azerbaijan what's going on in Iraq Syria and I'm also not convinced that this Iranian regime as it is now constituted will survive over the long term the current supreme leader may be the last supreme leader because the position itself might be eliminated at some point so um I think if you look 10 20 years down the road you might actually see some rapprochement between Iran and Israel okay very quickly sir last question thank you I'm sorry Nikita from happy science in Japan you mentioned in an article on New York Times last year Washington has no territorial ambitions in Eurasia regarding China and Russia relations so what kind of ambitions or interests should make a 600 Connie you know I I think in fact north of the temperate zone of North America is half a world away from this Co hearing Eurasian system has its negatives because we're not there you know but it also has its positives it means we don't have any territorial ambitions and we can therefore be a trusted power this was a it's a shame we would drew from the trans-pacific partnership because that would have been the icing on the cake to the United States pivot to Asia which was never supposed to end with more warships in the western Pacific the warships were supposed to only be a means to an end that would end with a free trading system of which America would be at the heart so I think you know if the Americans pretend preserve or regenerate their brand and the brand of not imposing democracy but promoting and encouraging civil society everywhere free trade and rule of law the United States can be a very attractive force throughout Eurasia because this belton road will have its tensions it will make people along it suspicious and worried about China well you warm the cockles of my heart by making a pitch for TPP and and in fact actually a couple years ago not to bring his name back into the story but Henry Kissinger met with some of us and and he was concerned about TPP because he thought it was more values than interest and I push back on then so I know I think they're clear interests here it's not it's not about values it's about interest and you know I don't think I won the argument he convinced him but but in any event what a great tour de force before you join me in applauding for dr. Kaplan there will be a book signing afterwards so if you want a book you can buy one the gentleman over there is holding them up and then we're going to have up on the Sam Nunn Terrace we will have beer and wine reception but really do please join me what a fantastic presentation and thank you we need we need a couple more hours [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 22,385

Rating: 4.7509155 out of 5

Keywords: csis, international, politics, diplomacy, washington

Id: NmoEwWhgCPk

Length: 70min 14sec (4214 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018