The Gift of American Power

Take away that raw American power — which is first and foremost a geopolitical phenomenon — and the escape from geopolitics that many proclaim suddenly evaporates.

by Robert D. Kaplan
October 22, 2015

Despite the East-West territorial clash over the buffer state of Ukraine, despite the sanguinary battles for patches of ground across the swath of the Middle East — in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq — and despite the zero-sum territorial conflicts throughout maritime East Asia, the myth persists of a world benignly ruled by multilateral institutions and agreements, by international financial markets that have all escaped geopolitics, and by the geography on which it is based.

Such thinking obviously contains a large measure of truth, but taken too far it creates the dangerous illusion of inexorable progress that is willfully blind to dangers ahead. While geography tells many stories, often contradictory, and can be overcome by human agency — especially in the form of brave and moral leadership — a belief in the inevitability of progress is dangerously deterministic. It was such deterministic optimism that made the civilized world less prepared for the t…