正确看待中国：终极道德困境

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Good evening, and welcome to the third annual Charles W. Kegley, Jr. Lecture. I am Joel Rosenthal, president of Carnegie Council, and I want to thank you all for joining us for this truly special occasion. Every organization needs a signature program, a moment that clarifies its mission, embodies its values, and rallies its community, and this program is that event for us.

There is a lot in our name, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. That is an ambitious name, but in the spirit of “show, don’t tell,” I am going to let this lecture demonstrate what our Council is all about, how it is different from all of the others, and why its work is so important.

The Kegley Lecture was established three years ago by Charles and Deborah Kegley, and we are very fortunate to have Chuck and Debbie here with us this evening all the way from Columbia, South Carolina. Chuck and Debbie, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support for this lecture and for your many years of support for the Council.

You established this lecture with a challenging and inspiring directive: “to invigorate the inquiry into the connections between moral concerns and the pressures and realities of world politics.” That is bold and ambitious, just as I would expect from you, Chuck, and this challenge is reflective of your own work, your contributions to the field, and your support for this Council over so many years.

This is why our guest lecturer this evening is Robert Kaplan, a person whose work exemplifies the best in ethics in international affairs. Bob’s deep understanding of the tragic mind and the verities of human and power politics make him, not surprisingly, one of the most treasured and frequent speakers here at the Carnegie Council. Welcome back, Robert.

Robert, your periodic appearances here at the Council in the “before times,” which is what I call pre-COVID 19, remind me that we have many of our most loyal supporters in the audience this evening, and I want to acknowledge a few of them. Our former Chairman, Anthony Faillace, is here. Anthony, thanks for coming.

Our former trustee, Haris Hromic is here, right on cue. Very dramatic. Good job. Our current crustees, Sanjay Mody and Eddie Mandhry, are here. Also, my former assistant and board secretary, Ulrike Klopfer is here. That is how I know it is an important event, because you are here.

Our former director of programs, Joanne Myers, is here, who as all of you know so expertly and beautifully ran so many of these events for many years at the Carnegie Council. We have such a committed and loyal group, and it is great to have this opportunity to thank you all publicly.

In addition to this lecture, another of Chuck’s many gifts to the Council, is his prize student, our moderator for this evening, Steve Hibbard. Among Steve’s many accomplishments, too many to mention here, is the fact that Steve served as the chairman of Carnegie Council from 2017 to 2022, after many years of service on the board. Steve was honored as the inaugural lecturer in this series two years ago. It is nice to have you back with us tonight, Steve, along with Mary. Thanks for coming. You can find Steve’s lecture on the Carnegie Council’s website with the great title—I am envious of this title—“A Place for Ethics in International Affairs.”

This evening we take the series forward in the capable hands of Steve and Robert. Again, my sincere thanks to all of you for coming, and I am going to hand the floor now over to Steve.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: Thank you, Joel. As usual, you outdo yourself and do us credit. Thank you for those kind words. Thank you all for the opportunity to be here tonight.

Good evening, all, and welcome to the third Charles W. Kegley, Jr. Lecture. Each year Carnegie Council convenes many deeply thoughtful and remarkable programs, all of which in their own fashion examine pressing current issues in international relations through an ethical lens. While the Kegley Lecture shares that DNA with all of the Council’s programs, as Joel indicated the Lecture was established so that the Council would have a singular moment each year to pull back the lens from the fleeting present and take a longer view about first principles, to reflect on what it means for there to be an ethical perspective on geopolitical realities.

This brings us to this year’s lecturer, Robert D. Kaplan. He is the best-selling author of 24 books and counting on foreign affairs and travel. His books have been translated into many languages. This list includes last year’s Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis. As an aside, as I note a few other of his books, I love his use of subtitles which foreshadow what is to come.

Before that, his other books include: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China; The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power; Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age; Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific; The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate; The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War; and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History.

Mr. Kaplan is currently distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, and he holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

It is important to realize that Mr. Kaplan is no armchair theorist. Indeed, few writers have seen as much of the world on the ground. Over four decades he has traveled in more than a hundred countries, throughout the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and the Indo-Pacific, first as a foreign correspondent and later as one of our leading geopolitical thinkers. To borrow from President Theodore Roosevelt, he has been “the man in the arena.” More than once he has faced life-threatening situations, including in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. The Wall Street Journal has called him “a grand strategist to whom the Pentagon turns.” Twice, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers.

Many of us first read him in Balkan Ghosts, his account of how history and memory shape conflict affected in part ways that could not have been anticipated how a generation of policymakers thought about the former Yugoslavia. His latest book, China Whisperers: The Voices that have Shaped America’s Views of its Chief Geopolitical Rival, will be released on November 10. More about that later.

What these impressive facts fail to convey is how beautifully Mr. Kaplan writes. He is a master stylist, and more, he is a polymath, a word of praise he bestowed in Wasteland on Oswald Spengler, but which to my mind describes him as well. When you read one of Mr. Kaplan’s books, you join a conversation about world politics with philosophers, historians, and literary giants across time.

Please join me in welcoming Robert D. Kaplan, a student of maps, mountains, and the hard limits of power, whose work is indeed moral to its core.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Thank you, Stephen, for that truly lovely introduction, and I hope I can live up to it this evening before all of you.

It may seem odd that “getting China right” should be a moral question, but keep in mind that 17 million people were killed in World War I, and one could argue that the highest moral question of foreign policy in this anxious, claustrophobic, and interconnected world that we live in is avoiding great-power conflict in a military sense, because that would dwarf anything else. To be humble about it, when we argue or discuss very hotly Ukraine, Gaza, or some of the other conflicts today, keep in mind that there is no place that angered Washington so much, got people to fight with each other, destroyed careers, and caused arguments you cannot even imagine than China.

China is a country we have gotten wrong in a big way over the decades, over the last 80 years, in fact, and if we get it wrong again, it could be catastrophic. For this reason, I am going to take you a bit through our history with China because before Iran, before Afghanistan, and before Iraq, as I said, there is no place we argued about and no place that caused friendships to dissolve and careers to be ruined, like America’s relationship with China. If people find this a surprise, it is only because memory is very, very short.

China policy has been plagued with miscalculations over the decades because of the very turbulence of the 20th century. Remember, World War II did not begin when the Nazis invaded Poland. It began when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, Northeastern China, in 1931, and then the Japanese went on to commit the so-called “rape” of Nanjing in 1937, when many tens of thousands of people were murdered, tortured, and raped by Japanese troops. Naturally, given the carnage, America’s sympathy went out to the nationalist ruler of China at the time, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. In fact, so high was our regard for Chiang Kai-shek that Henry Luce put him on the cover of Time magazine four times. Think of that; four times.

There was an easy, lazy assumption quite frankly shared by Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Chiang Kai-shek would become one of the Big Four leaders after World War II along with Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. There would be four countries leading the world after the war. Remember, we assumed during the war that Stalin would remain an ally after the war. That proved wrong, but we did not know that back then. We took Chiang Kai-shek for granted because he had always been there since the collapse of the Qing dynasty almost. We assumed he would always be there into the future.

That was a mistaken analysis because after the war, between 1946 and 1949 Mao Zedong’s communists conquered China. This was a shock to Washington and to the American system. Almost nobody—and I will get to the word “almost” in a minute—predicted it. It was thought that nothing worse could happen.

After all, this is the height of the “American century.” The Japanese had just surrendered on the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945. We were at the top of the world literally, yet four years later all of Eurasia is communist and in a negative way because Stalin by this time had started the Cold War and had broken with the United States and Western Europe, so we felt besieged.

On the one hand, Europe was bombed out and broke, and we were spending all the money we did not have for the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and ultimately the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the late 1940s. Meanwhile, China, all three time zones of it, 550 million people at the time, which was a great amount of people, had gone communist.

Somebody had to be held to account. This was such a great misjudgment on our part, and thus was born—and some of you a bit older than I may actually remember it at your parents’ kitchen table growing up—the “Who lost China?” debate. It may come from distant childhood memory. This was the late 1940s/first half of the 1950s. It was a question hurled as an accusation: “Who lost China?” Who should be held to account? Who should have their careers ruined, their pensions taken away in the State Department, all this? This is much worse than the arguments about the Arab-Israeli War. This was blood almost.

It turned out that the people blamed were the very people who predicted that Mao would win, who had said, “You know something? The communists may not be nice people, but they are going to win in this war.” The reason they said that is not so much because they fell in love with the communists, but they saw how weak Chiang Kai-shek was in the countryside with the peasantry.

All of this is still very contentious. There are still books coming out with new archival information that turns things one way and then the other way. We are still learning about it. So, the very people blamed were the only people who predicted what would happen, but they were not innocent either because that was only the first mistake about China.

The second mistake was that these people, known as the “old China hands,” people like John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, Teddy White, Edgar Snow, were right in predicting that the communists would win, but they were wrong in predicting that the communists would be benign. They said, “Oh, they are more democratic than Chiang Kai-shek. They won’t commit atrocities” and all, and Mao went on to kill 70 million people.

When you look back on history, Chiang Kai-shek was an ordinary flawed leader. His crimes were of an ordinary nature. What Mao was about to perpetrate was extraordinary. It was beyond belief. So the China hands got one thing right, that the communists would win, and another thing wrong, that the communists would be benign. They would not be; they would be altogether evil in everything. That is the second big thing we got wrong about China.

Even today you will hear voices saying that we could have saved China and we could have intervened in the Chinese Civil War. Let me tell you something: China at the time had a population of 550 million. South Vietnam at the time we intervened with half a million troops in 1965 had a population of 15 million. China had a population 37 times the size of Vietnam in that era, so the idea that we could have saved China at the same time we were doing all we could to save Europe from Stalin is probably not accurate. It is wishful thinking, particularly when you take into account how our interventions in Iraq, population 24 million people, and Afghanistan with even a smaller population, came to nought. There was probably nothing we could do, but we got it wrong because we would not face facts.

There was a witch hunt, and this gets us to the next big mistake we made about China. All the old China hands who were accused of not supporting Chiang Kai-shek enough were purged. They were fired. They had their pensions taken away. They were taken away from the debate, and this is something the baby boomers get wrong. The baby boomers have no real living memory of the McCarthy era, but they do have a living memory of Vietnam, so they make a distinction between the two.

In fact, there was no distinction. The McCarthy era led to Vietnam because the decision to send half a million troops into Vietnam was made by Europeanists, bureaucrats who had no experience with Asia because all the old Asian specialists were purged. The people who would have been assistant secretaries of state and assistant secretaries of defense, who had warned against getting involved in any guerrilla war in Asia, were purged. John Paton Davies, Jr. was living in Peru. That is where they purged him to. That was his last diplomatic posting.

There is a direct link through China between the McCarthy era and Vietnam, and the person who makes this clearest is the author of a book we have all heard about but forgotten because it was published 54 years ago, David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest. David Halberstam made this point, but it was in 1972 essentially, when he said that Vietnam was a result of the McCarthy era, because the 1950s did not end with John F. Kennedy being elected president in 1960. The 1950s, as a foreign policy era, did not end until Kennedy’s assassination. It continued into the early 1960s.

After he was elected, Kennedy wanted to open a dialogue with “Red China,” as it was called, but he was dissuaded from doing so because he had just won an election with 100,000 votes out of 66 million cast, in a questionable election, against a hard right-wing opponent at the time, Richard Nixon, and he therefore felt vulnerable on the right, and because he felt vulnerable on the right, he said that opening talks with China was too controversial and it was something he would do in the second term. Of course, there was no second term.

Johnson wanted to do it too. He wanted to open talks with China, but Mao was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution then. Nixon and Kissinger were not the first—and it was more Nixon’s idea than Kissinger’s to go to China—but the third, but they were the first ones who were actually able to do it.

Why did Vietnam happen? Why did Korea happen? For many reasons, but one small reason is that we had no dialogue with the Red Chinese at the time, none. When Zhou Enlai offered to shake hands with John Foster Dulles in the late 1950s at a conference in Geneva, John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand. That is how cold relations were.

Barbara Tuchman, a great historian, wrote a whole Foreign Affairs essay once about how if we had some dialogue with the Chinese, maybe, just maybe we would not have gotten involved in Vietnam to the degree that we did because we would have known that what was motivating Ho Chi Minh was Vietnamese nationalism and not the domino theory with China. That was another big mistake we made.

The person who ironically ended this whole cycle of history was Richard Nixon, the erstwhile red-baiter of the Chinese, and he did it because he said, “I want to win a second term, and this will get me a second term.” But forget about motives; he did it.

That ended the “Who lost China” debate finally because China was no longer lost. It was an asset to be used against the Soviet Union, and by weakening the Soviet Union Nixon and Kissinger were able to achieve détente with the Soviet Union, which was a great accomplishment because the Cold War still had 17 years left to run, which was an eternity essentially.

During some of the most unstable periods of the Cold War, Nixon and Kissinger did something—and I will get to this later—very moral; they prevented great-power war by opening a dialogue with China and creating almost a trilogy of three great powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.

This lasted very well until 1989. Two things happened in 1989. There was the Tiananmen Square massacre, which made Washington and the American people suddenly hate the regime in China, and there was the collapse of the Berlin Wall, so who needed China anymore as an asset against the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War and would soon collapse? Again, what happened next was unpredictable, which was that China would grow into a great economic power, mainly through the dynamism of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Zhou Rongxin, and that made it impossible to ignore China.

Then came another great mistake by Washington. Not just Bill Clinton but everyone in Washington, Democrat and Republican, supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) because they said if China would only enter the World Trade Organization, they would become democratic and liberal like we are, and the reason they believed this was that the Cold War had just ended. Every communist regime in Eastern Europe had collapsed. They had the wind at their back and assumed that China could not withstand that wind. As it turned out, China used WTO membership to cheat and get rich and then turned back to Leninism essentially.

We have always, for one reason or another, gotten China wrong, and the reason we have gotten it wrong is not a plot or stupidity, it was just that China is a deeply complicated country. We are only just now finding things out about Stalin’s support of Mao during the Chinese civil war. It is easy to make mistakes with China, and that is why defending Taiwan while preventing a war with China has to be fine-tuned dramatically, and yet that is the biggest moral question out there.

Take Gaza, take Ukraine, take other conflicts. They are terrible. I am not going to minimize them, and I am not trying to be cynical when I say this, but they have not affected anyone’s retirement accounts. In fact, it has been very impressive the way that financial markets have successfully priced in all of these conflicts. Yes, there have been variations and a correction or two, but the market is still near all-time highs after four-and-a-half years of war in Ukraine.

Even with Iran and the disruption of oil capabilities we are still close to all-time highs, though it has come down a little bit, but if there were a high-end military conflict between the United States and China, the world’s largest and second-largest economies, over the South China Sea and Taiwan, with Taiwan producing 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips and all the oil and gas that is transported from the Middle East through the Strait of Malacca and through the South China Sea, it would disrupt supply chains and sea lines of communication, and it might do the kind of economic damage so that the average American far from New York looking at their retirement statements would suddenly care nothing about Ukraine and nothing about Gaza and would ask, “What’s going on here?” Once you get people angry like that, it becomes even harder to make successful, cool foreign policy. That is the ultimate geopolitical catastrophe.

It is interesting. Being tough is not enough or being soft is not enough. You cannot say, “All right, we will give fewer arms to Taiwan, we will cool off a bit.” No. That does not work.

There is a fine professor at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, who wrote in Foreign Affairs about a year and a half ago that actually people misunderstand the outbreak of World War I. They think it was alliances that caused the war. He said, that’s true, but it is also because the Germans had gotten it into their heads that Britain would not come to the aid of the France and Belgium if they were attacked, and that helped encourage the Germans to invade.

If the Chinese ever got it into their heads that we are not going to defend Taiwan, you could get the opposite result, a Chinese miscalculation that leads to a war. It is not enough to be soft, and you cannot be tough without any negotiating strategy. It is a very fine line you have to draw.

Now I am going to say something very boring but true: What tends to keep the peace is having top, mentally cognizant professionals and technocrats running foreign policy, the deputy assistant secretaries, assistant secretaries, and undersecretaries because what will prevent war the most is proper signaling so that we never say anything that they misunderstand and they never say anything that we misunderstand. So many wars happen because of misunderstandings. To the degree that you can have cool professionals who are very rhetorically disciplined, not beginning a sentence without knowing how the sentence is going to end will do a lot to prevent a conflict with China.

The ultimate moral objective is to prevent great-power war. Barbara Tuchman wrote a book—you are thinking of The Guns of August, but that is not the book in my mind—called The Proud Tower, which shows just how rich, sophisticated, and beautiful was the world that was destroyed by World War I essentially, with all the elites living their wonderful lives and also with things like antisemitism and labor and student unrest. The more you read this book, the more eerie it sounds. It is like our own world, and it was all destroyed by World War I.

To me, the only regional conflict that has the potential to do that would be a conflict over Taiwan in the South China Sea. You can have other, non-regional conflicts that could do something like that, but this could really do it.

That is why I want to bring up two people who you do not normally think of as moral in this sense but who acted very morally in this instance. One I mentioned before was Nixon. Going to China, Nixon and Kissinger established a precedent of how to deal with China that has continued right up through but not including the Trump administration. It is proper signaling, relations are conducted at the highest level always, and deliberate rhetorical ambiguity on Taiwan, which basically says that there is only one China, its capital is in Beijing but that neither side will do anything to militarily change the situation on Taiwan. Those words are not in the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972, but they were implied, and that is what we have lived under with tremendous rhetorical discipline for decades.

That rhetorical discipline has wavered somewhat. President Biden said that of course we will come to the defense of Taiwan, but then his aides, his advisors, these quiet technocrats, had to walk that statement back a bit to get back into the realm of ambiguity. The problem with the current administration that is so scary is, as I alluded to before, the president often starts sentences and does not know how he is going to end them. On one hand he is indicating and signaling that China can have its own sphere of influence in East Asia. That is very irresponsible, because what that does is get the Japanese and South Koreans thinking that maybe they need a nuclear bomb of their own.

Lee Kuan Yew, the late leader of Singapore, once said something that nobody understood at the time but is now very clear: “You know, China is the demographic, geographical, and economic organizing principle of Asia. We can’t get away from that, whereas you Americans come to Asia from half a world away. You come here because you want to. You want to defend Japan and do all this stuff, but maybe one day there will be a president who does not want to or does not know the history or does not take it so seriously.” Lee Kuan Yew was being very clairvoyant at that time.

On the one hand, President Trump is telling the Chinese, “Maybe you can have a sphere of influence,” and on the other hand he is saying, “We’re not going to come 9,000 miles just to defend Taiwan.” He actually said this. This does not create peace; it creates uncertainty, and uncertainty can lead to mis-signaling and to wars, and, as I said, a war in this region of the world would be worse than anything we have seen so far, and that is the highest principle.

Now I would like to mention another president who, in great-power terms, was incredibly moral, even though you would think that nothing that dramatic happened during his administration, and that would be George H. W. Bush, who I rank as the second-greatest one-term president in American history, the first being James Polk, 1845 to 1849, who increased the size of the United States by almost 40 percent in one term and was the most vigorous president between Andrew Jackson on one end and Abraham Lincoln on the other.

Listen to what did not happen during George H. W. Bush’s administration: Tiananmen Square with all the liberal intellectuals demanding that the elder Bush administration break diplomatic relations with Beijing. Bush would not do it. In fact, he sent his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and his Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, to Beijing on a secret mission, telling the Chinese, “You did a bad thing, we are going to punish you for it, but we are not going to break relations. We will get over this period.”

That was denounced at the time but turned out to be the wiser course. Can you imagine had we broken diplomatic relations with Beijing just on the eve of China’s takeoff economically? The miracle of China today with its economy, technology, and everything actually did not begin until after Tiananmen and not before. People do not realize this.

Here’s another thing: One regime after another was collapsing in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, and again all the liberal intellectuals were saying that the president needs to go to Eastern Europe to take a victory lap, and George H. W. Bush said, “No. I’m going nowhere, I’m saying nothing.”

They said, “How could you be so cold? This is everything we have worked for for 45 years.”

Bush was afraid that the Soviets would intervene militarily, and he did not want to poke his finger in their eye. He did not want to give them any reason to intervene militarily. So Bush did nothing, he stayed cool, and the Cold War ended relatively peacefully. It did. This was not by accident.

Let me conclude. Moral questions are ultimately questions of power too. For instance, let me talk for a second about Bosnia.

Bosnia was a great liberal cause during the 1990s, but there was also massive ethnic cleansing in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and Armenia in the 1990s, which the intellectuals ignored. Why was that? It was because Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and Armenia were in the Soviet sphere of influence and the Russian sphere of influence, and the Russians had nuclear bombs, so there was no chance that we were going to intervene in their backyard, whereas the former Yugoslavia was different. Tito had broken with the Soviets back in 1947, so Yugoslavia did not have questions of superpower interest at the time. It was safe to intervene, and thus there was a great moral outrage that we delayed intervening, but the reason had to do with questions of power and why we chose one place to get all upset about and not another place.

I leave you with all this, that foreign policy is going to be increasingly hard in this anxious, claustrophobic world where, because of technology a crisis in one part of the world can influence and change a crisis in another part of the world very quickly, and keeping the peace without giving up your values will be the highest moral question.

Thank you.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: Thank you for those deeply insightful and provoking remarks. I am so pleased that we now get to continue this discussion in a slightly different vein, in a fireside chat, as it were.

Robert, thank you again for that. Where to begin? There is a lot to think about there. Let’s start with this very broad question: If the goal is to prevent great-power war, where do you draw the line so as to not lose the principles that you stand for by balancing power? What do you give up?

ROBERT KAPLAN: This goes back to Munich and appeasement in 1938.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: It does. In fact, I was going to say certainly appeasement in 1938. That is how we do it now, but Chamberlain at the time thought he had the balance right.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Also, up until 1938 “appeasement” was not a dirty word. Appeasement was a normal tool of diplomacy. Someone who points this out very elegantly is Stephen Kotkin, now at the Hoover Institute and formerly at Princeton, saying, “Appeasement was fine. We used it all the time. It was Chamberlain who made it a dirty word.”

The point is, you do not know exactly. Remember, right after Munich in 1938 came Kristallnacht and the Nazi invasion of Poland. Chamberlain thought he understood Hitler. He had no idea what he was dealing with, none whatsoever. There is no simple answer. You do not know 100 percent. You have to feel your way.

One thing about the Chinese communists and Xi Jinping is that so far, at least, they do not seem to be risk takers. They are not like the Iranians. I would not say that they play by the rules. They are relentless, but they are in a completely different category than Hitler. They seem to value patience and timing. I do not think Munich is a danger here so much.

At the same time, if we say publicly we are not going to defend Taiwan, that invites another Munich because that could lead Beijing to miscalculate, to think that they can invade or do something that like and we would have no reaction, but their very military action would create a circumstance that would almost force a president’s hand to intervene.

I do not think Beijing is going to invade Taiwan. I think they are going to find other ways to undermine Taiwanese sovereignty, to make an end run, if you will, around Taiwanese sovereignty.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: Let’s take that point. There are two things I want to talk about there: One is signaling here. What do the Chinese think of the signaling of the United States essentially not supporting Ukraine anymore and in fact raising the question of whether they will honor Article 5 of NATO? Are we already signaling things that are going to create the risk of this kind of great-power war short of saying we will not defend Taiwan?

ROBERT KAPLAN: We could be because they may see a window of opportunity with President Trump in this regard. It is not that Trump is not supporting Ukraine; it is that it is happening in such an amateurish and vulgar way that it would tell the Chinese that they have a window of opportunity here for two years because American policy will go back at least to some extent.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: You mentioned patience, and I think one of the things that would be interesting to do is take a long view of time, something we in the United States tend not to do, as we tend to go from election cycle to election cycle and changing of administrations. We are just not good at the long view or what you talk about as the “policy discipline” to prevent great-power war. How do we as a society, where the global world order is changing under our feet, the liberal order post-World War II is gone, and a new order is being born but it has not been born yet, and whatever it looks like it will probably have some multipolarity about it that is significant?

ROBERT KAPLAN: I would say that the U.S.-China rivalry is the last great-power rivalry between two powers before we have a truly multipolar or even multiplanetary world. Therefore, the highest goal has to be to get through this period without a war breaking out and without Taiwan being conquered.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: When we think about calculations and how the world looks, one of the things that struck me is that when the 21st century began the top five economies were the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, so when we are thinking about strategy and how we navigate a China-U.S. competition going forward we tend to think of that in a static dynamic; that is the great powers. That is where the economic powers are.

But when you look forward a hundred years, and we are not as good at that, three of the top four economies at the end of this century are likely to be Asian—China, India, and Indonesia. Europe, which had Germany, England, and France on that list, is likely to be something like 10 percent of global domestic product. When you see that kind of evolution happening across time, what does that say for how the United States needs to be thinking about managing this global conflict?

ROBERT KAPLAN: I will give you another perspective: When World War II ended, the United States was 50 percent of world manufacturing capacity. We are now down to something like 16 or 17 percent, and I think China has gone up to 26 percent. This tells you a lot about the world. We used to have by far not only the largest navy in the world but a navy larger than the next ten nations combined, and naval power is how you calculate national power because of the cost of ships. China now has a larger navy than us, and even qualitatively it is getting better, with not only nuclear-powered but the latest diesel and electric-powered submarines.

They say, “Oh, but the Chinese have not fought a war since they had a draw with Vietnam in 1979." It is interesting to watch the Chinese put so much effort into noncommissioned officers because they know that is where wars are won and lost, not with officers but with noncommissioned officers.

So they are doing everything right in terms of being able to take over us. It is almost as if they know all the arguments against them, and they are trying to rectify them. They are a very smart adversary.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: Who here is working to get it right?

ROBERT KAPLAN: Are you talking about in the administration?

STEPHEN HIBBARD: I would say more broadly. I would ask, who are the voices that need to be listened to? Obviously, it would be great if some of them were in this administration, but for the moment I am going to make it broader than the current administration.

ROBERT KAPLAN: I know that Biden is rated as a weak president who was an interregnum president and mishandled a whole bunch of things mainly because he had no business wanting to be president at his age, but his Asia policy was quite dynamic. They brought Japan and South Korea together, historic enemies, because the Japanese occupied Korea not just for World War II but from 1910 to 1945. He brought together two historic enemies into the alliance and patched up their differences so that they both—this of course was never stated—could confront China together.

The whole deal known as AUKUS between the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, was quite brilliant. Australia is a huge continent with very few people, which means that despite their military prowess they needed to be defended by the United States Navy. That is the bottom line. The Australians were defended by the U.S. Navy while they were getting rich off trade with China. In a way, they were somewhat neutralist.

So this deal, which is supposed to get Australia American-built nuclear-powered submarines together with technology from Great Britain has essentially lifted Australia out of neutralism toward the U.S. alliance and brought NATO closer to our Pacific alliance. These were very smart moves.

Also, we were very careful what we said to the Chinese. It was a hard policy, but I thought it was a policy you could build on. Also, every year he was president, Obama made a point of visiting one or another Southeast Asian country. Rather than shuttling back and forth to the Middle East, he shuttled back and forth to Southeast Asia.

These were things to build on. They may not have been brilliant, but they were credible policy alternatives, and they were staffed by people, one of whom I profile in my new book and whose name is completely unknown to you, but these are the people who do policy at the lower and middle levels.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: You talked about China being admitted to the World Trade Organization. There is a lot of commentary to the effect that we made this miscalculation and that if they turned into a liberal democratic government, they would be more like us than like them and so it was a mistake to do that.

Here is the counterfactual: What if H. W. Bush had done something different in the wake of Tiananmen? If diplomatic relations had been terminated, would China have been admitted to the WTO, which many people say created the monster that we now confront as our biggest rival?

ROBERT KAPLAN: I think if we had broken relations with China, China was determined to push ahead with pseudo-capitalism, less with Deng Xiaoping than with Jiang Zemin and Zhou Rongxin, and they would have found buyers throughout the world, in Europe, all over, and China would have turned into a behemoth anyway. We would not have been shut out entirely but partially shut out. I do not think there was a way to stop Chinese economic and technological development.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: That has been probably the most significant transformation of any country in the history of mankind.

ROBERT KAPLAN: I would go further. When people sit around and ask who the greatest man in the 20th century was, they always say Einstein or Churchill. This is a very Western point of view. Deng Xiaoping and his successors improved the daily lives of more millions of people in a shorter period of time and gave them more personal choices than ever before in recorded economic history. If you live in a world where most people do not worry at night about voting every four years but worry about putting food on their tables and sending their kids to good schools, there is an argument to be made that Deng Xiaoping was the greatest man of the 20th century.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: Fair enough. I want to shift the conversation and talk about something you have talked about in a number of your books because I think it ties into some of the dynamics about what happens as transformation occurs and if there were to be the kind of great-power conflict that we are saying is the moral question to avoid.

You have written a lot particularly about order and chaos and said in effect that there are times when tyranny of a country may be a lesser evil for a society than anarchy. That is a hard concept for many Americans to hear, including as people perceive at least this administration moving toward autocracy. Can you talk more about what you consider the tragic choice between lesser evils and how this plays out for liberal democracy?

ROBERT KAPLAN: It has to do with the definition. People hear the word “anarchy” all the time, but they have no idea what it means. None. They think anarchy is when there is a controversy in the Trump White House. The New York Times uses the words “anarchy” and “chaos” all the time to describe lesser crises: There is a demonstration, it gets out of hand, a few people are arrested, and it is “anarchy.”

No. When I say “anarchy” I mean it the way the ancient Greeks meant anarchy. The ancient Greeks lived at a time when there were no bureaucratic institutions, so chaos was very visible and very possible all the time. There is nothing more frightening than a society in anarchy. You do not know where to turn.

I experienced this several times in my life, in West Africa in the early 1990s, in Iraq right after Saddam Hussein fell, and in several other places, such as in Baku, Azerbaijan before the economic takeoff of that country. People forget that in 1992 and 1993 there was anarchy in the streets there. It was a democracy, but that did not mean anything.

An Iraqi woman said to me, “Look. Saddam was awful. He was a pathological murderer, but even under Saddam there were rules. You knew what to do and what you couldn’t do, and if you did what you were supposed to do, unless you were really unlucky nothing really bad happened to you. But now, you Americans have created a society which is no society, where there is literally blood in the streets, and that is worse. That is more frightening.”

That is why the ancient Greeks were obsessed with anarchy. In Euripides’ play The Bacchae it is all about the fear of anarchy. The Greeks associated anarchy with evil, and they valued order above all, but order can get out of hand.

The Founding Fathers wrestled with this often. If you read The Federalist Papers and other things, their horror was the revolutions in Europe and England a hundred years before them. That was their close history. They were terrified: “We are building a democracy, but we don’t want the anarchy they had in Europe.” The Founders knew that you had to create order, Hamilton especially, and once you created that order then you could go about making that very order less tyrannical, and that was the solution.

The Greeks feared anarchy, as did the Founders, and Americans have no idea about it. We get snippets of it, like with the disturbances in France two weeks ago, but that is only a snippet of what is possible.

The worst evil is no government, and that is on the first few pages of probably the greatest political science work of the 20th century, in my opinion, Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies. He said that there is no evil worse than no government, and I think he was quoting Walter Lippmann. It may have been someone else; I don’t remember exactly. Anarchy is something that 99 percent of Americans have no experience with.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: It is a fantastic description of that, and I think it is very important. Even when we think about riots in Portland or things in the wake of George Floyd, I do not think it approached nearly what you experienced in Iraq and other places.

Thinking about you having traveled the world and seen so many places I want to step our conversation back. Looking around the room, I can tell that folks here would be happy to sit and listen for quite a long time, but I want to end tonight, which we have to do, sadly, with a question that goes more to your personal experience in life as well and draw this analogy: In 1828 and then in 1831, when he was 19 and then 22, Abraham Lincoln made two flatboat voyages down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and historians have widely considered those trips to have been the foundational, transformative catalysts for his views on slavery, commerce, and national unity.

Of all your travels and all of the world governments you have seen, the people you have met and talked to, as you look back what was the most foundational in developing your own thinking about moral issues in international relations?

ROBERT KAPLAN: A number of things. First of all, I think Lincoln’s trip down the Mississippi, though it gave him views against slavery and other things, I imagine it also gave him a visual and visceral indication of the greatness of the American continent, the size of the continent, and that it needed to be united as a counter to Europe and that it could only be united under a free society. Remember, the far West then was the Mississippi. Very few people had seen the Rocky Mountains. So, Lincoln was getting an indication of the continent basically.

A foundational thing for me was that in the mid-1980s, when it was thought the Cold War would last forever—it was not until 1988 and 1989 that people thought the Cold War was a transitional phase once it became clear the Soviet Union was weakening—I traveled from Greece, where I lived, throughout the Balkans and not just Yugoslavia but Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania, where it was possible sometimes to get a visa into, and I was overwhelmed by how many people I interviewed were obsessed with national and ethnic grievances. I said to myself, “This cannot end well because at some point the Cold War security structure will collapse and we ae not just going to get peace, love, and freedom all over.” Maybe up in Poland or Hungary at that time, but not down here, not in these places that were ruled not by the Habsburgs but by the Ottoman Empire.

This set me at odds with the elites in the United States, who said, “Oh, no. At the end of the Cold War they all rejoiced and we celebrated.”

An essay I published and that I framed—it is in my study—was in The Wall Street Journal European Edition, and it was published the same month that the Berlin Wall fell. I said, “Elites are celebrating the concept of Central Europe. They will soon learn about the concept of the Balkans, and the century will end as it began, with datelines in the Balkans.” This was also in an essay I published the same year in The Atlantic, called “The Balkans: Europe’s Third World.”

The negative reaction I got was amazing. This is in the 1980s still, but it made me aware of something, that nobody predicts the future. That is not what happens. What happens is that you do reporting on aspects of the present that other people are ignoring, and that way you get an insight into the future.

STEPHEN HIBBARD: Thank you. For those of you who want to imagine at least that you get to continue this conversation, I encourage you to get his new book. It will be released on November 10. I have preordered my copy. That way we can continue sharing your thoughts in another forum.

I want to thank you very much for your time, for being with us tonight, and for all of the insights and thoughts you have shared with the group. Ladies and gentlemen, Robert Kaplan.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Thank you, Steve. Thank you, everybody.