How Geopolitics Intrudes
CNAS Author: Robert Kaplan
Original Post: How Geopolitics Intrudes
Type: CNAS Commentary
July 18, 2008 — Issues like climate change and sustainability were a major theme in this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, which concluded in early July.
Aspen sang this year with pleas for the next president to make climate change --and the protection of dwindling resources -- the centerpiece of his foreign policy, thus fusing in a very concrete way America's national interest with that of the wider world. There was clearly a yearning for a new, more elevated brand of American patriotism that co-opted these global issues as national security interests - which indeed they are. Americans have always been a people of the frontier, and just as civil rights constituted a new frontier of enlightened patriotism in the 1960s, tackling environmental challenges looks like the new frontier of this and future decades.
The facts presented were compelling, from falling water levels in the Great Lakes to rising sea levels world-wide that could kill and make homeless tens of millions of people in Bangladesh alone. It became obvious, listening to the briefings and panel discussions that we are on the verge of more cataclysmic events like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 -- event that will reshape public perceptions of foreign policy. We inhabit an increasingly crowded world with extremely fragile infrastructures subject to the slightest shifts in climatic and seismic patterns. As I wrote in my 1994 Atlantic article, The Coming Anarchy, the natural environment will be the national security focus of the 21st century.
But there is, nevertheless, a problem: the more mundane, less uplifting, narrower issues of geopolitics that will inevitably intrude. To relegate geopolitics to the background threatens to provoke other sorts of cataclysms that will permanently distract the new president from these newer concerns. Only by effectively handling Iraq and Afghanistan, the wider war on terrorism and the rising military power of China can a new president build up the political capital to lead the world on climate change and sustainability.
Obviously, the two sets of issues are not mutually exclusive. The new president can and will focus on both at the same time. In the early months of his administration he will seek to consolidate and build upon the gains in Iraq over the past 18 months, even as he tackles global warming in a serious way, thus reversing the neglect of the Bush Administration.
But a president cannot simply ditch geopolitics for post-national politics. He must make a serious adjustment to the policies of George W. Bush, not renounce them altogether. And my worry at Aspen was that while there were some excellent, dutiful panels on traditional national security concerns, especially on nuclear weapons, the audience's heart lay elsewhere. Tellingly, the dramatic rescue of three American military contractors from a five-and-a-half-year-long captivity in the Colombian jungles, as prisoners of the narco-terrorist group, FARC, elicited little or no chatter among the conference participants - even though the rescue in and of itself dealt a major strategic blow to the anti-American left throughout South America.
As excellent and jam-packed with substance as the conference was, there was an element of narcissism among at least a few participants, who wanted to embrace issues like global warming to the exclusion of all else. A new president will not have that luxury. Only if he furiously concentrates on traditional, 19th century balance-of-power politics and gets that right will the path be clear for him to embrace the ultimately more critical issues raised at Aspen.
Topic(s): Development and Diplomacy
People: Robert Kaplan
