We have really flubbed our utopia. A lot has been said of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History“. More than the book itself, it engendered an attitude, a spirit — mostly within the American managerial elites. I think I first encountered it, at least really thought about it, as I stood on an airstrip in northern Mali waiting for a lift back to Bamako. I was with a State Department Foreign Service Officer (FSO), and a nice guy who really meant well and I would learn a competent and professional diplomat. But we were talking about trade imbalances, foreign assistance, America’s then-thriving (and frankly still thriving) “America Last” philosophy. “We made it,” he told me. “Now it’s time to let the others catch up.”

Fukuyama.

It is this thinking, mostly well intentioned, that brought about our current impending apocalypse. We didn’t manage our apogee well. Our “Pax Americana” that reached its golden heights during the Clinton years; between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. That lazy, meaningless, nihilistic decade when Fukuyama was king, religion died, restraint died and American liberalism captured global democracy (and her institutions). We went out to tremendously fragile countries in transition pushing gender and sexual politics while empowering the wrong people by not recognizing that while the mechanics of western democracy serve in the west (sort of — US, UK, Canada and to a lesser degree in Western Europe) as a stay on state capture, in the third world (and especially in Africa) they are a tool for state capture. Foreign assistance and central banks to fund corruption (and pay for the cronyism dictatorship needs), elections to cement power, corrupt judges to pave over poor behavior, and genocide (not once or twice but over and over again, including now). I once had a conversation with a Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) in an African country (I won’t say who) about this. “The West’s approach in Africa has utterly and miserably failed,” I said. “You just have to look around. The genocides aren’t ‘growing pains’ of young democracies. They are ghosts in the machine, glitches inherited from the West which are unfixable in the third world.” He looked at me and said (and with a straight face), “I think we just need to do a little better; double down a little harder.” And he started talking about a judicial training program for corrupt judges that he had just visited. Forget these judges were not the intellectual offspring of Locke, forget that they were not selected by merit but through a cronyistic process which involved the purchase of position, and forget that to get people to show up you have to pay them a “sitting fee” — and that is not only normal but part of the USAID budgets. Asses in chairs — things are improving!

Less Fukuyama, more Kaplan.

Robert D. Kaplan’s penultimate book is called “The Tragic Mind“. It’s a short read, as close to a memoir as he’s gotten, it’s sort of an essay. It is not geopolitics like his normal genre — it’s more what I’d probably call “Philosophy of action”. His contention, American (Fukuyaman) utopians have forgotten (or never learned) how to think tragically. Like my DCM friend, who was sure we could get a western style jury verdict among uneducated African peasants instead of an execution committee. A judge who would see beyond tribe and his perilous future to Jefferson and Locke and Kant. What Kaplan reminds us of is that decision making, especially from positions of power, needs to realize that choices are often between bad and worse. Rarely ever good, and always with the understanding in our mind that things could go very wrong, very quickly indeed. Especially when evil roams the world freely, and our first and main job is to try and contain it.

The artificers of our Afghanistan withdrawal, our Iran ‘détente’, our Zelensky goading should have read some Kaplan and entertained a little tragedy. Mixed with some humility, this might have averted the apocalypse.

Incidentally Fukuyama is still at it. Most recently I caught him on YouTube debating the architect of Eurasianism and Putin’s bloody war (Aleksandr Dugin) on the merits of progress. “Seems all you’re really opposed to is gay marriage,” Fukuyama smugly quipped at Dugin. “Don’t worry, you’ll get there.”

Cue WWIII.