Recorded just before the midterms, the DC-based foreign policy guru Charles Kupchan predicted they weren’t going to be kind to the Republicans. He was right. So if he can predict the future of domestic politics, what about international relations? Can he tell us what is about to happen in our increasingly anarchic global system?
Kupchan’s new book Bringing Order to Anarchy is less predictive than prescriptive. He argues that the answer to our multipolar disorder is not the United Nations but something older and, frankly, less democratic. His model is the Concert of Europe, the club of five great powers that, in his view, maintained peace on the European continent for most of the nineteenth century.
His diagnosis of our current disorder is that two tectonic shifts have occurred simultaneously. Firstly, international power has moved west to east and north to south on a scale not seen in centuries. Secondly, the digital revolution, particularly the automation of work, has dismantled the social contract of the industrial era. The result is the international version of a Gramscian interregnum. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. And everywhere around us are the morbid symptoms of decay.
So should Trump sit down with Putin and Xi to (re)create a 21st-Century Concert of the World? Kupchan’s answer is not yet. A concert needs conservative powers practising restraint, and Putin is a revisionist who wants the status quo overturned. The concert, he says, will have to await the post-Putin era.
What he also says is that America needs a “national conversation” about both the digital revolution and its role in the world. This conversation, I suspect, is about to begin. But it will be increasingly a post-MAGA, post-Trump one. He’s waiting for a world after Putin. The rest of us are waiting for the one after MAGA. Post-Trump and post-Putin. That’s how the world can bring back order to the international system.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Charles A. Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama, and is the author of Isolationism, No One’s World and How Enemies Become Friends.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:01 — Disorder is the default position in history
02:20 — The Concert of Europe, 1815
04:48 — Can we have an ordering moment without a war?
06:20 — Are we living in the years before 1914?
07:09 — Gramsci, and an interregnum of two tectonic shifts
08:43 — Is America suited to this moment?
11:32 — AK: this all sounds rather vague
13:03 — What does a national conversation actually mean?
13:40 — Both parties have been lying about reindustrialization
16:39 — Does Trump have a point about the old foreign policy?
19:37 — What kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from Armageddon?
24:30 — The UN is a bystander in every great conflict of our time
25:50 — Impossible maximums, workable minimums
26:09 — AK: isn’t the Concert of Europe a conservative model?
31:39 — The main wrecker is Putin
33:39 — AK: isn’t this a recipe for a world run by three autocrats?
35:48 — It’s going to be a big round table
36:27 — Closing