Making Sense - Sam Harris - #440 — A World in Crisis

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

00:00:11.780 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

00:00:15.740 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

00:00:20.100 Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore

00:00:26.260 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.240 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Robert Kaplan. Robert, thanks

00:00:37.920 for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. So I've been a fan of your work for many, many

00:00:43.120 years. I think like half of humanity I was first introduced to you when you wrote that

00:00:48.440 rather shocking article in The Atlantic in 1994, The Coming Anarchy, which I think was probably

00:00:54.740 the most read piece in the magazine for quite some time. I don't know if it's been supplanted

00:00:59.340 by anything in recent years, but that article was everywhere. Yes. See, remember, it was

00:01:05.280 the 1990s, so it was photocopied. It was the most photocopied article of the decade because

00:01:12.100 that was the technology then. Nowadays, you have so many outlets, so many things coming

00:01:18.160 out to, that it's hard for a piece really to rise above the rest, so to speak.

00:01:24.660 Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then you followed it up, if memory serves, with the book-length version,

00:01:29.900 The Ends of the Earth, which I also read at the time in hardback. So I've been following

00:01:34.640 you for quite some time. Before we jump in and talk about your new book and all manner of

00:01:40.120 thing that worries us, how do you describe your career and your focus as a writer and journalist?

00:01:46.920 Well, I started out as a journalist at a newspaper in Vermont, the Rutland Daily Herald. And then

00:01:54.180 I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and North Africa. And I traveled the world essentially

00:02:00.920 over the years. And I got bored with conventional journalism, you know, with standard, narrowly

00:02:07.760 focused journalism. When I was in Turkey, I didn't care how many F-15s the Turkish government 1.00

00:02:14.260 was going to buy from the United States. I wanted to visit the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.

00:02:21.020 I thought that would tell me more about Turkey than how many F-15s they were going to buy.

00:02:26.840 So I just gradually emerged out of daily journalism. And I had an editor who really helped me in this

00:02:34.420 regard, William Whitworth, who was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly for 20 years,

00:02:40.260 from 1980 to 2000. And he died last year. Without him, I don't know what I would have done. But he

00:02:48.340 recognized something in me and let me do the kind of writing I wanted to do, which was to

00:02:54.860 incorporate with journalism philosophy, geography, history, literature.

00:03:02.680 Yeah. Yeah. Well, you do that quite eloquently. The new book is Wasteland, A World in Permanent

00:03:09.360 Crisis, which we will get to. But let's start with the ends of the earth and how the world looked

00:03:14.080 to you then. Because in addition to everything descriptive that is of such interest in your work,

00:03:20.560 you're not shy about prognosticating. And I'm wondering how your view of the future has held up

00:03:28.140 over the last 30 plus years. Because in The Coming Anarchy, and again, in the book,

00:03:34.160 The Ends of the Earth, you paint a very bleak picture of the future. And it's not too much to

00:03:39.880 say the unraveling on some level of civilization. I remember you were focused more on the way the

00:03:46.820 end of the Cold War would just kind of lift the lid on simmering cultural conflicts and the way that

00:03:52.560 environmental concerns and urbanization and other demographic trends would just lead to

00:03:59.620 fragmentation and disorder. What, if anything, in that view has held up well? And what do you think

00:04:06.080 you got wrong? Well, the specifics always, you get things wrong. But I think the general view is held

00:04:12.840 up well. Remember, these were products of the 1990s. The Coming Anarchy was published in 1994 as an essay.

00:04:22.860 It came out in book form in 1996. That was the heart of the mid-1990s when the policy elite at famous

00:04:33.440 posh conferences in Davos and elsewhere were predicting a world of liberal humanism. They predicted that

00:04:41.860 Africa, Asia, every place would just follow Eastern Europe into democracy and good governance.

00:04:50.620 And I was traveling around Africa, the Middle East, and other places, and I said, that's not true at all.

00:04:57.800 These places have different histories. They're at a different time in their development. And they're

00:05:04.040 not just following what happened with the collapse of a number of regimes in former communist Eastern

00:05:11.400 Europe. So, you know, I saw a totally different world than the policy elites at the time. And I

00:05:19.320 actually followed it up with another Atlantic essay called, Was Democracy Just a Moment? Which came out

00:05:26.420 in 1997. Again, this is the 1990s when the whole policy elite bought into the notion that history was

00:05:35.680 over, that there were going to be no more wars. We can just concentrate on stabilizing human rights,

00:05:43.360 et cetera. And I had a different image. So I would say that my overall prognosis of the world has held

00:05:51.040 up extremely well. I wrote about anarchy in Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast,

00:05:58.400 but those were models for what would later happen in Libya, Syria, Iraq, many other places.

00:06:05.320 Burma, then called Burma, now Myanmar, et cetera. So I think generally it's held up well.

00:06:12.920 And obviously you wrote certainly the article, The Coming Anarchy, in 1994, before virtually anyone was

00:06:19.960 on the internet, right? I forget what year we all got on, 96 or something, but obviously before social

00:06:25.420 media and smartphones. And the implications of this technology knitting the world together for good

00:06:31.420 or for ill and largely for ill is of relevance in your new book, Wasteland, because you focus more

00:06:38.620 there on the way in which the shrinkage of the information landscape and also just of geography,

00:06:46.620 I mean, the connection of every place to every other by air travel has just changed the dynamics of

00:06:54.700 everything. And, you know, the institutions fraying in one part of the world affect the institutions

00:07:00.540 elsewhere. But before we jump into the new book, do you still view the environmental focus you had 30

00:07:08.220 years ago as fairly central or is it a second order concern? No, it's fairly central, Sam, because at the

00:07:16.700 time I said in The Coming Anarchy, the essay, the 1994 essay, that the environment, the natural

00:07:24.380 environment would eventually constitute the number one security issue of the 21st century. Of course,

00:07:32.220 now it goes under a different name, climate change. It used to be global warming. But what we're really

00:07:39.100 talking about is populations in the developing world that have not stabilized and gone down like in the

00:07:47.020 West, but are still climbing, climbing, climbing. Meanwhile, there's still, there's less and less water

00:07:53.260 to drink and for agriculture. There's less and less nutrients in the soil in many of these countries,

00:08:01.180 which again, puts more pressure on food production. So that the, and this leads to migration.

00:08:08.380 It leads from the rural areas, which can no longer sustain agriculture into the cities,

00:08:14.620 which can no longer sustain these bulging populations. So the consequently people live

00:08:20.540 in slums and shanty towns. And this goes uncovered still in the media to a significant extent because

00:08:29.100 they're off our radar screen. So, so to speak, we don't realize that most of Africa now is urban.

00:08:36.780 It's not national geographic photo rural. It's mostly urban. And therefore these places are harder to

00:08:45.500 govern, harder to satisfy because urban populations require complex infrastructure that rural populations

00:08:54.300 don't. So I would say that the natural environment writ large connecting with a lot of other factors is still

00:09:02.380 fairly central.

00:09:07.660 Yeah. The demographic details you cite in the book around urbanization and just population growth in,

00:09:10.700 in Africa, especially are pretty alarming. I mean, if memory serves as something like 1.00

00:09:15.100 you're forecasting that 85% of humanity will be living in these vast mega cities.

00:09:20.540 Not that high. I forget the exact figure, but look at it this way. At the beginning of the 21st century,

00:09:29.660 our century now, there was one African for every one European. At the end of the 21st century,

00:09:37.500 there's going to be seven Africans for every European. Europe is only divided from, 0.84

00:09:43.260 is only separated from Africa by the Mediterranean Sea, which is fairly narrow in global terms.

00:09:49.900 So we're going to have a decades ahead of more and more migration as many of these people in 1.00

00:09:57.580 sub-Saharan Africa become middle class. And in the first generation of middle class, they leave, 0.91

00:10:04.140 they migrate for better opportunities elsewhere. So that this, this steady migration from not only

00:10:11.180 Africa, from the Middle East is going to fuel European populism for decades to come.

00:10:17.180 Well, I want to jump into that. I want to talk about the specific fates of Europe and America and

00:10:22.540 Russia and China and many of these places you focus on. But let's talk about the central analogy

00:10:29.500 you draw in your book to the Weimar Republic. It's been pretty common, probably all too common, 0.91

00:10:35.900 and somewhat misleading for people to analogize between America under Trump and Weimar. That seems to

00:10:43.500 sharpen up the concern about authoritarianism, perhaps to too fine a point. But you draw a global

00:10:50.780 analogy. You're describing what you call a global Weimar. What, what, what do you maybe remind people

00:10:56.620 just what Weimar was and what lessons we draw from it and why you think this is a good analogy for the

00:11:02.220 globe? Right. I'm not interested in Hitler per se. When people say Weimar, they think that it ended

00:11:09.020 with Hitler. It did. But that's not what concerns me with this analogy in this book. Weimar is a town

00:11:16.860 in central Germany where at the end of World War One in 1918, German constitutionalist lawyers,

00:11:24.940 politicians all met to draw up a new constitution. Now, Germany had just lost World War One, millions of

00:11:33.100 deaths. And, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm II turned out to be a disastrous autocrat. Even Bismarck from the 0.74

00:11:42.140 late 19th century ruler of Germany was looked down upon. And the rulers of Weimar, the people who

00:11:49.900 gathered at Weimar, were determined never to have another autocrat rule Germany. So what they did was,

00:11:58.540 and we all do this in our lives periodically, they overlearned the lesson. They made not only

00:12:05.420 it so hard for another autocrat to emerge, they made it hard to govern the place in the first place.

00:12:12.300 So that, uh, there was constant crises, constantly weak governments, weak cabinets. Um, nobody was in

00:12:20.700 control. And because nobody was in control, it led eventually to a super autocrat.

00:12:28.540 To Hitler. But for me, the world today is like the 15 years of Weimar between 1918 and 1933. 0.71

00:12:38.940 It's why do I make an analogy between the world and Weimar? Weimar was so small. The world is so big

00:12:46.940 because technology has shrunk geography. It's not only the internet, social media, it's air travel,

00:12:55.500 it's the unity of financial markets. We're all close to each other now. We're all, we all inhabit

00:13:02.780 an anxious, claustrophobic world like Weimar was. And it's not going to lead to another Hitler. I say that, 0.50

00:13:12.140 you know, I say that upfront very clearly. But what it would lead to is like a permanent crisis,

00:13:18.700 permanent paralysis, so to speak, that the days when the world had some coherence during the

00:13:27.260 bipolar cold war and uni polar American leadership in the immediate aftermath of the cold war,

00:13:35.340 those days are over. Now we live in a global Weimar where no, where we're close enough to affect each

00:13:43.020 other. But still, there's nobody in control. Well, on the matter of control, at one point you make in

00:13:49.420 the book, and you probably make it elsewhere if memory serves, is that order must precede freedom,

00:13:56.780 right? And this is something that is, I think, routinely overlooked on the left. But as you move

00:14:01.580 right of center with this epiphany, you run the risk of authoritarian capture, right? I mean,

00:14:07.260 if you privilege order over everything, I mean, the primacy of order leads to all kinds of,

00:14:12.060 you know, right-wing temptations of a sort that we're seeing play out globally. How do we avoid

00:14:19.740 this lurch toward tyranny in the face of disorder? Yes. This was the very problem that the founders

00:14:28.620 of the American Republic wrestled with. If you read the Federalist papers, you read the debates between

00:14:36.300 Hamilton and Jefferson and all of those things. You know, they were absolutely united and they

00:14:44.140 wanted to avoid tyranny, but they also were afraid of chaos, of anarchy. And the reason they were afraid

00:14:51.900 of chaos and anarchy was because they had Cromwell in their backs, the English Revolution. Remember,

00:14:57.980 we're talking here the 1780s or so. And their frame of reference was back to the 1700s, the 1600s.

00:15:07.020 So it was, they knew it was a fine balance. Madison said, you don't want a democracy, 0.98

00:15:13.020 you want a republic. What he meant by a republic was limited democracy, where people would vote every

00:15:21.740 two or four years, but otherwise elites at the top who are well-educated, you know, moral would run the

00:15:29.580 system. It was like a combination. They would be horrified at the push polls we have now of, you know,

00:15:36.780 of primary elections. We just horrify them. They would see that as a lurch towards disorder,

00:15:44.140 so to speak. But order comes before freedom because without order, there is no freedom for anybody.

00:15:52.860 You know, anarchy is a word we use. Most people have never experienced it. I've experienced anarchy

00:16:00.940 in Sierra Leone, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and other places. Literally within, when there's nobody in

00:16:08.700 control is the most frightening political reality you can think of.

00:16:14.380 Yeah. You make a related point, which I had never considered, but it strikes me as true that 1.00

00:16:20.860 when you're talking about establishing democratic order, democratic institutions are more important

00:16:26.700 than democratic ideals. I mean, we tend to think about it in terms of the ideals first, but really,

00:16:32.940 when you look at our, especially when you look at our failure to export democracy to the rest of the

00:16:38.300 the world, I mean, to go into the Middle East and our various misadventures there and try to nation

00:16:42.700 build, you know, the ideals can be spread as liberally as you want. But the failure to build

00:16:48.780 durable institutions just renders the whole project synonymous with failure and internecine chaos in the

00:16:55.900 end. Spot on. The great late Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington, said that America is

00:17:04.780 great not because of the character of its peoples, but because of its institutions. And he didn't just

00:17:13.100 mean the separation of powers in Washington between executive, legislative, and judicial. He also meant

00:17:20.780 the separation of the states, the counties, and the federal government. Wherever you look, there was

00:17:27.100 a separation of powers and with strong institutions at every level. So this is what made Huntington say

00:17:34.780 America is a great country because no place else has our level of separation of institutions. And so this

00:17:44.060 is, you know, this is what makes America great. And it's also what makes the present moment in America so

00:17:52.300 perilous because we're seeing these institutions challenged. We're seeing the separation of power

00:17:58.780 challenged. You can have periods where you have a stronger presidency, a weaker presidency, a stronger

00:18:06.060 Congress, a weaker Congress, but it stays within a certain medium, so to speak. And many countries

00:18:14.300 don't have any of this. Huntington said something else. He said that America has no business lecturing the

00:18:23.660 world about its systems of government because the American form of government was, despite our

00:18:31.580 revolution, was largely inherited from 17th century England. What the revolution in the Continental

00:18:40.060 Congress and the Federalist Papers were all about were iron of fine-tuning the details. We inherited our

00:18:48.300 system of government from 17th century England, whereas many countries in the developing world have

00:18:55.180 inherited nothing, essentially. The colonialists ruled and then they just left, so to speak. So you have

00:19:02.940 many countries in the world that are starting to, that are having to build institutions from scratch.

00:19:10.380 Which is something we actually never had to do.

00:19:14.300 Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's take a tour of the chaos and start with Russia. So in the book, 0.60

00:19:21.740 you describe Putin as the most dangerous Russian leader since Stalin. It would seem that most Americans,

00:19:28.060 certainly right of center and most definitely in Trumpistan, are unaware of this. There's even a fondness

00:19:35.020 for Putin that has spread in that cult. Why does Putin worry you more than than anyone else?

00:19:41.900 Remember, when the Soviet Union, for most of the Cold War, Stalin died in 1953. So for most of the Cold

00:19:50.620 War, we faced a Soviet Politburo of like 12 or 14 men. Yes, we had Soviet leaders, Khrushchev, Brezhnev,

00:20:00.380 Andropov, et cetera. But they were merely spokesmen for the Politburo. So there was collegial rule,

00:20:07.740 collegial leadership. And this Politburo, though technically communist, was in fact deeply cautious

00:20:16.460 and conservative. And why do I say that? Because the only way to, they were all survivors of Stalin's

00:20:24.060 purges of the 1930s and 1940s. How do you survive Stalin's purges? You have an opinion on nothing,

00:20:33.180 essentially. You're overly cautious. You never open your mouth. And that's who essentially ruled

00:20:39.500 the Soviet Union through most of the Cold War. So we had it easy, in a way. Putin is not like this at

00:20:47.180 all. Putin is a risk taker. He governs alone, essentially. Around him are various circles of

00:20:56.880 oligarchs, of crime figures, of intelligence figures, of the media. If Putin were to get sick

00:21:04.580 tomorrow, it's unclear who would rule Russia. Russia could descend into a kind of low-calorie version

00:21:12.660 of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. So Putin is very, very dangerous. And the most dangerous and 0.55

00:21:21.820 also the strongest Russian leader since Stalin died in 1953. And what's the significance of the war

00:21:30.200 in Ukraine, in your view? And what did it reveal about Russia? It revealed Russian weakness, 0.61

00:21:36.900 really. Because remember the day before the Ukraine war started in early February 2022,

00:21:44.860 Russia was assumed to be able to conquer Ukraine in short order, send in a bunch of tank divisions,

00:21:54.220 you know, various arrow points on the map of tanks rolling in. Because look at it, from the point of

00:22:00.620 view of early February 2022, Russia had essentially won the war in Syria. It had made deep inroads in

00:22:08.580 sub-Saharan Africa. It had made deep inroads in the Caucasus, in the greater Balkans, in Transdenistria

00:22:18.140 and other places. Russia seemed invincible, both to us and to Putin. The lesson Putin learned from

00:22:25.300 those small wars was, wars can be easy. You can win easily, so to speak. But then he made the fateful

00:22:33.800 decision to invade Ukraine. And it was revealed that in a great power military operation, Russia

00:22:43.340 had no logistics. You know, there's a saying that amateurs discuss strategy and professionals discuss

00:22:52.000 logistics. Big military operations are logistics, logistics, logistics. In other words, it's not

00:22:59.020 just the tanks. It's the maintenance crews that have to be alongside them. It's the food wagons that

00:23:06.040 have to be alongside them to feed the soldiers. It's the laundry people. It's all kinds of things have 0.60

00:23:13.700 to accompany your main fighting units in, you know, relatively in coordination. And it turned out that

00:23:22.920 Russia had none of this. You know, it just had none of this. It could fake it in small-scale military

00:23:29.800 operations in Syria, which was mainly an air war from the Russian point of view, and in various places

00:23:37.260 in sub-Saharan West Africa. But the Ukraine war revealed Russian weakness. So we have a country,

00:23:45.700 Ukraine, a big country of 44 million people, but still just one country that has been able to

00:23:52.680 withstand, you know, the might of the Russian war machine for like almost four years now.

00:24:00.460 So what's at stake there? What do you think is likely to happen? And what do you think the likely

00:24:04.400 consequences are of it happening? I think Russia is a country in decline, really. And I think that

00:24:11.800 if you remember World War 1... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

00:24:17.480 you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length

00:24:22.940 episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on

00:24:28.800 listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 24, 2025

#440 — A World in Crisis

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript