Robert Kaplan is one of the most influential geopolitical thinkers in our time. He has been a great influence on my thinking over more than 20 years since I started reading his books. Robert: The Cold War was cold because it never got hot in Central Eastern Europe during the second half of the 20th century and presumably neither the United States nor China want a hot kinetic war so people have called it a Cold War but the differences are profound. Remember that this old Soviet Union only had some niche capacities. It had a great nuclear bombs it had a space program which was very good they had no economy of any sort.
The great dilemmas of geopolitics are not battles of good against evil, where the choices are clear. They are contests of good against good, where the choices are often painful, incompatible and fraught with consequence. That’s the argument that political scientist Robert Kaplan who's joined here in conversation by political philosopher John Gray. Together they discuss how the insights of the Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – as well as Shakespeare and modern philosophers and classic authors can help us understand the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. And they explored how viewing events through a tragic lens could guide the West’s strategy for dealing with Russia and China today.
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