Multipolarity is an indisputable international political fact and not a loose and questionable academic theory, to be played with and trampled upon by those who, out of self-interest, half-educated or intellectual deficiency, obsessively desire a unipolar hegemony of the United States. World events are moving very quickly. With their development, they surpass the consolidation of the theory of the multipolar world by the International system. A theory that the Russian thinker Alexander Gelievich Dugin first introduced in its entirety, creating at the same time a global political movement.
Multipolarity is best understood as a brief introduction to broader and deeper elaborations of current international politics and the international power game, with the core view of Dugin’s political theory of Eurasianism. His book “The Theory of a Multipolar World” (2021) is a collection of interactive multidisciplinary essays that connect themes from right-wing thought to a broader geopolitical narrative, well-researched without being systematic. This is not a disadvantage. This book, like all the previous ones, is useful for those looking for intersections between current events and their theoretical implications, rather than as a comprehensive treatment of the theory itself. It is perhaps more akin to works by Robert David Kaplan – “Balkan Ghosts”, “The Revenge of Geography”, “The Coming Anarchy”, etc. – a utilitarian “stack of historical snapshots” that, when viewed with intensity and focus, ultimately present a moving image, a revealing cinematic record.
But while the famous Robert Kaplan is an American Jew now a disillusioned neoconservative, tightly gripped by Western hegemony, who served his military service in Israel [Since 2023 Robert Strausz Hupé Professor of Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute -FPRI (named after the Austrian-American diplomat and geopolitician, 1903–2002). FPRI is an American “think tank” based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that conducts research on geopolitics, international relations, and international security in various regions of the world], the unknown writer Philipp Jakob Hanke is a German political scientist, a great admirer of the versatile Kaplan, who supports and presents a completely traditional and well-structured right-wing worldview, which is informed by the emerging currents of modern philosophy.
While the planet holds its breath for what else the “noisy” return of President Trump to the White House will bring, there are people like Robert Kaplan, the famous geopolitical analyst and author, who …. keep their cool! The experienced Mr. Kaplan argues that Trump, being a successful multi-entrepreneur, operates on business terms in diplomatic agreements, in diplomatic “deals”, using threats and verbal exaggerations. In this sense, he believes that things will come to a more overall balance, although he estimates that the new President himself returned to power wishing to make a breakthrough with moves of “grandeur”. Robert Kaplan’s rough assessments about the arrival of Trump and its micro- and macro-reflections are as follows:
“The returning President will outline a peculiar foreign policy, which will be much more transactional than in the past, where he will support Europe, but Europe must do much more. He will warn China. He will talk about avoiding war, but he will be particularly supportive of Israel against Iran. He will talk repeatedly about immigration. Trump himself “wants to make a breakthrough.” It is a fact: Even the fleeting ceasefire in Gaza is largely due to Trump. If he had not threatened, the process would never have progressed. The whole situation is very similar to the last days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The moment Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, the Iranians released the hostages. It is a similar case, because the Iranians clearly knew that Reagan would be much tougher than Carter. So here is another reason to take Trump seriously, but not literally. His method of speech is to exaggerate to a great extent.
When he talks about “invading” Greenland, what he probably really means is that he expects the Danes to do a lot more in terms of security, because the East Greenland Seaway is indeed a very important strategic point, where the Russian fleet goes out with its submarines. The President wants the Danes to invest more in supporting the defense of Greenland. Part of his tactic is to dramatize the situation. So you will see that in the end the Danes will actually do more. But I repeat: Trump’s method is to exaggerate. Take him seriously, but not literally!
NATO will change or cease to exist. Europeans will realize that we are living in a period that requires deeper military cooperation and autonomy. It will be very difficult for Europe because in previous years the reason why the continent – with the exception of Greece and Poland – spent little on defense budgets was the lack of social support. In the Mediterranean countries, the fear is less about Russia and more about migration and refugees. So without public support for the dramatic increase in defense budgets, things will become very difficult. Do not forget that the US has essentially been paying for Europe’s defense since the late 1940s. This is a long time in history, especially when there have been such great technological developments. It is equivalent to 200 years in other historical periods, when there were fewer technological changes. I do not think anyone can expect the US to support Europe emotionally forever. And the election of Trump is a realization.
Trump’s Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, is a level-headed, normal, normal person. Unlike some of his other cabinet appointees, who are not normal at all…
The Democrat Biden administration, which is completely submissive, has actually done a very good job with China: It has avoided a military conflict, but it has not given in to the Chinese demands. In fact, it has been very tough in its own way: It has orchestrated a rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, which has been very important in allowing those two countries to focus more on China. It has established the “AUKUS” defense agreement, which provides nuclear submarines to Australia with American and British technology. This was a very big deal because Australia was somehow maintaining American support while making money from China. Now it has chosen a camp. The US strategic position has improved significantly. We will see if Trump can do things as well or better than his predecessor.
In Gaza, there is a very weak case for the ceasefire to hold, because from the perspective of Netanyahu and his allies, this is a bad deal in terms of having to hand over 700-800 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. Remember, this was the reason we went to war in the first place, since the Israelis had to hand over over 1,000 prisoners, including Shinwar, to get back one Israeli soldier! Although it is a bad deal for Netanyahu, he did it to show Trump that he is not against him, because he will definitely need him against Iran….
We must be realistic: While the foreign policy elite in Washington has focused on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – about half a planet away from the United States – more than 47,000 people have died from drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico! Mexico, a deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the southern border of the United States, will influence America’s destiny in the coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East.
Are Turkey and Erdogan likely to gain more space in the Southeast Mediterranean region? Don’t be so sure about that! You know Trump. Trump knows how to use leverage well. He said of Gaza, “If all the hostages are not released by January 20th, hell will come and you will pay.” This is a kind of political exercise that Biden never understood. Neither did Blinken. Trump operates on instinct, and Erdogan understands this well. Remember, Erdogan is getting old too. He is not going to stay in the game forever. After all, after decades of institutional destruction in the Turkish bureaucracy, essentially due to Erdogan’s dictatorial rule, Turkey could find itself in a weakened state.
On the Ukraine front: What President Trump needs to do is achieve a ceasefire or a truce, but one that does not look like a clear victory for Putin. This is a very difficult exercise. Trump’s Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, is an experienced senator and if he appoints capable associates, he could succeed in his peace mission.”
Now, we will trace back the enlightening and educational thought of Robert Kaplan, over the last 32 years, since he wrote his excellent book “Balkan Ghosts – A Journey Through History”, 307 pages, published by “St. Martin’s Press”, New York, 1993. As you will see, the analysis and reduction to the approach of the experienced geopolitical commentator is worth it, as it reflects realities that remain essential throughout time.
With this book, Kaplan has not written a typical investigation, as he makes clear in his preface. On the contrary, “Balkan Ghosts” is a “portrait gallery” of the heroes and villains of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and that country that was the former Yugoslavia. With his narrative, he also offers the reader an often enjoyable journey through the past and present politics of a region about which the author has written many reports and correspondences for major American media outlets for many years. His text can convince us with certainty and aphoristic lucidity that the peoples of these five estranged countries do indeed form a capable and at the same time dissatisfied whole. While the majority of their leaders in the post-Cold War era indignantly deny any association of their country with the “Balkans” (a term that has been used since the late 19th century to denote political chaos and covert internal war), these territories are certainly characterized by a diffuse social suffering, as well as extreme nationalist passions, sometimes provocative, sometimes hidden.
Passionate politics is often downright entertaining, so in 1990, when Kaplan landed in Timisoara (old German Temesvar), the cosmopolitan city near Romania’s western border where the Romanian Revolution broke out in December 1989, he found the place to be passionless and left immediately… out of boredom. Romanians, Hungarians and a few Germans live in Timisoara, which was ruled by the Habsburg and Hungarian bureaucracy until 1918. As a result of this strict “Central European” influence, things still work there today: the offices are clean, the ashtrays are emptied regularly and the walls are covered with works of modern art rather than posters of modern music stars.
Kaplan writes in an ambivalent, disparaging and laudatory mood: “In Timisoara I no longer felt like I was in Romania. Romania was an echo of Dostoevsky’s world: The interior of a horrific, Byzantine image, full of suffering and passionate figures whose minds were warped by their own rage and their belief in wild half-truths and conspiracies. In Timisoara, Romania is less a reality than a powerful memory!” (Remember the recent incident with the arbitrary ban and “expulsion” of the clearly superior patriotic candidate President Georgesescu from the presidential elections!)
East and south of Timisoara, the reality is very harsh and perhaps because of this, people tend to live in a dream world inhabited by the epic avengers of national grievances and injustices, as well as by the memory of shattered medieval principalities and kingdoms – Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Croatian, Wallachian, Moldavian and Greek great states, adorned with law and order. Balkan folklore vividly captures and narrates the heroic struggle of each of these states against the Ottomans.
The memory of a historical role as a “shield of Christianity” against a formidable antichrist enemy, a role performed without the help of Christian Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, or Balkan neighbors (and often performed while the combatant is stabbed in the back by them), this memory preserves and informs the mutual hostilities of the present. The Serbian militiaman in the Yugoslav “civil war,” who raped Muslim women and killed Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, believed absolutely and sincerely that he was avenging the monstrous injustices inflicted on his nation 600 years ago.
The Greek patriot who shouted and still shouts at rallies that “there is only one Macedonia and it is in Greece” (and not in the former Yugoslavia of the communist Tito) is also a staunch defender of the cultural heritage of Alexander the Great against the unforgiving and unruly Slavic invaders. (Of course, he is not bothered by the fact that the Slavs themselves have lived in the region for about 1,300 years.)
Kaplan does not single out any individual or nation in his indictments, especially Greece, where he once lived for seven years. He is furious with the Greeks because, among other things, they idolized Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, whom he believes was a fraud, a demagogue and a protector of terrorists (Arab and domestic). He argues that under Mr. Papandreou, the Greek economy collapsed, revealing the country as what it always was, a Balkan state, not a Western state.
He also claims that communism did not help to alleviate national antagonisms in the Balkans. Only, where it prevailed, did it make things worse, by expelling the best intellectuals (as “reactionaries”), while at the same time creating, through the poor industrialization and urbanization of the countries, a huge category of “paysans depayses”. These uprooted peasants of the post-Soviet Balkans are neither bourgeois nor peasants, they are an “unhealthy social hybrid”. They inhabit a monstrous landscape of prefabricated socialist “dwellings”, drowning their sorrows in hatred and drink.
Describing life in these crude concrete structures, disfigured by graffiti and trash, reeking of urine and cheap alcohol, Kaplan displays his literary powers to the fullest. As he describes a journey along the lower Danube in Romania, in a filthy, overcrowded boat, he is sure to put off many would-be tourists.
A major drawback of communism, Kaplan argues persuasively, was that it failed to resolve any of the great historical controversies. Recall the case of the Croatian fascist atrocities at Jesenovic, a World War II death camp 65 miles southeast of Zagreb: Figures on the number of victims continue to vary from a total of 60,000 for all victims to 700,000 for the Serbian Orthodox killed there alone.
The author suggests, semi-ironically, that one way to distinguish Serbs from Croats, who speak the same language and have almost identical names, is to ask about the number of victims at Jesenovic. A Croat will almost always report the lower number and a Serb the higher.
His chief nightmares are historical half-truths and a conspiratorial interpretation of history. Yet, seemingly overwhelmed by the fantastic stories told to him by countless Balkan intellectuals, he himself sometimes accepts as fact the fanciful, the marginal, the extreme. For example, he accuses unfortunate Romania, which has certainly suffered more than its fair share of poverty and moral degradation, of always being a cesspool of corruption, prostitution, espionage, slander, and denunciation.
He repeats with glee the popular tale of King Carol II’s “priapism” (with his notorious mistress and later wife Magda Lupescu), and attributes the tragic history of interwar Romania, at least in part, to the King’s persistent and painful erections and the many hours he spent in bed with his mistresses. In general, he tends to give individual leaders too much importance, as he maintains a strongly Carlylean view of the role of personality in history.
Kaplan is often astute in his assessments, but almost as often he fails to distinguish between different forms of political oppression. It makes no sense, for example, that he repeats Rebecca West’s biased attacks on Austria-Hungary in her famous two-volume work “Black Sheep and Grey Hawk” (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia. [Dame Cecily Isabel Fairfield (1892-1983), known as Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer]. Habsburg misrule in no way deserved the same label as Nicolae Ceausescu’s red tyranny in Romania.
Political prisoners in Austria-Hungary, in the late 19th century, were confined for a few months at most, in relatively comfortable quarters. Things got much worse in the successor states of the Habsburg monarchy, and starting with the Second World War, most political prisoners in the Danube region or the Balkans could count themselves lucky if they had not been tortured to death. There is a whole world of difference between the “tyranny” of the old liberal-conservative parliamentary states and the modern tyranny after the Second World War.
Nor is there any great utility in hurling accusations and blanket condemnation equally against all kinds of regimes that once existed in Southeastern Europe. Kaplan rightly condemns the hypocrisy of the nation-states after World War I, which were in reality almost as multinational as their imperial predecessors, but pretended to be otherwise.
He also rightly confuses the terrible crime of the Eastern European regimes, which, during and after World War II, got rid of the culturally and economically most successful minorities within them, especially the Jews and Germans. (This sudden “disappearance” of so many productive citizens undoubtedly went a long way in explaining in part why these countries, “victors” even with them, were afterwards so poor and chaotic).
But why does Kaplan describe the Habsburg Empire as a “prison of peoples”? He is probably biased. The Habsburg monarchy did not even distinguish between religious groups. Contrary to his claim, the wealth of Habsburg Vienna and Budapest was “built on the broken backs of its Slavic subjects,” but on “the broken backs of farmers and workers, whether German-Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, or Slav.”
Finally, it was disturbing to see Mr. Kaplan refer to Bosnia as “a swamp of ethnically mixed villages in the mountains.” Regardless of one’s ideological and political beliefs and sympathies, when Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence, this “swamp” represented the last hope for ethnic coexistence and cooperation in a largely nationalist region that had gone mad. It is no comfort to know now that, due to the Serbian mass murder, the “ethnic swamp” of Bosnia no longer exists.
Until the outbreak of the Serb-Bosnian war, the Balkans were considered underdeveloped by most Western journalists. This suited Kaplan’s character, mindset, and experiences, and he declared cynically, delighted by the job opportunity: “I like to cover stories where I know that when I’m not there, it won’t be reported or known.”
Kaplan visited the region frequently in the 1980s, while also writing books about two other “exotic” places, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. But no publisher was interested in a book about the Balkans until the fighting began.
Kaplan wrote his “Balkan Ghosts” as a travel memoir, feeling that the color of his experiences was necessary to appeal to American readers. “Travelogue is just a vehicle for doing something else, teaching people about history or art or politics” (as secret service agents often do!), he added, adding that “a mix of personal and historical anecdotes was ideal for explaining a region where hatreds have been running rampant for more than two millennia.”
For the wider region, he believes that the Clinton administration’s Balkan Policy has so far amounted to little more than benign neglect. He says that any underestimation of the Balkans is dangerous, because the region remains, as it was 200 years ago, “a tinderbox for the 21st-century cultural and religious war between the global ‘House of Islam,’ led by the Turks, and this great belt of Eastern Orthodox Christianity that stretches from Athens to Moscow.”
