Hello and welcome to the Green Room, Spectator USA's weekly life and arts podcast.

This week, I'm talking to the author Robert Kaplan.

25 years ago, when many in the West were congratulating themselves on winning the Cold War,

or at least not losing it, Kaplan wrote an article called

The Coming Anarchy. Instead of the spread of a liberal order across the globe, he foresaw

increasing instability caused by population movements, environmental degradation, and the

return of history. Well, the coming anarchy seems to have come. Robert Kaplan, welcome

to Spectator USA. It's a pleasure to be here, Dominic. Well, we're talking in the first days

of 2019, and so this may be the first occasion on which someone has said to you, how do you

feel about the coming anarchy as its 25th anniversary appears?

I think on the whole, I feel very good about it. I think I caught something that was true,

but there were, you know, there were minor elements of the piece that proved wrong and even one

or two major elements. Basically, what I believe that nobody can predict the

future in terms of tomorrow or the day after in a given country. That depends on the Shakespearean

dynamics of leaders, you know, active intelligence, which very few people have. Also, nobody can predict 40 or 50 years out because there will be such technological change.

It would make such a prediction mere speculation.

But what a journalist should be expected to do is to make the reader somewhat less surprised by what happens in a given place in five or

10 or 15 years.

In other words, the middle term future.

And so if you look at what I said about specific places in the coming anarchy in 1994,

and what happened to them in the late 90s, the early

2000s, up until 2010, you know, I will stand on my record as being right. And we can go through

...