Table Of ContentALSO BY ROBERT KAGAN
The World America Made
The Return of History and the End of Dreams Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its
Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the
New World Order A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by Robert Kagan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin
Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kagan, Robert, author.
Title: The jungle grows back : America and our imperiled world / by Robert Kagan.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011882 (print) | LCCN 2018013593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525521662 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780525521655 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. |
United States—Foreign relations—1989– | World politics—1945–1989. | World politics—1989– | Security,
International. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States 20th Century. | POLITICAL SCIENCE International
Relations General. | HISTORY Modern / General.
Classification: LCC E744 (ebook) | LCC E744.K147 2018 (print) | DDC 327.73009/04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011882
Ebook ISBN 9780525521662
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
v5.3_r1.2
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Contents
Cover
Also by Robert Kagan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Jungle Grows Back
Acknowledgments
Notes
A Note About the Author
For Dad
THE AMERICAN-LED LIBERAL WORLD ORDER was never a natural phenomenon. It
was not the culmination of evolutionary processes across the millennia or the
inevitable fulfillment of universal human desires. The past seven-plus decades of
relatively free trade, growing respect for individual rights, and relatively
peaceful cooperation among nations—the core elements of the liberal order—
have been a great historical aberration. Until 1945 the story of humankind going
back thousands of years was a long tale of war, tyranny, and poverty. Moments
of peace were fleeting, democracy so rare as to seem almost accidental, and
prosperity the luxury of the powerful few. Our own era has not lacked its
horrors, its genocides, its oppressions, its barbarisms. Yet by historical
standards, including the standards of the recent past, it has been a relative
paradise. Between 1500 and 1945 scarcely a year passed when the strongest
powers in the world, the great powers of Europe, were not at war, but since 1945
there have been no wars among the great powers.1 The great Cold War
confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union ended peacefully,
a historical rarity. Meanwhile, deaths from all recent smaller wars have declined
dramatically, as indeed have violent deaths of all kinds. Since the end of the
Second World War the world has also enjoyed a period of prosperity unlike any
other, with more than seven decades of global GDP growth averaging almost
3.5 percent per year, despite the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Since 1945, some
four billion people around the world have climbed out of poverty. The number of
democratic governments has grown from no more than a dozen in 1939 to more
than a hundred today. The power of the state has been curbed in favor of the
individual in large parts of the world, and an ever-expanding panoply of
individual rights has come to be respected. What Abraham Lincoln called the
“better angels” of human nature have been encouraged, and some of human
beings’ worst impulses have been suppressed more effectively than before.2 But
all this has been an anomaly in the history of human existence. The liberal world
order is fragile and impermanent. Like a garden, it is ever under siege from the
natural forces of history, the jungle whose vines and weeds constantly threaten
to overwhelm it.
Unfortunately, we tend to take our world for granted. We have lived so long
inside the bubble of the liberal order that we can imagine no other kind of world.
We think it is natural and normal, even inevitable. We see all its flaws and wish
it could be better, but it doesn’t occur to us that the more likely alternative to it
would be much, much worse. Unlike other cultures, which view history as a
continuous cycle of growth and decay, or as stasis, we view history as having a
direction and a purpose. We believe in “modernization,” in stages of economic
and political development, in the link between prosperity and democracy. As
children of the Enlightenment, we believe the expansion of knowledge and
material progress goes hand in hand with improvements in human behavior and
moral progress. From Montesquieu and Kant we learned that commerce tames
the souls of men and nations, reducing conflict and increasing harmony and
cooperation. From Marx and others we learned to treat stages of economic
development as the drivers of political development—feudalism produces
government by monarchs and aristocrats, capitalism produces government by
parliaments and democracies, all as part of some iron logic of economic
determinism. From Hegel we learned that history is but “the progress of the
consciousness of freedom” and that, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his famous
description of the “End of History,” there is “a common evolutionary pattern for
all societies…something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of
liberal democracy.”3 Hence we have come to believe that, while there may be
occasional bumps and detours on the road, progress is inevitable.
This story of human progress is a myth, however. If the last century has taught
us anything, it is that scientific and technological progress and the expansion of
knowledge, while capable of improving our lives materially, have brought no
lasting improvement in human behavior. Nor is history rightly viewed as a
progressive upward march toward enlightenment. That perception rests on a
carefully curated set of facts. We jump from Periclean Athens to the birth of
Christianity, from the Renaissance to the Reformation, from the Magna Carta to
the American Revolution. Omitted from this tale of golden ages and great leaps
forward are the dark ages and great leaps backward. When it comes to human
behavior, history is a jagged line with no discernible slope. Where on the scale
of progress would we put the Thirty Years’ War, which killed off almost half the
populations of the German principalities, or the Napoleonic Wars, which killed
more than three million Europeans, destroyed the lives of many millions more,
and helped produce the revolutionary nationalism that would wreak so much
havoc in the first decades of the twentieth century? How do World War I, World
War II, the famines, and the genocides of the last century fit into our story of
human progress? Were the horrors perpetrated against Ukrainians and Chinese in
the 1930s and against Jews in the 1940s part of our story of progress? Were they
Description:"A brilliant and visionary argument for America's role as an enforcer of peace and order throughout the world--and what is likely to happen if we withdraw and focus our attention inward. Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning
