Humanity’s Claustrophobia: How Technology and Globalization Created a World in Crisis

Globalization, which is based on trade, the large-scale movement of people by jet transportation, and rapid technological advances in the electronic and digital realms, fits neatly together with a world in permanent crisis. That is because the permanent crisis demands a dense webwork of interactions between crisis zones across the earth, which globalization produces.

Ukraine, Gaza, and other major wars have their effects amplified, rather than assuaged, by globalization. A Weimar-type world, in the sense that I mean it, would be impossible without globalization.

Globalization can thus far be divided into two broad phases, which I will label Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0, with the coronavirus functioning as a very rough chapter break between them.

At the end of the Cold War, remember, there was for all intents and purposes no Internet, no email, no smartphones, no well- established global elite with its influential networks and conferences, none of the things we now take for granted as the staples of our interconnected world.

All of that came about in the context of a world which, in a security sense, was initially united by a U.S. unipolar hegemon, as America’s ideological victory against Soviet Communism led, in the 1990s, to postmodern capitalism and American management practices spreading across the globe, creating gleaming new cities in previously sleepy or at least undervalued places such as Bangalore, Baku, Hanoi, all the capitals of the Arabian Gulf, and so on.

Suddenly, world cities looked increasingly similar and similarly prosperous, and people were flying to places they never did before. Silicon Valley, which relies heavily on computer engineers and software writers from places as diverse as India, Israel, and Russia, could not have become the phenomenon that it did except in a post-Cold War world. This explosion of economic and technological creativity gave rise to Globalization 1.0.

Globalization 1.0 was basically a good-news story, so that in its time—the heady 1990s—”globalization” was actually mistaken for a wholesale security arrangement ensuring a Kantian universal peace of sorts, even as minor wars proliferated here and there. Besides the prodigious evolution of technology, Globalization 1.0 was about the spread of democracy and the creation and enlargement of middle classes beyond the West and particularly in formerly Communist Central Europe.

It was also about the dismantling of thermonuclear arsenals in the United States and the former Soviet Union, about the eradication of a good deal of the extreme poverty in the former third world, and about the rise of an integrated system of global stock markets, together with a plethora of new global corporations with international and multilingual boards and staffs. Truly, a global elite now seemed to be in charge, claiming to engineer reality from above and throughout the world by virtue of the fancy conferences it held—such as in Davos, Aspen, and Bilderberg.

Progress was seen as automatic, linear, and deterministic, and consequently the sense of the tragic was lost. Again, there was an affliction of presentness, as if the present in all of its vividness, enhanced and constantly improved upon by technology, could go on forever and just keep getting better.

The Cold War, with its deep and entrenched great-power divisions, seemed to have occurred decades ago rather than a few years ago. And because a difficult past had been virtually forgotten by America’s sudden and unexpected victory in the Cold War, there was no sense of a difficult future either.

The 1990s ended late, on September 11, 2001. It was stunning how quickly a mood can change. One day all the smart people were saying that geopolitics had been replaced by geo-economics in this new era of perpetual peace, à la the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and exactly as Bill Clinton had believed very early in his presidency. The next day it was all about terrorism and going to war against the bad guys.

One day George W. Bush was seen as just fine as president. The next day there was the question of, Is he up to the job? After all, as one prominent Republican told me,

had we still been in a situation like the Cold War before the 2000 election, the party elders would have gently told Father Bush that his son had good prospects but needed more experience and seasoning. The younger Bush was picked between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when nothing serious seemed at stake.

The 9/11 attacks were quickly followed by the American invasion of Afghanistan, and seventeen months later by the Iraq War. The greater Middle East now consumed our strategic and historical thinking.

But meanwhile, the Chinese were methodically constructing a gargantuan, high-end military complex, with an emphasis on warships, fighter jets, missiles, and cyber-warfare capabilities. In time, they would be perfecting the art of turning technology to Orwellian purposes, snooping on the online searches of untold millions of their citizens to determine their loyalty to the state, and in the process complicating the techno-optimism that had raged in the West.

At this time, while America remained obsessed with the Middle East, Vladimir Putin was also methodically beginning to stabilize Russia through a blend of authoritarianism and organized crime networks, following the chaos of the Yeltsin years with their failed experiment in democracy.

This also began a period when social and economic anxieties began to permeate the new globe-spanning middle classes that had been the creation of Globalization 1.0, resulting in the gradual rise of populism and new forms of authoritarianism in a number of countries in the West and the former third world.

Whether it was the strengthening of a nasty right-wing movement in France or Hungary, or Brazil or Turkey, or wherever, encouragement always seemed to flow from Putin’s newly risen Russia. Evidently, the contraction of the world system had helped allow not only for the spread of good trends, but for bad ones as well. Globalization 2.0 was upon us, and it wasn’t altogether a good-news story.

Covid-19, which to a significant extent shut down the world economy, struck at the end of 2019, and its effects lingered for a number of years. As the world emerged from Covid-19, globalization—which had dramatically helped spread the virus— did not look so benign. Average readers like chapter breaks, and Covid-19 was a convenient if very imperfect chapter break between Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0.

We were now in a new world, and globalization seemed a distinctly value-neutral historical development, as good as it was bad, and in fact central to the permanent, Weimar-like crisis I have been describing.

A world united was also a world where there was no place to hide. The belief that a smaller world would necessarily be a better world was fundamentally flawed, since it assumed an inherent goodness in the fact of proximity, which is often not the case.

After all, we periodically don’t get along with our next-door neighbors. Countries have military clashes along their borders. Disease does not respect borders. Because of these and many other examples, we often yearn for separation and quietude.

One of the reasons America is powerful is that it is protected by oceans. And one of the reasons why Americans have become less secure is because oceans offer them less protection than they used to. Once again, the finite earth is gradually losing the race against technology and population growth, as John von Neumann indicated. Covid-19 spread as far and as rapidly as it did because of this phenomenon.

Covid-19 might actually have been a minor factor in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, since it increased his isolation from other people, which left him more often alone with his own thoughts. Both the virus and the Ukraine War, by the way, each in its own fashion, disrupted supply chains, contributing to an element of deglobalization, however short-lived it was. It is just that because every- thing intersects with everything else in a smaller world, such a world is by definition unstable.

Journalists began to record an unending series of cataclysms: Covid-19 and massive lockdowns, the murder by Minneapolis police of the African American George Floyd and ensuing urban riots and protests, the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection as the capstone of the nonstop crises of the Trump presidency, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the partial rearming of Europe, the Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong coupled with Beijing’s intensifying military threat to Taiwan, the Gaza War following the Hamas attack on Israel, and so forth all added to the crises on the international scene.

History had marched on, with domestic events interwoven with world events, and no time to catch one’s breath. And it was real history, for each of those events’ effect on society and geopolitics was profound.

The George Floyd murder changed our ideas about race and the American past. It even changed our language and how we were supposed to express ourselves. The Trump presidency from 2017 to 2021 made us question the very viability of American democracy and political order. The Ukraine War made us fear the very thing we had thought we had left behind many decades before: a conventional military conflict between the great powers.

Humanity’s new sense of claustrophobia, wrought by the closing of distance, which was in turn wrought by technology, was in and of itself intensifying the magnitude of each crisis as it was perceived. The hot medium of digital-video communications drove us into emotional, philosophical, and ideological silos much more than did the cool, gray medium of print-and-typewriter journalism.

Journalists shoved their opinions in our faces in a way that was harder to do with the old technology. They were participants, taking sides in a way they never used to do, which only served to further intensify everything we thought and heard.

We all felt we were down in the arena as well as watching from the stands. Personal life has its escalating anxieties, to be sure, but public life had become unbearable.

It used to be in years and decades past that the most combative political arguments were about the Middle East, which quickly descended into an us-versus-them mentality: you were either for the Jews or for the Arabs. Now the whole world and much of public life has become as confrontational as the Middle East. That is the totemic reality of globalization.

Enmeshed in the tumult of globalization, with all of its mayhem, are the great powers, on which a semblance of world order depends, all of which are experiencing grave difficulties. Whatever the state of upheaval in America, the fact is that Russia and China are experiencing something deeper and more fundamental. Let me start, though, with America and Russia.

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Excerpted from Waste Land copyright © 2025 by Robert D. Kaplan. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.