The Jungle Grows Back

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 increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. Kagan makes clear how the “realist” impulse to recognize our limitations and focus on our failures misunderstands the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world's worst instability in check. A true realism, he argues, is based on the understanding that the historical norm has always been toward chaos--that the jungle will grow back, if we let it.

"An incisive, elegantly written, new book about America’s unique role in the world."
—Tom Friedman, The New York Times

"A devastating riposte to [Trump’s] careless, cynical and destructive approach to diplomacy. . . . [Kagan] is right to detect a crisis of confidence in the democratic world. He sets out his case with characteristic brilliance and conviction."
—*The Economist*
 
"[I]t is time to say it: I am a Kaganite. . . . There is no modern author who has taught me more, or changed the way I view the world more, than he has. . . . For identifying and clearly explaining the chief forces driving human history, Bob is brilliant."
—Michael E. O’Hanlon, Brookings

"[S]o important. . . . In clear and forceful language, [The Jungle Grows Back] makes the case for America continuing its role as the guarantor of a liberal world order."
—Eli Lake, Bloomberg
 
"[Kagan] has in many ways become the biographer of American power. . . . He brings to the page a true sense of the stakes involved—not some abstract notion of the 'rules-based order,' but the basic security and prosperity of Americans."
—Commentary
 
"The Jungle Grows Back displays the characteristic Kagan virtues of lucid writing and thought—and a strong sense of history that adds drama and sweep to his argument."
—Gideon Rachman, The Financial Times

"This short book is a valuable read and makes a valiant effort to argue for America’s continued deep engagement in the world. . . . The world order is not natural; it needed to be built and it needs to be carefully maintained."
—Doug Stokes, Quillette

Auteur
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Paradise and Power, and A Twilight Struggle. He served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Virginia with his wife.

Échantillon de lecture
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. 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. 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.

The American-led liberal world order has never been a natural phenomenon. The story of humankind going back thousands of years is a long tale of war, tyranny, and poverty. Moments of peace have been 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. 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 have 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 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. All this has been a great aberration, an anomaly in the recorded history of human existence.

Unfortunately, we tend to take our world for granted. We have lived so long inside the bubble of the liberal world 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…