I don’t think Washington can be insulated by competence for more than a few years. The current crisis, of which the financial crisis is but one aspect, is destroying the old “imperial center-periphery” model that seems to underlie Kaplan’s analysis.

Stupidity is no longer a luxury the West can afford. What probably will happen is that the multilateral security/development aid/diplomacy — the ramshackle “End of History” institutions — will collapse. About all the US military can make sure the collapse is a graceful one. One way or the other new institutions will emerge. I think (without any real basis for it) that these features will apply:

1. The new ethos will align much more with function than with geographical culture. They will embody relatively more ideas from the US, India and China and relatively fewer ideas from Western Europe. Western Europe will continue to be important but the future will not look like the EU/UN.
2. The role of nations will be redefined away from the classic European idea of providers of services to one of governance. In other words, the nonstate actors will be the engines of the 21st century. The role of states will shrink back to delivering defense and key public goods.

The post-1945 world is over, but the newer world has not yet emerged. A midwife is nowhere to be found and of all the wrecked institutions that are likely to be around as the world reorders itself, about the only obvious one is the military, which the politicians ironically sharpened against the whetstone of facts. It’s an old story, one with many Roman echoes.

And although Kaplan doesn’t say it, I believe the unease he feels is rooted in the possibility that the military may be in a pivotal position during the period of the collapse of the elites. They won’t cause it but they will be around when it happens. In the end Kaplan wants the world to stay under civilian control; and I believe most of us do. But the fecklessness of the politicians combined with the schooling the military has had creates bad scenarios.

The solution, I believe, is for the civilians to get their act together and clean up the political world so that they can consciously escape from the prison of the 20th century ideology and take the reform process in hand. I think that’s already happening. The question is whether it can happen fast enough.