'It's Our Own naked
Self-Interest, Stupid'

Jim Lehrer: Now a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News and World Report, engages Robert Kaplan, contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, author of The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century.

Gergen: Mr. Kaplan, you left the United States in 1993 and began making a series of journeys through the third world, starting in West Africa and then going across the tropical belt, and now you have come back and put them into a very large book called The Ends of the Earth. I am curious. Much of what you write about sounds like a trip through the Inferno by Dante. Was that your impression on many occasions?

Kaplan: I deliberately picked out the most difficult trouble spots in the world because that is where ninety-five out of every one hundred births are occurring. All the new babies in the world are not being born in places like Japan or Scarsdale or Singapore. They are being born in poor African countries, in subcontinental India, and in the poorest parts of our own societies. And though much of world -- our kind of people -- are going through a communications revolution, I spent months travelling through a large swath of the earth where I've entered cities where there is no electricity, you can go to seven photocopy machines, eight or nine, and you won't find one that will be working, you can turn on the water taps and nothing will come out but kind of a death rattle and a hissing sound. It's like one part of the world is going in one direction, but a large swath of humanity is going in another. And over-population, disease pandemics, rising crime, cultural disfunction are going to make so many parts of the world -- or let's put it this way, a critical mass of the third world -- so far behind that they won't be able to catch up.

Gergen: I was very struck by the numbers you had in your book about the industrialized world. I think many of us don't appreciate sometimes that after the second world war, the industrialized world -- the United States, Europe, and the rest of the industrialized world -- represented forty percent of the world's population. We are now down to twenty percent of the world's population and still dropping.

Kaplan: Yes. While the middle class expands in places like India, the poor and the sub-proletariat expands at an even faster rate. It's like the veneer of civilization, of functional society, is getting thinner and thinner and thinner.

Gergen: After the Russian revolution in 1917, another traveller, the journalist Lincoln Stephens, went to the Soviet Union. And when he came back Bernard Baruch asked him what did he see, and Stephens said, 'I have been over to the future and it works.' You in effect have been over into the future and you say it doesn't work?

Kaplan: Yes. In a sense. The long range future may be fine, but the next few decades are going to be most tumultuous in human history. And that is because humanity is economically developing at a faster rate than ever before. That is where the optimists are right. But the optimists do not think historically. Because the faster development occurs -- development is always uneven, cruel, painful and violent. So development always bring political upheaval in its wake.

Gergen: But you seem to be saying that it is not the process of development that is a negative driver. The two negative drivers are world population growth, the explosion of world population and, in its wake, the deforestation, the devastation that is occurring in the environments in many of these third world countries. These are the two -- the population and the environment.

Kaplan: I want to be more specific about population because that's a controversial area. But it is certainly true that in the upper end of the population growth spectrum, when you've got places like Pakistan and Sierra Leone and Rwanda who are doubling their populations every thirty years on top of an already depleted rain forest and whatever, on top of already weak infrastructures without an institutional tradition, it's bad. It's bad. In all the places where we have seen the most internecine violence in the past two decades -- Ethiopia, Tajikistan, Nicaragua, Yemen -- are all places who have high population growth rates for the fifteen or twenty years before these revolutions occurred.

Gergen: From your book, you seem to suggest that a place like west Africa which has only a very thin civiliz -- ah, tradition, there are many good traditions in west Africa - but it is nowhere near the kind of traditions that existed in, ah, Persia, which is now modern Iran.

Kaplan: Persia is actually one of the most optimistic parts of this book. Our problems with Iran are ephemeral -- they are problems of the moment. Persia has been a state for twenty five hundred years. It has a deep, rich cultural tradition. Persia was very, ah, the mullahs' regime has done less damage to Persian culture than communists have done to the cultures of the former Soviet Union and to the culture of China. If a Martian were to go down and walk through Persia and ask people about Americans, about Jews, about a lot of things, and then do the same thing in Egypt, the Martian would think that Persia was the place where we had better diplomatic relations. Iranians now are in the post-anti-American phase. They've been through it all. You find some of the most wisest public attitudes in the Near East in Iran these days. The regime [Iran] is in an ossified, Chernyenko state, and sooner or later it is going to collapse.

Gergen: Why should Americans care about this?

Kaplan: We should care for our own naked self-interest. AIDS is a product of the cycle of poverty, deforestation, migration and other pathologies of sub-Saharan Africa, which found its way to white, middle-class suburbs in an inter-connected world where there are no borders. There are more viruses in the wake of AIDS. As governments collapse and even as weak democratic regimes try to take over in these places, they are perfect petri dishes for the rise of organized crime networks, which are another threat to us. Disease -- also, strictly from an economist's point of view, our market in the future is the third world. If the third world doesn't make it as a middle class place, or at least a large part of the third world, we are not going to be able to grow at three percent growth rates into the future.

Gergen: The question arises of what we can do. If what we understand is -- and it does matter to us -- what can we do about it? Your argument in your book is not much.

Kaplan: No. Elites, whether the U.N. or the U.S. government, cannot engineer reality from above. Generally speaking, we are not going to be able to pivotally affect the future of sub-Saharan Africa. But just because we can't solve problems everywhere doesn't mean we can't be engaged in a few select places here and there, that also track with our self interest so that we can justify it in terms of Congress and the public, and therefore keep platforms of connections inside these places, between our culture and theirs.

Gergen: You would help on the population front and on the environmental front?

Kaplan: Population control, women's literacy programs, are some of the cheapest yet most effective ways to combat cultural disfunction over the middle run and the short run. Rwanda is a place where women have been giving birth on the average of eight times over their adult lifetime. This has been going on for decades. If those women had been giving birth two or three times instead of eight, imagine how much different Rwandan society would have been, how different social relations would have been. And given that politics is merely a macro expression of social relations, the politics would have evolved differently.

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