> >>West as, basically, being clueless as what to do to help, and Western help
> as often hurting far more than helping.
>
> >This assumes the "West's" policies are designed to help, and that the
> selection of policies which have the contrary effect is due only to
> miscalculation.
>
> True enough, however my real point here is Robert Kaplan's main thesis -
> that environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and ethnic differences
> are, in many parts of the world, leading to irreversible downward spirals,
> and that the resultant anarchy will have worldwide impact and will affect
> all of us.
>
> The current issue of The Atlantic has an article by Jeffrey Taylor (an
> American living in Moscow, married to a Russian) titled "Russia is Finished.
> The unstoppable descent into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance"
> which gives a good example of Kaplan's thesis.
==============
Conflating paradoxes of predictability , indeterminism, self-fulfilling prophecy and fatalism. An insidious mixture elites love to foist on unsuspecting readers. Kaplan is just doing Homer-Dixon's 'environmental security" paradigm with a bunch of pessimism thrown in for good measure.
Ian