For me, as for many in my generation, the Iraq War was a defining political event. I was 19 and in my second year of college when the Bush Administration began to press its case, and the first political event I ever attended was an anti-Iraq War rally in downtown Chicago. Those of us opposed to the war saw in those pushing for it a cocktail of incompetence, corruption, dishonesty, and bloodlust. It was not simply an important issue, or even the most important issue; it was the issue that defined political identity.
I first heard of Robert Kagan then, as a proponent of the war. I’ve seen his work over the years, but had never gone deep with any of it until this week, when I read his 2018 book The Jungle Grows Back. Given how far apart we were then, it’s remarkable how deeply resonant (and, from 2018, prescient) I find his argument now. To get a sense of it, I recommend this talk Kagan gave for the book here in Chicago.
The “jungle” is the illiberal, violent order that preceded the relatively peaceful postwar period, beaten back and tamed by American security guarantees and the international system they allowed, i.e., the “garden.” Kagan argued — before October 7 and the subsequent violence in Gaza, before the current Russia-Ukraine war, before Trump 2 and its ceaselessly inventive string of self-inflicted wounds — that without American leadership and action, the jungle can and will grow back. He is right, and yet the dominant voices in both political parties are uninterested in coming to terms with this reality and exercising the leadership we need.
The jungle is a good metaphor, though I have another that I like.
Entropy is a measure of the randomness in a system, and per the laws of thermodynamics, it increases over time. The entire universe is on a steady march toward a dead equilibrium of diffusion and disorder.
But in some areas, at least for a time, there is something that unexpectedly runs the other direction, creating order and even meaning and purpose out of chaos. I’ve always been moved by this definition of life, as the opposite of entropy, even if it doesn’t fully hold up scientifically (more on that in a bit). Life rages against disorder, emerging from the randomness, adapting, replicating, expanding, always at risk of death and extinction. The typical condition, based on all the planets we know, is lifeless gas and rock, but here something different and astonishing happened.
Like entropy, autocracy is the state that things slide into, as power concentrates and corrupts and collapses into iron-fisted rule. Huge swathes of the world have lived like that for millennia. But, just as life miraculously grew from inert molecules, democracy emerged out of autocracy — at first incrementally, and then triumphantly.
We live in the sustained afterglow of that triumph. We’re taught in school that democracies are "stable” because they create prosperity and peace, and because giving the public a voice creates cohesion and order. It isn’t so. As we’ve been reminded over the last few years, democracy is precarious. It faces threats from without, as autocrats chafe against international order. It faces threats from within, in part because it demands so much of its public — engagement, tolerance, patience — while people lose the memory of what life was like without it. Over time, citizens imagine how nice it would be to slide back to autocracy.
That’s what this metaphor gives us: not the banality of a garden but the miracle of life.
What are the metaphor’s implications?
Life must continue to adapt and grow, or it will be swallowed by the indifferent world. Isolationism is the idea that we can choose to disengage and turn inward, but what happens to life that doesn’t grow would also happen to our democracy. Ultimately, democracy must support the liberation of all people everywhere.
That isn’t an endorsement of the facile adventurism that led to the Iraq War. In the first place, the military challenge of regime change and occupation is enormous, and could only be justified by delusion — i.e., we’ll be greeted as liberators. More deeply, democracy must grow within a people and be theirs to own; democracy must be born democratically. The failure to grasp that led to hundreds of thousands dead.
What we can and must do is support democratic nations militarily as they fight autocratic aggressors, as we have in Ukraine, and democratic movements by other means as they agitate for change in their nations.
The dark implication of the metaphor is the reverse. Some scientists argue that life is not the opposite of entropy, that it is in fact an engine of entropy. A living creature is localized order, but it breaks down substances and converts them into heat and commodities, and so our entire ecology may be advancing entropy faster than bare rock. The parallel would be not that democracy must grow to survive, but that in fact it creates the conditions for autocracy elsewhere. As democracies seek to meet the demands of their own citizens, they shape a world order that privileges them over others, condemning other nations to poverty and autocracy.
I don’t believe that, but it can’t be dismissed.
Our inheritance from past generations is not only the American domestic order, but the global order in which it sits and which it shaped. Both demand constant attention, but, as Kagan argues, we treat them as though they are a given. Each generation has to take on the burden of preserving democracy, and each generation has to fight for a world order that advances democracy, human rights, and shared prosperity.
I want Americans to get past the optionality we’ve been taught for thirty years — that we choose to be the world’s policeman, if we like. I am tired of the argument that supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, for example, wastes resources that could be spent here. I want us to recognize that there is a consolidating threat to democracy, here and around the world, and it’s our responsibility to rise to it.