KAPLAN: I think the world is no more stable or unstable than it has been in other times in history. But because there are now six billion of us, rather than just one billion say a hundred years ago or whenever it was, the magnitude of problems is much greater. So that the outbreak of a war has much greater consequences than it had a hundred years ago. And not only are there six billion of us, but more than in any time of history are we urbanized, so we are in big cities, so we are in need of big complex infrastructure, of sewage, of electricity, of potable water that we never had before, because people in rural settings have the ability to live of the earth to a much greater extent than people in cities and are not susceptible to price rises in food for example, because they can grow their own supplies. So where there is many more of us than in any time of history, we require much more than in any time of history. We require more from government, the more a society is the more government has to provide in infrastructure. So the same level of political instability exacts much greater consequences.

CDI: Can you you identify a couple of trends, for example ethnic or religious conflicts, which do not fit in tradition notions of security challenges? Perhaps affecting the way foreign policy decision makers approach the next decade or two.

KAPLAN: For the last three hundred years, foreign policy practitioners had thought about security in terms of nation states, one nation state versus the other, one constellation of nation states competing with another constellation of nation states, and that has give rise to the notion of power politics. And that is what sort of has been the organizing principle of foreign policy the last few hundred years. That still works obviously, because there are lots of powerful nation states out there that have conflicting views of lots of things. But increasingly we see the weakening of nation states. The weakening from the top by global corporations, international trading groups, but we also see the weakening at the bottom through wars, refugee migrations, civil conflict. So increasingly we have non-state adversaries who want to kill us, terrorist groups for instance, who are not part of any bureaucratic mechanism of the state. They don't own territory, they do not have an address. So, for instance, when the U.S. government, as it did about a year ago, announced that it had destroyed the infrastructure of Osama Bin Laden terrorist network, some of the hardware and infrastructure, what did that mean? It meant that they had destroyed a bunch of blow-up tents in the dessert of Afghanistan that you and I could put back together in about two hours. So increasingly these people don't have an infrastructure that is destroyable. They only way to get them, is to kill them. So I think the more unconventional the threat, the more assassinations will come back.

CDI: What do you see as the role of military power in this kind of changing situation between traditional state actors and non-state actors?

KAPLAN: The power of the military is going to increase. There is a basic contradiction about time. We live in a age of democratization, but at the same time military and security services are increasingly powerful within governments themselves. Throughout the world we have a kind of facade of weak democratic governments that behind the scenes are being run, manipulated or incredibly influenced by various military people. The best example of that was just a week or two ago going on in Armenia where the man who was assassinated was the man who was really running the country, who controlled the military security apparatus and the elected president had just been a figure head. So throughout the world we see that, even in the United States, the military has an increasingly unacknowledged role in foreign policy decision making. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Shelton, is a virtual member of the cabinet on national security decisions. This did not exist a few decades ago. The head of Central Command, General Zinni USMC, is a virtual Pro-consul for the Middle East. Nobody acknowledges this, but everybody knows it is true. And why is this so, here and abroad. Because increasingly foreign policy is technical. It involves relief and rescue operations of one sort or another, dealing with environmental emergencies, earth quakes or whatever. And the military is the only group in Washington that has the technical know-how to know how actually affect such a policy on the ground. So because they are the ones to know how to do it, they will have increasingly a role in shaping the policy itself.

CDI: What do you envision as the role for NGOs? As NGOs tend to address these problems, maybe in competition with military structures, or in competition.

KAPLAN: I think the importance of NGOs exists and it is growing, because there are more and more of them and like the military they are the people on the ground who know how to do things on the ground. In many of these, what I call, non-strategic humanitarian emergencies like Rwanda teamwork, etc. But I think the power of NGOs has been blown a bit out of proportion and that is because while militaries have strategic goals, NGOs do not have strategic goals. NGOs just want to save lives, like the UN. The UN is devoted to nothing except crisis prevention. It beliefs in nothing, it has no great strategic goal. All it wants to do it stop whatever fighting that is going on at any time. NGOs are similar. They have humanitarian objectives. They do not have national self-interest objectives. Therefore they are a factor, but they are not a power in their own right. In the sense that they are not competing with us, they are not competing with any other group. And NGOs in each different emergency will have conflicting goals. Have you ever noticed that when you see interviewed an NGO in Bosnia, he will say this is the most important emergency in the world, and an NGO in Rwanda will say this is the most important emergency in the world. Wherever NGOs are, they will think their emergency is the most important thing going on at the planet, but the problem is there are several ongoing emergencies simultaneously. And great powers have to pick and choose where they put their emphasis. So because NGOs do not discriminate, their importance is diminished because they do not have a defined goal.

CDI: How would you define human security (if possible) and is human security a viable framework for US foreign policy?

KAPLAN: From what I have seen around the world - I have traveled in about 80 countries, I just spend a few months traveling through the Caucasus, the former Soviet Union, some of the poorest parts of the ex-Soviet Union (Turkmenistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, most recently Armenia), I traveled through Sub-Saharan Africa - human security has to do with protecting you and your family and your children. That is where it boils down to. Human beings in all these countries are not intellectuals, they do not think about human security, they do not think about universal values. The only people who think like that are the intellectuals who are interviewed by visiting western journalists and diplomats and others who go, and they like to charm people who are the most educated members of the society, and who think like they do. So there is this elite around the world that thinks about a concept called human security, but what human beings actually think about, ninety percent of them at least, is how do I get the most for me and my family or my extended family. And what I have seen of that, these people will put up with any kind of tyranny if it means a better material stability and quality of life for their immediate relatives.

CDI: What role should foreign aid play in US foreign policy, and I am thinking specifically of how it interacts with the idea of human security? If human security may not a viable framework for conducting foreign policy, what role should foreign aid then play?

KAPLAN: Foreign aid will play the same role as it always had. Foreign aid has never helped much for what it was meant for, but it has been a way that we have projected our own strategic power. Because when we give money to a certain region in the world, we have more influence in that region of the world. Because a certain amount of foreign aid is always stolen, unless patrionist networks develop which we can use in the case of an emergency. If we give no foreign aid, for instance in the area like West Africa and we give no foreign aid for ten years. Let's say there is an emergency - and a number of Americans are held hostage, or diseases are spreading there, or the Iranians are using several West African countries as a trans-shipment point for parts of nuclear weapons, or these countries are used a trans-shipment point for drugs - we will have more influence with local officials there in order to deal with the problem if we have a record of already having given foreign aid year in year out. We will have proven political commitment to the region. So without foreign aid, our ability to influence societies at a time when it is absolutely necessary for our own self-interest, will be greatly diminished. I am in favor of foreign aid, but I have no illusions of what foreign aid actually accomplishes.

CDI: How would you describe America's role in globalization?

KAPLAN: Globalization is one of these words that become so overused, that we all become embarrassed using it because it becomes sort of a cliche. Let me use globalization in a way in which it maybe has not been used in the past. Globalization is actually a code word for a very weak anomic form of the new American imperialism. Because what is it really? It is an American, western management way of doing things. Countries that are globalized, let me take Hungary as an example. A Hungarian official bragged to me recently, said we have sold all our bags to foreigners. That means we now have to operate on an international standard. We cannot mess up our own economy the way we used to anymore. We are forced to be held to an international standard, because we not even know our own banks anymore. So that is a good thing, it is not a bad thing for Hungarian security. In other words, countries in the world that have been globalized are those places that have bought into, to some degree, of a western capitalist way of doing things. One can broadly interpret that in many ways, and because of that there will be disagreements, and perhaps even violent disagreements, within this great new area of American influence. Globalization means that basically the West won the Cold War, that our model of political development had won out to the extent that are there as yet no other specific competing models, because the area outside of the globalized roam of the world, inside the poorest parts of the ex-Soviet Union, the poorest parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, they are not offering a competing model. They are just too poor or too chaotic, to be part of this new kind of very weak anemic form of American imperialism. But it is so weak, it is so anemic, it does not even go by the name American. It goes by another word: globalization. So is this usable for us, yes it is, because not nearly to the extent that say the imperial holdings of Britain were using it for Britain. We are now at a new journey in world history. We have a new kind of undeclared imperialism, that because it is undeclared it is weak, but it is not without consequences at the same time.

CDI: In your upcoming book, "The Coming Anarchy", you describe a series of situations, states that maybe roughly described as failed states. What do you see as a responsibility of the industrialized world, or post-industrialized nations, in assisting in failed states and restoring civil society?

KAPLAN: I have an upcoming book of essays coming out, called "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War" which will be published by Random House in February. It deals with a number of topics. It deals with the part of the world, that is not part of this new globalized area. It deals with the whole problem of democracy. It deals with the whole problem mass murder. There are different essays that deal with different elements. In the first few essays I kind of describe the problem as a foreign correspondent and in the last I kind of open avenues in how to deal with them. But I think, to bring it down in a nutshell, in order for us to keep a stable world in the future we have to abandon this idea of exporting democracy. Democracy cannot be expanded, it needs natural roots to develop. It cannot be exported. We can talk about human rights, we can talk about the protection of minorities, but there are many societies around the world that are actually more stable and more prosperous without elections than because of elections. That is because these societies have no middle class, they have no working institutions, they are basically societies of world peasants in Sub-Saharan Africa or urbanized peasants as in the ex-Soviet Union. And the real challenge in these places is to start from scratch a real middle class and see it grow. Because it is only with a middle class that you have stability. The problem though it throughout history middle classes have never been started from scratch, except under authoritarian regimes. Once their sizable enough and big enough, then they tend to throw out the very autocrats that created the middle class in the first place and advance up the level of democracy. We have seen that in the southern cone of Latin America and Argentina and Chile, recent year in Uruguay, we have seen it in Taiwan and South Korea. That in societies that are so poor like Singapore, which was as poor as West Africa 35 years ago, initial prosperity can only come from some kind of enlightened despotism. After that initial prosperity, then you want to see increasing democratization, but you cannot jump start it from scratch by holding elections.

CDI: What do you think it means to be the world longed superpower, what kind of security issues or security challenges should the US be focusing on at the turn of the century?

KAPLAN: It means nothing more or less than it meant for the British empire at the end of the nineteenth century when there was no challenge on the horizon for the British navy. If you got up at a conference and said the navy will not be the most powerful force in the world in twenty years, you might be laughed at because you would have no proof of your argument, it would all be purely subjective. So that is what it means. It means that at this moment as we speak there is no other nation or region in the world that has information age military capabilities. But precisely because of we are so powerful, we are resented. And if history teaches anything, it is that power is fleeing, there will always be challengers.

CDI: Are there any implied responsibilities being the one superpower at the turn of the century?

KAPLAN: Yes, there is, like it or not. We are all stuck with each other in this world. Whatever we do affects the outside world to a much greater degree than what the people of any other nation does. So we have no choice but to be internationalist. The only intelligent argument could be about the degree of internationalism. Isolationism is simply not an option. It is a 1920s word that has no more relevance today.

CDI: What are some security threats you see in the future?

KAPLAN: In terms of concrete security threats in the future we are going to face, keep this in mind, that the spread of free markets does not necessarily mean the spread of civil society. The drug trade that goes up and down North America is an example of the success of free market capitalism. Organized crime mafias that have taken shape and power in many parts of the ex-communist world is another example of the success of free markets. So it all depends what kinds of free markets you mean. In terms of the threats we are going to face threats of all kinds of criminal groups that take advantage of globalization. They will take advantage of the spread of free markets and technology. They will take much greater advantage of it them democratic parties will around the world. We have weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical, nuclear - that are a greater threat, because they can now be used by non-state actors, meaning terrorist groups, people that do not own a country, who do not own geographical space. The chances of a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, that is not a test, is probably greater now than during the Cold War. That is because during the Cold War nuclear weapons were controlled by controlled by two very conservative, stodgy bureaucracies - ours and the Kremlin. Now they are in the hands of people who have no bureaucratic control mechanisms, no real organized decision-making process of how to use them. So there are terrorist groups, there are crime and mafia groups, there are all kinds of lethal weapons, there is kidnaping which is going to be used by crime groups and others to influence the behavior of the wealthy around the world, targeted people. So increasingly, we will be attacked in the places we are most vulnerable. As I said earlier, we will be challenged for power. Somebody will challenge us and they will never challenge us in the areas where we are strong, but in the areas where we are weak.