Reviewing The Jungle Grows Back (March 2025)

In his short book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (2018), Robert Kagan, former editor-at-large for the Washington Post(1) and author of many books on international relations, argues that the rise of authoritarian governments and movements in countries around the world is largely attributable to America’s growing disengagement from its role as the primary sponsor of the post-World War II liberal world order. Writing in 2018, Kagan clearly has in mind Xi Jinping’s China, Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran, Orban’s Hungary, Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally, Italy’s Brothers of Italy and most significantly, America’s MAGA movement, which shocked the Western world with its victory in the 2016 presidential election that put Donald Trump, real estate developer and TV personality, in the White House. It is the latter that provided the real impetus for this book, as, for Kagan and many others in the American foreign policy establishment, the risks of the U.S. abdicating its role as ‘leader of the free world’ suddenly escalated. He writes, “If Obama’s policies put a dent in the liberal world order, Trump’s statements and actions are driving a stake through it.”

While Kagan is truly alarmed for the immediate future of the liberal international order, one has to wonder whether at this point, nearly 75 years after they were established, the foundations of the post-World War II world had not been so firmly established as we thought. If Washington is the sole guarantor of this world order, which espouses limited government in the forms of representative democracy and free markets, then one must concede that the system is actually quite fragile. And Kagan agrees, noting that liberal democracies are by far and away the exception in the recorded history of governments, various forms of autocratic government having been historically the norm. What is one to make of Europe’s, Japan’s and the British Commonwealth’s commitment to the program if the system would collapse without the U.S. as its underwriter?

Kagan’s thesis is encapsulated in the book’s title. The jungle evokes the Hobbesian world of ‘all against all,’ which in 17^th century England had to be tamed by the authoritarian Leviathan. Now, for Kagan, Hobbes’ Leviathan is as much a part of the jungle as the rest. It is only the Enlightenment ideas of freedom that can save human society from the violent and unpredictable world of the jungle. The liberal international world order is the human society of nations that have escaped the jungle, but this escape can never be permanent as the jungle cannot be completely destroyed and it grows back again and again despite efforts to contain it and push it back.

Pushing the jungle back from the garden is a never-ending task. There are no “mission accomplished” moments. Liberalism, prosperity, stability are constantly being eroded or undermined by enduring forces of habit and history and by enduring elements of human nature. Policies and policy formulations inevitably fell victim to the foibles common to all humans, no matter how well intentioned—the failures of insight and foresight, the selfishness and solipsism, and the overall incompetence endemic to all human activity.

What exactly does the jungle represent? Essentially, it is that part of human nature that, owing to fear and insecurity on one hand and greed and the lust for power on the other, seeks to dominate instead of cooperate and congregate in small tribes where the enemy is everything outside the tribe.

Kagan is not so disingenuous as to deny the hypocrisy of U.S. exceptionalism in foreign policy in the post-World War II global system. However, he attempts to justify what has sometimes been characterized as Pax Americana as the best option among imperfect choices. The overarching purpose of the liberal world order is to prevent the sort of breakdowns in international affairs that led to the unspeakable slaughter of the two world wars of the 20^th century. America’s violation of the sovereignty of countries around the world is noted, but it is regarded as collateral damage.

Americans were certainly unready for the moral complexity of wielding such great power. They never reconciled themselves to the tragic reality that it was impossible to wield power, even in the best of causes, with clean hands. Americans liked to believe they were on the side of the good, but power is power and killing is killing, no matter how virtuous the objective. In every war, innocents are killed, dreadful mistakes waste the lives of brave soldiers, and even disciplined armies commit atrocities.

The obvious contradictions between the espoused democratic liberalism and its practice in everyday international affairs are said to be resolved according to the principle of the greatest good or least harm. This, of course, assumes that there is an inescapable trade-off between great power conflicts and great power interventions (economic and military) in small countries.

Kagan argues that it was a multipolar world that led to the two world wars, which he cites to support his view that the US-led international order has performed well in terms of keeping the great powers from engaging one another in full-scale war and threatening to draw in the rest of the world. Here, Kagan has to justify America’s use of military and economic force in the countries of the Third World (now the Global South). He writes, “it is ultimately the American security guarantee, the ability to deploy hard power to deter and defeat potential aggressors, that provides the essential foundation without which the liberal world order could never survive.” In his view, what progressive critics call neocolonialism is a necessary evil for containing smaller conflicts and is part of a larger foreign policy of containment that was designed to outlast the Soviet Union. Now that the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR is over, the enemies of the liberal world order are a miscellany of aggressive autocracies as mentioned above.

Throughout the book, Kagan describes international relations as if it were a complex strategy game where the key players are the great powers. Countries in the Global South are to be played. In the trade-offs of global diplomacy, citizens of the former are regarded more highly than those of the latter. This has its parallel in the domestic politics of the US. Ronald Reagan acquired notoriety for trickle-down economics, but he was not the first nor the last Republican to serve the wealthy at the expense of the poor. That is fundamental to the Republican platform—on one side, tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for American corporations, and tax loopholes for both, while on the other side, welfare cutbacks for the poor. In the international system led by the US, the great powers are the rich, and the countries of the Global South are the poor.

To his credit, Kagan does raise the alarm of the dangers posed by Trump and his movement . . . and this was in 2018. “Doubts about America have reverberated across the globe, especially since the election of Trump, and this alone has contributed to the unraveling of the liberal order.” Fast forward seven years, and the dangers have been magnified and transformed into attacks, and the attack on the global world order is underway. Picking up on Kagan’s metaphor, the jungle is no longer being actively pushed back—certainly not by America. And if America is not willing to contain it, who will? That is the danger of an international system that relies so much on one country. What happens when that country is compromised and can no longer be relied upon to support democracy and free markets worldwide?

All is not lost though, as Kagan counters, “It is no more accurate to say today that the West is facing inevitable decline than it was to say in 1989 that history had ended and liberalism had triumphed.” Here, he refers to Francis Fukuyama’s (in)famous End of History thesis, which hearkens back to Hegelian notions of the dialectic of history. Kagan reminds us that just as Fukuyama’s assessment was misguided, our current assessment of the state of the world may be flawed. To put it another way, what may appear inevitable today need not lead us to a feckless fatalism.

One does not have to agree entirely with all of Kagan’s political views to appreciate his contribution to America’s resistance, such as it is, to the transactional conduct of foreign policy by an administration that is not so much driven by ideology as by the motives of a Republican crime syndicate godfathered by a deranged old man.

Endnotes

(1) Kagan resigned from the Post when Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, pulled the endorsement of Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, breaking with recent Post practice. Kagan cited a quid pro quo between Bezos and Trump, which would assure Bezos’ Blue Origin, a rival of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, of favourable treatment under a Trump Administration. See the October 27, 2024 New York Times article, ‘Bezos faces criticism after executives met with Trump on day of Post’s non-endorsement.’