Former Pentagon analyst warns Oxford Literary Festival that China and the US are heading towards an inevitable Cuban Missile Crisis moment
Tracy Chevalier and Robert D Kaplan at the Oxford Literary Festival
29 March – 6 April
By Jon Lewis
Americans Abroad
The American strand at the Oxford Literary Festival is always worth attending. Tracy Chevalier, author of The Girl With the Pearl Earring, spoke to a packed audience in Pusey House’s chapel about her new novel, The Glassmaker. This is a long book set over many centuries, featuring a female glassmaker, Orsola Rosso, who lives in Murano, an island off Venice known for its glass.
Chevalier started writing the novel in 2019 and had to abandon her plans to stay in Venice the following summer to learn Italian because of the pandemic. However, Chevalier found that the lockdown restrictions during covid had a parallel in outbreaks of plague in Venice in 1575 and 1631 that killed a quarter of the population. There were so many events in Venice that intrigued Chevalier, such as Casanova being arrested in 1755, that she wanted her novel to encompass all these historical moments. Chevalier came up with the conceit that everyone in Venice ages very slowly, and Ursula is in her 60s by the end of the novel.
Robert D Kaplan, former analyst for the Pentagon and US Navy, gave a fascinating lecture based on his book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. Having met many of the world’s leaders, Kaplan has analysed the state of world politics. It does not look good. He cites the Hungarian-American scientist John van Neumann who suggested that the limited size of the earth will become a force for instability creating anxiety and a claustrophobic tension. Kaplan foresees that the three greatest powers, the US, China and Russia, are all in a process of decline, but at different rates.
Kaplan intriguingly calls Donald Trump ‘post-literate’ because he does not read books, and does not know, or is interested in, history. Trump is profoundly uninterested in Europe. Regarding the recent tariffs, Kaplan is worried that an economic battle can lead to a real war. He believes that China and the US are heading towards an inevitable Cuban Missile Crisis moment. His plea for the world is for everyone to have an imagination and foresee future problems to avoid them.
