There was once a time in the 1990s when Robert Kaplan was rightly regarded as a prophet.
“Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels”—this was the parade of horribles Kaplan bracingly foretold in his landmark 1994 Atlantic article entitled, “The Coming Anarchy.”
Observing the key challenges facing the world—”the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war”—through the lens of West Africa, Kaplan, then as now a writer and traveloguer with a keen eye and a sharper pen, trained his sights on how the post-Cold War world—then in its infancy—had already become afflicted by numerous maladies.
And now, some 30 years later, Kaplan has returned in Waste Land, his concise and self-described “relentlessly pessimistic” analysis of current geopolitical crises, to chronicle how the world of the 2020s has come to suffer from the nascent ills spawned in the 1990s.
But first he embarks on a trip even further back, to the 1920s, when Germany’s Weimar Republic struggled, and ultimately failed, to withstand the powerful forces buffeting a fragile liberal society. “The entire world is one big Weimar now,” Kaplan contends, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.” The rise of China, the hardening of Russia, the audacity of Iran, the explosion of telecommunication technology, and, most important, the ebbing of the West have given rise to an unprecedentedly perilous global moment.
It’s not that another Hitler is around the corner, Kaplan hastens to add. Instead, “we are forced to wallow in one sort of emergency or another without pause, as crises seep and ricochet across the globe.” Putin’s criminal Ukrainian adventure, Xi’s saber-rattling over Taiwan, the mullahs’ race toward a nuclear bomb—an anarchic world featuring the retrenchment of the once-dominant alliance of the United States, Europe, and other freedom-loving countries is a dangerous place indeed.
No global policeman walks the beat any longer. Kaplan quotes Jakub Grygiel of Catholic University (and a contributor to this section), who asserts that “an Earth-spanning security space governed by global rules doesn’t exist,” and instead, we are governed by mere “regional equilibria” that are “driven by local historical competitions.” No one power will replace the West, but many smaller ones may.
Meanwhile, Kaplan likens the intensifying cold war between Beijing and Washington to the Cuban Missile Crisis. “The globe,” he proclaims, “is becoming the worst of both worlds: a unified theater of conflict, but one where each far-flung extremity of that theater can tweak the other end thousands of miles away and cause an eruption.” We also can’t discount the mischief that even a declining Moscow has fomented.
Technology has supercharged the debate, too. “Because of digital communications, intercontinental missiles, jet travel, space satellites, and so much else,” Kaplan argues, “different parts of the globe now affect each other as intimately as different parts of Germany affected each other in the 1920s and early 1930s.” For instance, transnational post-liberal movements on both the right and the left—and the splintered, ideologically extreme media that empowers them—can now easily attract millions of adherents whose inextricably connected handheld devices render actual mass rallies utterly unnecessary.
The global movement toward urbanization, too, has contributed to the chaos. Invoking the likes of Oswald Spengler, Jane Jacobs, and even Ibn Khaldun, Kaplan condemns the concentration of wealth and inequality in contemporary conurbations the world over. But more than anyone else, T.S. Eliot—and his epic, rambling, and disorienting poem after which Kaplan’s book is titled—nailed the sense of unraveling even a century after The Waste Land first appeared. “The cities,” Kaplan writes, “because of their crowded conditions are an intensification of existence and therefore of politics,” which “should at least make you nervous given the demographics of the 21st century.” Crowds, mobs, and rabbles embody the most powerful and often negative impulses of society, whether in Minneapolis, Tehran, or Dhaka.
Not everything is dark, however. “More and more people live fuller and richer lives,” Kaplan acknowledges, “and have more and better ways to communicate their feelings.” But with improving prospects come heightened expectations, which authoritarian regimes seek to temper, sparking conflict both within and between states. “The faster the enlightenment of the population,” the celebrated political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote in 1968, “the more frequent the overthrow of the government.”
Some of Kaplan’s arguments have, alas, been overtaken by events. He labels the “tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment that the Biden Administration dispatched to Ukraine,” and the anti-Russian alliance that emerged after the 2022 invasion, “the greatest demonstration of American power since the First Gulf War of 1991.” A debatable point (the U.S.-led coalitions that wiped out al Qaeda and ISIS may have been more impressive), but an especially sour one, given the second Trump administration’s apparent determination to abandon Kyiv.
But Kaplan’s arguments are compelling, and even if his conclusions are depressing, forewarned is forearmed. “The key,” Kaplan insists, “is to make constructive use of our fears about Weimar, so as to be wary about the future without giving in to fate.” Here’s hoping the West can strike that balance—and right itself.
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis
by Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, 224 pp., $31
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Jewish Tradition Can Teach Us About AI.
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