The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War

by Robert D. Kaplan

When "The Coming Anarchy" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1994, it was hailed as among the most important and influential articulations of the future of our planet, along with Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" and Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations." Since then, Robert Kaplan's anti-utopian vision of the fault lines of the twentyfirst century has taken on the status of a paradigm. "The Coming Anarchy" has been hailed as the defining thesis for understanding the post-Cold War world.

At the heart of this book is a question as old as America and one that is crucial to our national what can and should we do when violence breaks out in countries far from our borders? A work of uncompromising honesty, The Coming Anarchy is the first book to present a coherent picture of the political views of a man who has shaped national dialogue in this decade on key issues of international relations. (The New York Times called Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts "the bestknown volume associated with the Clinton Presidency.")

The Coming Anarchy takes on some of the most difficult issues we will be grappling with and living through in the next century. When we speak about the resurgence of ethnic violence, the social pressures of disease, environmental scarcity and overpopulation, and the rise of criminal anarchy, we are using language that Robert Kaplan brought into our homes.

In "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Kaplan offers a fierce indictment of American plans to export democracy abroad, in places where it can't succeed. In "Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder," he looks with a clear eye at the consequences of the new Holocaust mentality in American foreign policy. In "Proportionalism," he lays out boundaries for a successful policy toward the developing world. And in "The Dangers of Peace," he proposes a theory of war and peace in the modern world and a vision of the future of the United Nations that will be as controversial as "The Coming Anarchy" was when it first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

Impassioned, iconoclastic, visionary, and stubbornly original, The Coming Anarchy will be one of the most important and controversial books of the new century.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, International Relations, Current Affairs, Philosophy, Political Science

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Robert David Kaplan is an American journalist, currently a National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His writings have also been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications, and his more controversial essays about the nature of U.S. power have spurred debate in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. A frequent theme in his work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War.

Reviews

[mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wait, what! Did I write this book? No, at the time it was written, the late 90’s, I was rehabilitating young minds and not all that concerned with world affairs; but now … I do agree with most of what the author thinks about the peopled world. This book, a book of essays concerned with international affairs and America’s involvement, all written before 9/11, is mind-blowing for its predictive accuracy. I suspect that’s because Kaplan takes a realistic world view versus a wishful, or idealistic one. The first essay, the title of which titles the book, is 20,000 words of what should be mandatory reading. Kaplan accurately describes the world as it is today – the real problems: population explosion combined with environmental degradation and mass poverty and migration, confounded by man-made false borders and ill-understood tribal, ethnic, and cultural differences that fuel conflict, which many men find stimulating and economically viable, i.e war works. A subject explored in more depth in the final essay, “The Dangers of Peace.”
When you finish reading the first essay, keep reading. The next, “Was Democracy Just a Moment”, will blow your mind as to how accurately it describes today, even the Berniebro phenomenon. It describes the community yours truly lives in, Westminster, Colorado – a ‘community’ of strip malls, golf-courses, private health clubs, strict zoning, generic architecture, zero crime, Disneyesque attractions and playgrounds – a gated community without a gate. A society of “micelike conformists” addicted to a technological complexity that has threatened our healthy individuality by constant streams of “other people’s opinions” of whom we no longer have any real interaction with. “… as communities become liberated from geography, as well as more specialized culturally and electronically, they will increasingly fall outside the realm of traditional governance. Democracy loses meaning if both rulers and ruled cease to be part of a community tied to a specific territory.” (pg. 87) In other words, we are (at least some, the Liberal Humanists, the international corporate globalists) are denying who we really are (Kaplan quotes Ben Franklin who calls mankind “tool-making animals”) in the service of profit for the few. The author, more accurately than he could know, states, “We have become voyeurs and escapists.” Echoes of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published between the two essays, by the way.
In “Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism” I like this: “A true conservative is in fact a hesitant progressive: he or she seeks to slow change when society is reforming too fast and to instigate moderate change when society is not reforming at all.” (pg. 136) Summarizing Kissenger, Kaplan writes: idealism leads to an inefficient cycle of intense hope [Obama’s ‘hope and change’ and now Sanders’ ‘a future you can believe in’] and activity [speeches and rallies and protests] abroad [and here] followed by morose withdrawal [drugs & entertainment/screens] once it became apparent that hope and activity were unlikely to remake the world. (pgs. 137-8)
In “Conrad’s Nostromo and the Third World,” Kaplan iterates, “Literature, alas, may be the only salvation for the policy elite, because in the guise of fiction a writer can more easily tell the truth.” Hunter Thompson said that, and Hemingway, btw. “Nostromo, like any great story, is about individuals and their desperate need for love.” (pg. 162) Hemingway also said that. I love this: “authentic heroes like Nostromo are motivated by personal vanity rather than ideals, and that such vanity, rather than something bad, is the true source of incorruptibility.” [see Trump] “… we often do the most noble things in politics for the most personal of reasons, and not for those we publicly espouse. … the desire for wealth, or for the admiration of beautiful women, may, in fact, preserve objectivity far better than the desire to save a million people.’ (pg. 167)
The last essay, “The Dangers of Peace,” – brilliant! Summarizes the conundrum of three important personal and political axis: pleasure/pain; self/other; and active/passive, within the context of war and peace. Five stars. Read this book.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book, because it’s a book of (pessimistic) analysis and predictions made long enough ago (mid- to late-1990s) that some judgment can be made of its accuracy. It’s a book of several essays of varying lengths on varying topics, based largely on direct observation from Kaplan’s travels, but all generally focused around the future structure and stability of the world. Kaplan is a very vivid and incisive writer, so just on that basis alone the book is worth reading. He’s also a very pessimistic writer, or realist as he would say.

The first essay is the most famous and the one after which the book is named (subtitled “How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Destroying The Planet”—hard to get more pessimistic than that!). It’s from 1994. Kaplan in essence says that in the Third World, by which he really means Africa, population growth will inevitably lead to continual warfare over critical resources like food, with the sole exception being places where a strong culture prevents it (he specifically focuses on Muslim culture in the incredibly orderly Istanbul slums, which he believes is the one culture that is likely to expand in troubled times, because “it is prepared to fight”). In sum, “Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.”

Kaplan relies heavily on ideologically driven sources such as Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who basically believe the sky is falling because we have too many people and they are going to use everything up, historical contradictions to that be damned. Kaplan and his sources are definitely not of the opinion that human creativity can or will solve our problems—rather, they are of the deterministic mold that we are all screwed because there are too many of us and we will inevitably use up everything, as supposedly proven by a static, Malthusian analysis. Not that they advert to Malthus being proven wrong in the developed world.

So far none of this pessimism has been borne out by reality—while there’s plenty of warfare in Africa, it’s mostly tribally/religiously driven, not over scarce critical resources, and the population growth impact is, as usual, not what is feared. In this essay, Kaplan has more than a little in common with such totally discredited “scientists” as Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (Obama’s science advisor—go figure), who have been beating this drum with the solution of more government control over everyone, for decades. Sure, Kaplan is more interesting than those hacks, but in practice his pessimism hasn’t been borne out.

Kaplan isn’t wrong that there’s a huge and growing divide between rich and poor countries. But that war will be the result doesn’t follow and hasn’t happened. In fact, outside of Africa, most poor countries have become vastly richer in the 21 years since this essay came out.

Kaplan continues the pessimism with an essay in essence predicting no future for democracy—“Was Democracy Just A Moment?”. In most countries, he says, it just doesn’t work due to “lack of social development.” In more advanced countries, such as the US, the ruling class lacks purpose and vision, the other classes want convenience and circuses, and anyway corporations really rule, so we are headed back to oligarchy.

Much of this is quite compelling. On the other hand, it’s undermined by (in this and other essays in the book), how Kaplan has an obsession with the political impact of corporations. He does not seem to understand how large corporations work in practice, leading to odd statements like “Of the world’s hundred largest economies, fifty-one are not countries but corporations,” and “Corporations . . . are nothing less than the vanguard of a new Darwinian organization of politics.” He even explicitly predicts universities will die unless they do what corporations tell them and develop the curricula corporations demand. Of course, nothing with respect to universities could be further from the truth in 2015, and more broadly corporations are not nation-states, but instead ultimately subject to nation-states—just see Venezuela. They may have political power in some cases, but no, Halliburton does not dictate US foreign policy (not that Kaplan says that, but that’s the same type of thinking). But certainly in the 18 years since this essay, democratic governance in the advanced world has declined, while there’s no more, and probably less, real democracy in the rest of the world. So perhaps he is right about the end result.

Other essays are very interesting—most notably one on Conrad’s Nostromo, a great and little-read book, and one on Gibbon’s Decline & Fall. He note that Nostromo analyzes crappy Third World societies and how they operate with a clear eye, and that fiction can do analysis of this sort well—without having to be polite, and instead being able to bring up “the very uncomfortably sensitive issues that people are afraid to discuss at dinner parties for fear of what others might think of them”—a relevant observation applicable to today’s neo-Jacobin mobs chasing cultural conservatives from their jobs and public visibility. In another essay, he analyzes and endorses Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy realism across the decades, focusing on analyzing “needless” late-Vietnam bloodshed as justified by demonstrating US resolve to other world powers, with a nod to Metternich (on whom Kissinger wrote his dissertation).

Kaplan ends the book by pointing out that peacetime is not necessarily better for us, particularly if brought about by a strong (perhaps world) government. “Consensus can be the handmaiden of evil, since the ability to confront evil means the willingness to act boldly and ruthlessly and without consensus, attributes that executive, national leadership has in far more abundance than any international organization.” Global bodies merely reflect the actual global elite, most of whom are cretinous people who are rich and powerful because they stole and killed their way to the top. “We think we know what political correctness is: we have no idea how intensely suffocating public discourse could become in a truly unified and peaceful world.” He does not mention the EU, but the EU immediately springs to mind when talking of an organization “lacking accountability because of its received claim to progressive rationality. Such an organization would rule not through violence but by ably delegitimizing—perhaps, with the help of an all-powerful global media—anything and anybody that crossed its path, by defining such opposition as ‘immoral,’ ‘unprogressive,’ ‘provincial,’ or ‘isolationist.’” This is of course what the EU and its cultural elite has done with all opposition, in particular any opposition to the free immigration of unassimilated populations that create most of the crime and violence (e.g., 60% of the convicts in French jails are Muslim, but you’re a pariah if you are opposed to more immigration or have any love for your traditional culture).

Finally, Kaplan points out that “A long domestic peace would rear up leaders with no tragic historical memory, and thus little wisdom. Nor would such future leaders be fortified by a life of serious reading to compensate for their lack of historical experience: permanent peace, with its worship of entertainment and convenience, will produce ever shallower leaders. The mass man will rule as well as be ruled. Nor would such childlike leaders be well advised, due to the inverse relationship between wisdom and specialization.” While this was 15 years ago, pre-9/11, pre-Bush II, and pre-Obama, he could easily have been talking about Bush, or particularly Obama, who surrounds himself with third-rate, unread, un-specialized, and unwise sycophants (like Valarie Jarrett). Or, as Kaplan say, “Think of the mentality of young White House aides after, say, sixty years of domestic peace, and you may grasp why even if peace obtains for sixty years, it could not for sixty-one.” His solution: “The solution for such trends is simple: struggle, of one sort or another, hopefully nonviolent. . . . . Struggle causes us to reflect, to fortify our faith, and to see beyond our narrow slots of existence. . . . What we should be skeptical of are the ‘benefits’ of a world at peace with unlimited natural resources.” A sobering counter to the techno-optimists, who assume a world with nano-scale fabrication would lead to happiness and peace for all.

[Prospero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prophetic.

Written more than 25 years ago at the height of post-Cold War liberal-international and globalization euphoria in the mid-90s, Kaplan braved professional ridicule to sagely warn the world of coming threats being left unchecked and allowed to grow at the margins of a world celebrating the end of history.

Analyzing everything from fringe white supremacism in America to the rising popularity of Islamism in the Middle East, religious and ethnic tribalism in Africa, the Balkans and Asia to the rise of corporatism and borderless technology all undermining the stability of nation-states, he predicted the rise of radical Islamist groups in the Middle East, populism in the West, the undermining and unraveling of liberal democracy at the hands of unchecked corporate power and disruptive communication technology, and the impact of ecological destabilization on social order.

The 2010s validated his theses, which continue to remain relevant at the start of our new decade.

Standout essays to read are "Was Democracy Just A Moment?" (in which he argues that democracy doesn't so much advance society as much as complicate it, and ultimately democracy's dependence on the health of its underlying society either makes it advance the cause of freedom and progress, or sharpen tribal divisions and lead to political dysfunction) and "The Coming Anarchy", (in which he argues that the end of the Cold War, rather than ushering in a new age of peace, enlightenment and prosperity, merely uncorked a million ancient ethnic, religious and tribal rivalries, allowing them to bubble to the surface and trigger the next cycle of conflict, and set the stage for empire to re-emerge as the default political organizing principle for the world).

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kaplan is a fearless author and thinker. He explores and explodes the modern emphasis on peace and transnational government as a rational view to the reality of the current state of international affairs. Though published in 2000 this book is still relevant and insightful. Kaplan is a journalist with a strengthen in foreign and security issues. He is a realist of the first degree, starting the book with a quote from Hobbes, and writing a fantastic essay - "Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism". He explores the collapse of nation states, rising environmental concerns, the concerns of modern intelligence and the problems of idealism when addressing foreign affairs. Interestingly is his use of literature to better understand our changing world, writing about Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Conrad's Nostromo. (In previous books and this he mentions Robert Musli's "A Man Without Qualities", which is now on my reading list for the summer).

Kaplan is truly a man of all worlds, teaching at military academies, drawing on current and past foreign affair prose, traveling to regions he studies (what a brave guy, applying his "boots on the ground" to study things up close {does he need a Sherpa?, I may volunteer}), and drawing on literature. He breath of scholarship is truly amazing.

His two most fearless essays are "Was Democracy Just A Moment?" and "The Dangers of Peace". The first trounces the call for multi-party democracy in third world nations without having established the essential underlying civic and cultural institutions - rule of law, a stable economy, a vibrant middle class, and active, relatively corruption-free government. This is where is his wide ranging academic and real world experience, in support of his realism soundly levels the idealism of the modern, insular academic. (Let's see what happens post the Arab Spring. So far it is mix in terms of a true understanding of democracy for all, not just the majority.) This second essay chronicles the dangers of peace at all cost movements of the 20th century, that while peace is laudable, the danger for the world is peace in the form of surrender of the principals we hold most dear. He writes elegantly of the rise of the mob mentality of the media and world elites. His most interesting observation is that an understanding and study of history, and engagement in world affairs, requires a sense of tragedy and historic memory. These will ensure a true sense of the world and how to live within it, versus the coming chaos as a result of idealism for the sake of idealism, divorced from the actual world.

[AJ Shields · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's very poorly written. And not just his actual points, but his prose as well. Half of the book is quotes from other people who are largely irrelevant and are not any sort of authority on the topic at hand. The other half is Kaplan trying to cram the most intelligent sounding words in a sentence as physically possible.

And then his actual points are baseless and lacking any sort of logical thought. He pretty much sums up the book with why we need a good war now and then to straighten out our collective outlook. It's rubbish.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another saved book. From where I don't know. It's a collection of essays written mostly for the Atlantic Monthly. A friend of mine has a subscription. My impression is that it's kind of a progressive Republican rag - whatever that might be! I read the intro last night. Should prove interesting to read alongside "The Glory and the Dream."

Got a bit further in over the retail-work weekend. Now I have some nice time off to read on. The picture ain't gonna be pretty. In fact it's already pretty discouraging.

I had enough time last night to read more of this one. I'll stick to it exclusively for a while at least. Very interesting to read the authors suggestions of how things are evolving in the world. Most Americans would not pay any attention to this book of course, too busy watching TV, texting, tweeting, and taking selfies. Too bad. But then, why read when someone like Trump can make it all so simple for us?

Some interesting points last night as well as a prediction that even the USA may well experience some "boundary realignment" in the fairly near future. This point relates to "American Nations" as well. The author and others are particularly looking toward the southwest to become politically and culturally dominated by Hispanic people in the coming decades. They may demand more political autonomy. I'll be long gone by then I suppose.

This book is EXCELLENT if a bit disjointed. All the essays/articles orbit around the same general topic - the fairly short-term political future of our planet. Economic and religious considerations are VERY important! Not to mention environmental stress and continual population expansion. It attacks some of our most cherished myths. One in particular is the notion that democracy is best for everybody. Sorry ... most definitely and obviously NOT the case. Even in a relatively wealthy society like the U.S. democracy has the potential to promote cultural and cultural instability - just look at the current political situation!

Getting near the end now and will likely finish tonight. Last night's reading had a lot of semi-good things to say about Kissinger and Nixon. I'm not an intellectual and not an historian so my ability to evaluate the points this author makes is limited. He is a pretty lucid writer and that helps him of course. As for the K & N show I haven't got much to say. I tend to evaluate people as much on what and who they are as on what they do or did. Nixon was nuts. Kissinger was too amoral. According to this author that's not necessarily a bad thing in a Secretary of State. He favors paragmatism and realism over idealism. Hmmm ... I guess that's the current Hillary vs. Bernie argument. Maybe I'm too idealistic? Go Bernie!

Finished last night with looks at Gibbon's history of Rome and Conrad's "Nostromo" and how they might apply to today's unfolding challenges. The overall effect of this book is meant to be(I think) a sort of rebuke(correction?) to liberal idealism and the misapplication thereof. The author seems to be more of a pragmatist, not really a right-winger. I'm not nearly as well-versed in the workings of recent human events to pass judgment on my own. Most of the G'reads reviewers have liked this but at least one attacks the book/author pretty sharply. Certainly worth reading for a different way of understanding today's political-cultural challenges. A few points ...

- The internet enable "resident expatriatism," extremest(white supremacy, radical Islam) views in "stable" cultures.

- Affluenza - a destabilizing and corrosive factor in affluent societies. Who can care about anything except money and stuff? The breeding of servility and withdrawal = de Tocqueville's "industrious sheep"

- Should the world be ruled by a "progressive" UN? The author thinks that this would be problematic.

- Where do non-war struggles come from. We need them - like the space program or something.

- 4.5* rounds down to 4* due to the sort-of randomly drawn together content.

[Daniel Vaughan · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is a difference between realism and cynical pessimism. Kaplan’s book is a collection of essays where he reveals cynical disdain for every ideal, concept, or author to have ever existed. And he does it while showing little knowledge of the broad ideas, people, and forces to cause events; and what knowledge he does posses is based on his travels.

Kaplan is the epitome of a wealthy elite person who takes a few trips around the world and then comes back declaring his entire mindset changed. He just understands things better than you. You just don’t know. It’s hard to be a cynical pessimist while also being near illiterate of all the authors he quotes. Kaplan does succeed on that point.

In multiple sections, and I’m not joking, he makes a broad sweeping generalization about the world and says his proof for it is that he traveled to a 3rd world county for a few weeks. And read a novel by a local author.

One essay is him riffing on Kissinger and the book “A World Restored.” The essay was written in 1999, five years after Kissinger released his book “Diplomacy” and all the memoir books. Kaplan muses that we may never know the inner-thinking of the Nixon-Kissinger thought process on Vietnam. What??? Kissinger literally laid out everything in Diplomacy, and talks about how he missed the collapse of the USSR. That book (and others) had been out 5 years by the time Kaplan wrote. You’d never know Kissinger had written multiple other things.

The internal incoherence of Kaplan’s argument is that he takes a dour, pessimistic view of everything. Everything is bad, we are doomed to a 3rd world economic future. You want peace? That’s bad. You want a stable world? That’s bad? War? Also bad. Every form of government is doomed. The only thing he seemingly wants is the enlightened elite despot — who can make decisions on behalf of the unwashed, moronic masses.

He talks about the evils of colonialism. But he himself has a borderline racist view of all third world country people. He calls them hardened and uneducated, and thinks them incapable of greater thoughts. Real power is all they know. Some people write poor psychoanalysis of single people, Kaplan does this with entire people groups.

And throughout it all — Kaplan offers NO PROOF OF ANYTHING. He’s internally incoherent, weak on evidence, and long on pessimism. If you’re pessimistic on literally everything, you’re bound to be right on some things. Not because you’re capable of strong analysis, but because you’ve answered a multiple choice test by answering “A” for everything.

The real indictment of the book is the list of newspapers and elite magazines praising it. It’s garbage. 1/5 stars, and I’d go lower if I could.

[Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kaplan presciently predicts the contemporary period of chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere in this late 1990s work. Railing against the rhetoric of spreading democracy, Kaplan effectively argues against the 2003 invasion of Iraq before it even happened. Tremendously important and applicable today.

[Chad Manske · Rating 4 out of 5]

TBD

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazone

The Coming Anarchy: Dispelling the Illusion of Idealism
8/10

The 1960s forged a generation of raw journalists whose idealism was slowly stripped away by the moral bankruptcy and the dehumanizing experience of America's involvement in Vietnam. Wide eyed innocents such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan walked away disillusioned and bitter, and their seminal analyses of America's failed experiment in Vietnam earned them wide acclaim along with the journalist's ultimate badge of respectability, the Pulitzer

If Halberstam and Sheehan were products of the Cold War, Kaplan is their natural successor in the Post Cold War.

The Coming Anarchy, a collection of nine essays, is not the work of a traditional realist, such as Henry Kissinger, who nonetheless maintains an unassailable belief in American exceptionalism, but that of an über-realist, a neo-Malthusian hardened by many years in forgotten corners of the world such as the Balkans, Western Africa, and Southwest Asia.

The nine essays encapsulated in The Coming Anarchy range from grim predictions of future conflicts to book reviews to a catechism on proportionalism as a litmus test for American intervention. Though seemingly unrelated, Kaplan's penchant for lucent, occasionally acerbic, and consistently powerful prose cogently connects the articles with the assiduous advocacy of realism.

Kaplan challenges the old order with wisdom borne from the crucible of insidious conflict. He describes the multitude of problems that assail Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa.....

Issues such as environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic density, and localized, tribal warfare are by no means new.

Kaplan contends that whereas these problems, endemic to the poorest corners of the world, have been subordinated in previous decades to the primacy of the Cold War, in the absence of a single monolithic threat, the multitude of the previously latent ones have emerged that directly challenge the American version of the new world order.

Americans that have long been accustomed to ignoring the plight of Sub-Saharan Africans, Pakistanis, and Afghans, can no longer afford to so.

Kaplan's first essay, essentially a bleak portrait of the third world teeming with human suffering and violence, is left wanting. While it serves as a premonition of danger, he offers no solutions.

In another essay, titled, Proportionalism: A Realistic Approach to Foreign Policy, Kaplan espouses a version of realpolitik that is tempered by America's experience in Vietnam. Kaplan's proportionalism is a decision-making matrix determined by calculations of national interest and considerations of the terms of the Powell Doctrine.

...it is a realist's acknowledgement of having to commit lesser evils to achieve the greater good.

Proportionalism, as applied for foreign has three tenets: the aid itself, early warning, and extremely rare intervention.

American doles will be provided to countries not of direst need but those most promising of some form of a return on investment.

Kaplan predicts that this search for a positive bottom line in the determination of foreign aid will be an "anathema to moral and ideological purists" but he asserts its necessity because proportionalism "tempers implacable principle with common sense".

Kaplan openly challenges convention with his advocacy for realism and his prediction of a certain "anarchy" that will be almost inevitable if the issues and tensions that tear at the social and political fabric of the world's periphery are not resolved.

Although his arguments are vulnerable to a quick dismissal as being extreme, Kaplan's prescient prediction of the Balkans catastrophe....lends much credibility to his analysis.

He declares open warfare on idealists with articles that assert that peace and democracy are not necessarily desirable ends.

Kaplan warns, "A long period of peace in an advanced technological society like ours could lead to great evils."

Although Kaplan's essays are brilliantly written that draw from an eclectic mix of history, literature, and anecdotes, his ideas and arguments in their current form are incomplete.

A master polemicist, Kaplan's bold ideas add a significant dimension to the current discourse on American foreign policy.

SavvyShopper

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Half truths and distortions for the clueless?
2/10

This book represents to me an interesting, yes, but nevertheless old trick: state an opinion that mostly everyone agrees on (in this case - we are moving fast towards global economic and social doom) dress it up with platitudes and foggy "explanations" and finish off by actually advocating that the movers and shakers of the system aren't responsible for any of it themselves...

So who's responsible for the economic and social doom or the "coming anarchy"?

Well that's where it gets even more interesting. The author points out to us the guilty ones by actually telling us who is not guilty.

That would be for example Henry Kissinger for whom Kaplan dedicates more than a whole chapter praising his efforts to maintain a balance in this mad, mad world we're living in...

But then again, Kaplan admits that Kissinger was one of the pivotal decision makers for the brutal bombings in Cambodia with 1000s of innocent civilians dead. The reason according to the book? It was nothing more than an expression of power to China (!!!)..And the Vietnam war? Oh that was also "needed" because the region had to be "stabilised"...

Just when it starts becoming obvious that the author is an apologist for some of the darker eras of the past century you come upon the more intriguing parts. Why cant the world be saved?

That, according to the author, is because aside of the west vast parts of the rest of the world and in particular Africa and -secondarily??- Asia are "not ready for democracy"!

Why? Because their populaces are illiterate and because they have a history of political violence and instability..See, it all is far too simple and if politics or, more importantly, history is not your forte it might even sound logical too.

It is strikingly obvious though that stating a result alone doesn't justify an explanation if you dont state the process that led to that result. If, for instance, you say that criminality rates are sky rocketing and then you advocate harsh measures for criminals without bothering to explain the sociological basis for such a development (i.e high unemployment, the erosion of the social bonds etc) you are stating half truths.

African societies have not, by some magical and mysterious reason, remained "uneducated" because they somehow tend towards disorder and chaos. Same goes for Asian societies as well.

Kaplan mentions not a single word about the the ongoing and very old in fact brutal exploitation of african and asian societies by the west.

Exactly how were these societies supposed to advance under the centuries-old colonial boot of Europe and later on by multinational companies

Minor detail according to the "Coming anarchy"...

What Kaplan professes is that these societies are not only not ready for democracy but they actually need brutal regimes in order to keep anarchy in check!! Hmm, i hadn't, for one, thought of that, i must admit.

And besides, the author goes on, dictatorships arent by definition "bad".
They have their purpose when the right timing is involved...

Kaplan ends up being an apologist for backing up dictatorships then (it's not that he denies it but he sees the "necessity" of it) and an apologist for those that were central figures behind such policies (Kissinger and Nixon for example and -wow- Metternich).

Further on he blames the victims, the "third world" societies, for the coming anarchy and concludes that "we" in the west are doing relatively ok but that the world isnt only made up of "us" and thus "we" have no total control over what is going to happen.

In reality noone of course has any "control" of what is going to happen, not in terms of fate, but it would be anyway over the top arrogant to consider us as a species "in control" of things to begin with.

But when it comes to sociological developments, to matters like war and peace (war can be good claims the author because without war there cant be any peace, a cold war motto in this case) one has to acknowledge every single piece of the puzzle and Kaplan very obviously does not care to do that. Judging from his book i assume he's actually perfectly aware of the reasons african and/or asian societies are in the state they are. But he he doesn't bother to mention it. This speaks volumes about where he's coming from.

I could go on and on as this book is filled from begining to end with such "facts".

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Can't see the forest for the trees
2/10

Kaplan's Coming Anarchy is one of the weakest books I've read, and now in my 3rd year of a Pol Sci Phd program, that's a lot of books. He is the Jenny Jones of literature, spotlighting all that is shocking yet meaningless.

This book is a collection of problems, yet he offers no theory of how all of these events are related, no theory behind this anarchy, and no explanation for where it is leading, except for a possibly racist suggestion that it is leading to a society like that in current-era West Africa.

Douglas Long

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a little spotty; surely Kaplan has done better
6/10

This book collects 9 essays by Kaplan, known for political realism and bold travel writing.


The first and last essays are the worst; the middle seven are not so bad.

In the first essay Kaplan argues that the present peace will not last long, that its "degeneration" in places like sub-Saharan Africa will lead to anarchy, with disturbing results even in the first world.

His main evidence is environmental change and resource depletion (especially soil and water, his argument would be stronger if he included oil). I don't know what golden age Kaplan is looking back to in sub-Saharan Africa (in Eastern Europe I guess it must be the Ottomans); so anarchy there will be no surprise.

But with grand assumptions and meager evidence, surely he has more than he cites, but he has to deal with apparently contrary evidence to be truly convincing, he declares breathtaking conclusions, such as the dissolution of the USA into ethnic warfare.

Perhaps he's right, but his analysis is so thin that he's not persuasive.

Yet there are moments of light, as when he describes the historical perspective of the occupants of Ankara's slums, quoting Naipaul.

Or when he analyzes the "lies of the mapmaker," more precisely the lies of the post-WWII statesmen who carelessly created the states defined by the lines on the map.

So many people naively believe that the 3rd world will inevitably become like the 1st; but Kaplan believes it will go the other way just as inevitably.

His first essay is a polemic for his belief. I'm sorry; it has little useful analysis or insight.

Reading the second essay, "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" is like stepping from darkness into light (of course there are still shadows). If you believe that democracy is always the best government, this essay will be challenging for you.

The third essay, "Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder," will be interesting for anyone interested in the causes and preventions of genocide and similar massive tragedies.

Let me skip around a bit, for it is no small irony that an author concerned with mass murder would write in defense of Henry Kissinger, yet that is the purpose of the seventh essay.

Kaplan defends a man who is perhaps American history's worst criminal against critics by systematically understating everything Kissinger did in Vietnam, Cambodia, (Kaplan doesn't mention Laos), Cyprus, Chile, (and he doesn't mention East Timor).

The fourth essay explains the need for special forces and institutions such as the CIA. He believes, and I agree, that these are the future of warfare.

The fifth essay is a review of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."
If you don't know why that's famous, Kaplan's essay might even inspire you to try reading it.

The eighth essay is another book review, this time of Conrad's "Nostromo."
Kaplan compares the book to "Heart of Darkness" and considers its application to the contemporary third world.

The sixth essay advocates "proportional" responses to foreign policy.

Few would argue with the vague philosophy Kaplan presents, except those who eagerly throw American troops into murky conflicts with unclear goals (Kissinger?).

Of course, practical applications and interpretations are the real problem.
Anyway, this essay is solid and concise.

With the ninth essay Kaplan descends again. Nostalgic for the Cold War and MAD, "the Cold War may have been as close to utopia as we are ever likely to get" p. 17, he wants to be sure that the US rather than the UN is the power of the future.

He is sure that the UN wouldn't have enough war, so it would be unprincipled.

I'm not making this up!

"The US should... take over the UN in order to make it a transparent multiplier of American and Western power.

That, of course, may not lead to peace, since others might resent it and fight as a result; but such action would fill the [UN]'s insipid ideological vacuum with at least someone's values, indeed ours. Peace should never be an expediency."
Whoa.

Of course he's right that peace won't last forever; he's right that we (whoever we are) should be prepared to protect ourselves from evil; he's right not to trust the UN unconditionally (don't trust anything unconditionally).

This was my first book by Kaplan. I'm going to read another.
Kaplan is relevant because he understands human ambition; he is wrong because he doesn't believe it can be channeled productively and peacefully. No one should ignore such a voice, but no one should read uncritically.

Wyote

---

3.0 out of 5 stars The World According To Robert D. Kaplan!
6/10


This is a book full of fascinating and absorbing essays portraying Robert Kaplan's insightful vision of a world suddenly full of frightening, endlessly fragmented, unstable and chaotic nations launching into violence and internal genocide at the drop of the proverbial hat.

So what has changed, Bobby, other than the fact that the balance of terror provided by a catastrophically expensive, wasteful, and useless Cold War that Kaplan aches nostalgically for since it provided some means of international stability? While everything Mr. Kaplan argues for is ostensibly true in the narrow sense, I have a problem with the fact that for all its flashes of insight and brilliance, his perspective is sadly lacking in any genuine insights in terms of a rational and progressive policy for righting what he rightly views is ailing the collective world at large.

Moreover, I suspect from these essays that like many neo-conservatives desperately searching for reasons and rationalizations to reignite the home fires now languishing so petulantly beneath the American arms industry, he neglects to mention how flagrantly the transnational corporations he often lectures to negatively influence the regional conflagrations he so conspicuously deplores.

In short, I fear the author doth protest too much; for all his urgent protestations, he seems more like a wolf dressed in wool baying like a sheep than an ardently sincere proponent of peace in our time.

Certainly ours is a much more dangerous and fractious world than it was before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. But it is a serious mistake to conclude that this is solely due to the lack of a continuing balance of terror that kept each opposing orbit of influence circling within tolerable political tolerances.

Instead, the circumstances represented by the momentous change the author refers to must be viewed in a better defined, developed, and articulated context, one recognizing that while we enjoy a enviable lifestyle while producing what most of the rest of the world wants and cannot find the means to afford, we also act to undermine their positions, as well.

For example, both the nation itself and the transnational corporations it serves also conspicuously withhold (for reasons of profit and advantage) humanitarian aid and support of the rest of the world's basic needs for such elementary supplies and services as pharmaceutical assistance for the third world tuberculosis epidemic, or control of HIV infections in Africa, or a more rational crop management system that doesn't ruthlessly exploit third world countries by condemning their leaders to grow cash crops for export to meet their World Bank payment obligations instead of allowing them to feed their burgeoning populations.

This is a hardly an enlightened, disinterested, or progressive way to aid and assist the emerging third world countries.

In short, far from being innocent observers of dangerous trends going on "out there' in Kaplan's sterile and superficially defined world of nation states, we need to integrate what we know about the way the world really works, not just in the notional and abstract political world discussed in foreign policy statements for public consumption.

Rather, we need one that recognizes the fact that nations often conduct foreign policy in service to their corporate sponsors' perceived interests, that the flag often follows commerce, that the profound social, economic, and political influence wielded with great purpose by the cynical, indifferent, and anonymous corporations who are in fact almost exclusively oriented and motivated by profit considerations affect what is going on in the world.

I agree with much of what Mr. Kaplan has to say in terms of individual statements about the dangerous, unpredictable, and provocative times we are moving into.

But I hardly believe it serves public discussion to voice these concerns so articulately only to then retreat to a silly and superficial set of notions about what the larger social, economic and political realities are or what an enlightened foreign policy would be to guard against these dangers.

It is a sweet but insubstantial confection, one that patently disregards the profound issues of corporate globalization and how it views its role in the unfolding drama the author addresses so interestingly.

Barron Laycock

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-cold war, the general belief was that we had seen the end of history and it would all be a global march towards harmonious neoliberal capitalism from hereon out. Journalist Robert Kaplan wasn’t so sure and pointed to the tragic realism of the past and suggested the present and future would proceed similarly. This 1994 essay collection from a time before internet ubiquity and 9/11 is an interesting time capsule and often shows how accurate his warnings were.

Potential sources of conflict that Kaplan identifies in the titular essay are the steep and continuing population growth in regions like Africa (a hotbed of tribal, religious and racial conflicts) where poverty, denuding resources and topsoil and climate change combine with disastrous results. Illiteracy and poor infrastructure combine to make any nascent democracies collapse under the weight of corruption and inept leadership.

He visits a shanty town in Turkey yet feels relatively safe due to the religious, secularist ideals of the time. They held a moral code without being too zealous against infidels. He is less optimistic about the rest of the Islamic world, nodding towards forthcoming extremism. Again, ecological constraints are key and he highlights the likelihood of water wars as Turkey control Iraq and Syria with their dams.

He saw Turkey’s conflicts with the Kurds as likely to become just as significant as Israel and Palestine. Little unity is to be found in these regions, just more tribal warfare.

Indeed, this year he revisited the essay with an article entitled Anarchy Unbound and he assesses his original contention that the real news story of the time was drought, ecological destruction and population growth in Africa.

He doubles down on that angle and says that the peace treaties, march towards democracy and cold war angst pale into insignificance compared to the need for healthy soil, water and the inevitability of ethnic division.

"Africa is now 18 per cent of the world population, it will rise to 26 per cent by 2050, and is projected to be almost 40 per cent by 2100. At the turn of the 21st century, Europe and Africa had roughly the same population. At the end of this century, there could be seven Africans for every European."

Democracy is unable to hold off these natural pressures.

Indeed, the countries of the Sahel region of Africa, which a recent coup in Niger threatens to unravel, are afflicted by the demons of water scarcity and abnormally high temperatures. Women give birth there an average of six times during their lifetimes. Over 40 per cent of Niger’s population lives in extreme poverty, with the result being high levels of forced migration, even as refugees stream over into Niger from conflicts in neighbouring countries.

Pakistan and Egypt are following the African Malthusian forces. All are countries that are full of young men, rampaging in slums as the deserts get drier and less productive.

The second essay asks if democracy was just a moment. This successor to Christianity relies on middle class literacy, low birthrates, the nature of its people, geography and economy. Sudan’s attempt at democracy begot anarchy, Russia was also unsuited to it while China seems to be strengthened by not being democratic; it is a largely homogenous society despite tribal conflicts with local elements such as the Uighurs.

Even Latin America’s attempts have been murky, perhaps only Eastern Europe was primed for democracy. After the shaking off of communism they had still had historical exposure to enlightenment values.

Kaplan vaunts Singapore as a nation that has done well. Strangely the metric he uses at this stage for grading success is GDP, which of course comes with significant ecological costs.

Model democracies like South Africa quickly descended into chaos. The country becoming one of the most dangerous places on Earth, ten private security guards employed for every one police officer. A collapsed state in need of firm authority.

Tragic realists like Thomas Hobbes prized a strong military and state. Security and control over the worst of human instincts. Some kind of hybrid of authoritarianism and democracy seems most realistic.

Corporations abuse their power within democracies but only they are placed to cater to such large and complex societies. No longer localised merchants, they will become a source of power in the future. Another very accurate prediction given our huge populations and consumerist lifestyles.

Meanwhile, life within the functional democracies is far from rewarding. Globalism made one city interchangeable with any other. People are made rootless consumer units and the internet networks would only come to intensify the erosion of community that computers were ushering in.

He opines the emptiness of our modern civilizations and their passive enjoyment for sport and the regional importing of athletes to entertain us. It is akin to the Bread and Circuses of Roman times. Gladiators in the colosseum.

"Since neither Tucson nor any other southwestern city with a big state university can find enough talent locally, he pointed out, community self-esteem becomes a matter of which city can find the largest number of talented blacks from far away to represent it.

We have become voyeurs and escapists. Many of us don’t play sports but love watching great athletes with great physical attributes. The fact that basketball and football and baseball have become big corporate business has only increased the popularity of spectator sports. Basketball in particular — so fluid, and with the players in revealing shorts and tank tops — provides the artificial excitement that mass existence “against instinct,” as the philosopher Bertrand Russell labeled our lives, requires."

Democracy might fade in the west as corporations project power and increase their global stranglehold. Liberals still believe government policy can help control corporations while conservatives are for smaller government but turn a blind eye to corporate power.

But isn’t it better that the voters are apathetic rather than fired up and militant? Perhaps this is a a sign of a best case society, posits Kaplan. The signs are poor however for apathetic, unhealthy, depressed democracies such as America. These are marks of a decaying civilization and with a large, complex population it may need to ditch its democratic dreams and create an authoritarian hybrid of its own.

The third essay predicted the future of foreign interventions by the USA. The arrogant belief in holding the truth of progress would prove to be important. Again this could be born out by the shaky grounds for invading Iraq and deposing an authoritarian strong man (Hussein) who held the region together. Similarly the retreat from Afghanistan that immediately saw Tailban rule restored. The Arab Spring revolts were no more successful in this regard, often the rebellions created worse outcomes and a lower quality of life.

The conviction is gaining ground that mass murder, like other deadly diseases, can be prevented by that remedy in which all bourgeois societies, ours above all, deposit their faith, Progress. In this case, progress in global public education: if only Americans spread our values and the international community holds spectacular tribunals of war criminals, then genocide might become a thing of the past. Such an approach is both noble and naive.

All situations are only likely to worsen with climate chaos and the urbanisation around earthquake and flood zones. We can see this reflected in daily news stories.

Kaplan saw that Americans don’t have much stomach for interventions in which Americans die without clearly defined goals of self-interest. So while preserving oil supplies make sense it would be unlikely that any invasions on humanitarian grounds would be welcomed. Any action would be covert and from the secret services to move with out technological climate.

He concludes that:

"Alas, protection against evil is surest when man is assumed to be wholly unimprovable. That is a dilemma that liberal internationalism, which subscribes to Progress, has never satisfactorily dealt with. The policy that best incorporates such a bleak view of humanity is “balance of power” — or, more precisely, balance-of-fear-and-intimidation. Because this is neither a new nor an interesting nor an inspiring idea, it is easily relegated when debate focuses on high-minded pursuits like preventing mass murder. But the balance of power is the sine qua non without which warding off genocide becomes impossible."

A hardened and well travelled war correspondent Kaplan feels that no book better exemplifies his experience than Edward Gibbon’s The History of The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. All the same patterns of decadence, tyranny and corruption are on display everywhere, not least in the USA.

"Gibbon’s certainty that the tendency toward strife is a natural consequence of the human condition — a natural consequence of the very variety of our racial, cultural, and economic experience, which no belief system, religious or otherwise, can overcome — is reminiscent of James Madison in The Federalist. Madison, too, was convinced that a state or an empire can endure only if it generally limits itself to adjudicating disputes among its peoples, and in so doing becomes an exemplar of patriotic virtue."

Proportional intervention will prove best. Aid for women’s literacy across the world is a prime method that is said to bring down birthrates. This is much more useful than a global call for democracy. Strongmen authoritarian leaders may be best to support when they keep the peace and hold regions together. The pessimistic view is often the most accurate.

In this pragmatic mindset Kaplan gives Henry Kissinger a reappraisal. A fellow tragic realist, he knew that searching out harmony would merely leave the peaceful nations subject to the aggression of the most malevolent renegades. He understood that an orchestrated network of fear is what maintains peace.

Kissinger rejected the disorder posed by revolutions and was willing to take some injustice and imperfection. This is because successful strategists are realists, which sits in opposition to the idealism of the media and such institutions. We should work within the individual limits of different regions instead of creating instability with doomed-to-fail pushes for democracy.

The philosopher John Gray has been heavily influenced by Kaplan’s work and both like to cite literature as a method of assessing the way humans think and behave. Another essay found here is regarding Josef Conrad’s Nostromo. He posits the importance of novels in saying the unsayable. Journalism meanwhile repeats idealist, acceptable talking points. Nostromo is a novel in which the gritty realities of imperfect compromise take place. Especially in the third world, a solid military is required to stave off chaos and you might have to work with criminals to maintain order.

Next the author ponders peace, he believes that only a tyranny can hold together different groups with different beliefs. War is impossible to end and attempts towards that end empower those who are most apt to use violence. There is little sense of history on display, Kaplan warns of the decadence that we display and often comes before violent outbursts of rebellion. We believe we deserve more than corruption and our fallible human leaders but the only alternative to this imperfect state of affairs is tyranny.

Indeed, particularly countries with large numbers of young men need to offer an overflow for the testosterone and rage. The violence will turn in on the society if those men aren’t given an active military to serve in. The illusions fostered within the United Nations offer no universal truths on how to create a peaceful society. Nor is much honesty displayed on the different ways different groups behave:

"Rather than a better version of humanity, a world body merely reflects the global elite as it is. Until recently, the U.N. has been, to a significant degree, strongly influenced by a Third World aristocracy, those whose families have acquired wealth and prestige in their own societies through various means, often unmeritocratic, often without having to pay income taxes. To this unmeritocratic elitism, add a northern European element that implicitly trusts bureaucracy — because its own historical experience has been within tight, uniethnic societies where the functionary is “the man next door.”

Kaplan warns us that any global unity in consensus on political correctness would be intensely suffocating. He foresaw a time when bureaucratic language would be used to crush “wrong” behaviour. We could be said to be living through this time of stifling speech put forth by elites in the anglophone world (if not globally). Similarly, with the United Nations and its preaching of a one size fits all drive for democracy.

The consensus between different groups is actually so low as to be meaningless, there is little common ground. More realistic is NATO with its shifting coalitions and honest divisions. This can be a solid way forward as it even leads countries to share their data and reconnaissance. The USA is the ideal central power of the UN in Kaplan’s view because it at least has some values to guide others with and can gain assistance for its goals.

Ultimately, peace has only been part of a cycle and is always broken by further violence. Human ingenuity always trails behind new problems, much to the chagrin of the techno optimists. He sees that we live within similar conditions that birthed the first World War, an extended period of peace after Napoleon. In the mid nineties NATO could be seen to be opening up new divisions and the populous was lost in trivial pursuits such as celebrity and award shows. This lack of wisdom and respect for experience makes us vulnerable during any relative time of peace.

Our leaders alas are forever stuck in short-termism and lack that sense of the tragic that only history teaches. Kaplan paints a concerning picture; ever shallower leaders and an ever shallower culture armed with modern jargon from social sciences but little background in the great philosophy. This lack of any wise people at the wheel makes it likely that a costly miscalculation will occur.

Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 realism has come to pass in many ways. He suggested that only during a period of struggle can we fortify our little slots of existence in a system grown lazy and flaccid. We can then take our place between the soldiers and the barbarians at the gate, restricted by a world of natural limits and ecological health concerns.

The Coming Anarchy makes for a refreshing read when compared to the fantasy idealism found elsewhere in the media. I highly recommend The Coming Anarchy and look forward to checking out the 2023 book The Tragic Mind for his latest musings on world events and possible futures.

[Joshua Pierson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kaplan surmises that the new world order rising out of the ashes of the cold war will be multipolar and focused on economic growth for a very small few. He uses Africa as a template to demonstrate that the nation-state system is dying and the rise of tribal affiliations is growing in significance. These affiliations will rise to challenge the current multipolar world order. The nations that are more well-off are moving like a car down a freeway passing everyone else that is not a part of the economic prosperity that is part of specific nation-states. This anarchy will force traditional nation-states to rethink their role in the world and how they react to low-intensity conflict.

[Ian Marten · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't get into it. A good book if you run on the platform of FEAR. Not for me.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is cold here, in the middle of the Tennessee mountains where I have come; Christmas vacation for my little boy with grandma and grandpa. The little houses are picture perfect, the mailman knows everybody’s name and the community center is full of old people singing Christmas carols and toasting hot chocolate. Christmas music tinkles everywhere, the mall is full of shoppers.

Little do we know, those of us for whom this hamlet is the whole world, that just beyond the fringes of our consciousness the anarchy came. Little do we know that the wars of the future are already here; fought in borderless ‘buffer zones’ in the third world over dusty patches of ground and desiccated lakes. Tribe, religion, diminishing natural resources; overpopulation and corruption and the collapse of government systems imposed by the technocrats designing for the third world the structures that mirror only what they know, places cold and clean and kind – though they do not know why. Theirs is not history, it is only a vague recognition of how things are, not how they got there: “the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere,” as if that was what brought the prosperity, as Jose Ortega y Gasset once wrote.

“The Coming Anarchy” by Robert D. Kaplan is about this. It is a book, written 25 years ago, about what would happen in our post-Cold War world if we as the great superpower, the ‘winner’, did not make policy prescriptions with a dose of humility and realism. The book was written as a warning, a warning which alas went unheeded as we have plunged headlong into mistake after mistake product of hubris and an all-pervading anti-culture which caused us to think of all people as the same. That geography and culture and language do not matter; if only they correctly apply the “packages” designed for them by we the victors. The book is a desperate plea for “progressive conservatism”; for the understanding that rapid change is dangerous and revolutions always bring more harm than they allay.

It is a clarion’s call for an adult foreign policy.

There is much I appreciate about this book. It is rich with understanding that we who live on this wide planet have different cultures and traditions and beliefs. It eloquently captures Kaplan’s critical eye regarding imposed democracy and how foreign assistance can unbalance local communities by empowering the wrong people or introducing a resource too good to pass up which causes conflict (anybody see “The Gods Must Be Crazy”?). And I love his shout out to literature. “Literature, alas, may be the only salvation for the policy elite, because in the guise of fiction a writer can more easily tell the truth.” This after all is why I write fiction.

Finally I don’t think that it is a mystery why Kaplan chose to end his masterful book with Jose Ortega y Gasset. The ‘mass man’, brutally efficient in his technocracy, the absolute master of his miniscule domain who knows (nor cares to know) nothing outside of it; the historyless, cultureless, pastless, futureless entity who can code a computer to perfection or always produce winning returns on your 401k portfolio but cannot tell you which nation played host to the first official Christian religion or why the First World War was far more devastating than the Second. That man is destroying our world. His ignorance, his utopianism, his naïve anti-culture in which the world is ‘progressing’ towards a perfect peaceful supervised society; a broad global cul-de-sac from Marrakech to Mumbai which mirrors his own neat little house in a Portland suburb and where his brief forays into the ‘otherness’ are only to reinforce the world’s pressing need to forget too their pasts and their futures and embrace the constant pleasant comfort of now. This is the man who has prepared the world for “The Coming Anarchy”; an anarchy which has already arrived.

[Smiley III · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course we're still in Bush/CHENEY — that's why Obama was allowed to HAPPEN, and also wasn't but a plink in the BUCKET!!!

😉 👍👍👍 #YEAH

(Here, here's some stuff from a book published in 2000 and from articles that had been published in The ATLANTIC and other places, going back to 1990 and such ... The World is Real:)

It is time to understand "the environment" for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pol lution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh-developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts-will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War.

And:

As Iran has shown, Islamic extremism is the psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized peasants threatened with the loss of traditions in pseudomodern cities where their values are under attack, where basic services like water and electricity are unavailable, and where they are assaulted by a physically unhealthy environment. The American ethnologist and Orientalist Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam "has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period." Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message, Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one religion that is prepared to fight.

So.

Thanks to someone who put this in a Portland "free" box for me ... !!! I never would have HEARD of it otherwise ... !!!

😉

👍👍👍

#YEAH

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Coming Anarchy" was published 20 years ago as a warning about what the future held in the post-Cold War era, so I thought it would be interesting to read it now and see how accurate Robert Kaplan was in looking into the future. While I don't agree with some of the points that he makes and not everything in the book turned out to be accurate, the vast majority of it actually did. Kaplan was trying to show that the end of the Cold War would not, as many people believed in the 1990s, lead to a better, more democratic world. He still argued that the fall of Communism was a great thing, but he insisted many other problems remained and would grow worse. It was downright eerie reading some of the passages in the book as Kaplan, 20 years ago, described what much of what is currently going on in the world. He was spot on with warnings about the predictable failure of attempts to impose democracy on 3rd world countries, the decline of democracy in first world nations, the growing problem of misinformation, the continual rise of international corporate power, the growing role of environmental issues in international conflict, and the growth of cultural conflict and social disorder around the world. Kaplan did seem to underplay the importance of climate change, but in fairness we did not know as much about it in the year 2000 as we do today. Some of his most insightful analysis occured around the issue of peace. He convincingly linked the long period free from world war that we have enjoyed since 1945 to many of the problems the world is having today. The benefits of peace are obvious, but scholars rarely consider that our very success in preventing war for a long time can and have led to problems which push the world towards dangerous future conflicts. Overall, "The Coming Anarchy" is well worth a read, even 20 years after its publication.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a prescient gem of a book.

This was such a prescient gem of a book. Short yet dense. Brutally honest yet controversial. Ahead of its time considering how 2019 turned out to be.

This is one of those books where I could see myself revisiting and referencing it over time. I could see many being triggered by his assessments, namely starry-eyed progressives and bloodthirsty neocons. Two groups I’m not particularly fond of.

I’m convinced books like this will be viewed as contraband in the near future because of the “dangerous wrongthink” contained within these pages. There have to be college-level political science departments run by Far Leftists who’ve already removed Kaplan from their syllabi, that is, if he wasn’t banished already.

More people of all political persuasions should read this book. Kaplan illustrates the world as it is and will be. He ended up not being too far off the mark. I count his climate change and neo-Malthusian musings to be among his most prevalent inaccuracies. Otherwise, he’s correct about the folly of democracies, the wisdom of autocracy, the dangers of anyone preaching permanent peace, the truth contained in demographics/race/culture and more.

The chapter on Nostromo was so good I felt I had read Conrad’s book myself. I enjoyed the Kissinger/Metternich chapter too, considering I had recently finished Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon biography, it added some meat to my understanding of diplomacy, both then and now. Whether or not his thesis on Kissinger is correct, it’s certainly more than plausible that a show of brutal force in one conflict would be used as a demonstration of toughness in other areas.

Read this book. It’s short and makes for a delightful meal your mind won’t regret.

[Skip Unger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little late reading this influential collection of essays published just before 9/11. But it's often been highlighted as a fundamental text of interational relations after Fukuyam's End of History and Huntington's Clash of Civilization. Overall an interesting and engaging read of 9 essays focused on promulgating the realpolitik version of the changing international environment of the 21ist century. There is a long tradition of internationalists vs realists in U.S. foreign policy and this book falls into the extreme side of the realists. Pros: great discussion the realism of Kissinger and Metternich; useful descriptions of aspects of the post-Cold War environment. Cons: claims/text not footnoted or supported by cited academic sources; author tends to to make extremely large assumptions that because X exists then condition Z must be true; super dark and pessimistic to to the point of advocating war, assassinations and perpetual conflict and casting doubt on the usefulness of democracy. Overall a solid primer for those seeking to understand the uber-realistic view of foriegn policy.

[P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely helpful book in regard to better understanding the current situation. Takes us well beyond the current fractures in the United States to a much bigger picture of what is actually happening. Once this is understood, we, I think, are much better able to come to some kind of acceptance of reality as it now is, as opposed to the cultural myths that bind us. "Consciousness-raising" is not an exaggeration if you have not been exposed to understanding who/what is really behind the screen, in this precious land we used to call "Oz." We are not in Kansas anymore, if indeed, the geopolitical division of land into subdivisions of a nation state ever helped us, it doesn't help us now. Well worth finding out why and this book gets it done. It is a lot to digest, but then the truth, she is vast and sometimes filled with hard pain, no?

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I initially read this in the late 90s after coming home from two years in the Peace Corps in central Africa. I felt that Kaplan was one of the few American journalists/writers who "got it" in terms of what was going on in sub-Saharan Africa. The main title of the book was a long-form piece originally published in The Atlantic in 1994. The other chapters are articles on democracy, foreign policy, the legacy of Kissinger, the dangers of peace (insight: for peace to work, you must have struggle), and more. To think that this policy-wonkish book was published for the mainstream already says something about how Kaplan struck a nerve or, at least, sparked interest in the newly minted 24-hour news cycle on cable TV and on the nascent internet.

Nobody can predict the future. Kaplan tried to explain present-day 1990s and what may be coming: anarchy due to environmental upheaval, idealogical (religious and ethnic) conflict, economic inequities, regional wars, and more. You could argue that world history always had these tensions (save for environmental upheaval, which is relatively new), yet Kaplan brings them into stark yet considered terms that go beyond the two-minute soundbite or the front-page photo op.

He wasn't too far off in terms of what actually came after the 90s, but little did he, or us, know about 9/11, the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and the US, the schisms created by the internet and social media, and on and on.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a question of causes and effects here. When I first read The Coming Anarchy during my senior thesis prep work in college, I thought it prescient. Now, 11 years later, I have come to wonder how much these essays predicted the widening gyre of domestic and international political relations, and how much they abetted that same clannish drifting. Either way, the essays are worth reading, for a neo-Malthusian's well articulated take on the present and future of our world. If thinking like his has affected the behavior of mainstream politicians, if the politics of scarcity have forced ever greater deprivations on the societies political systems are intended to serve, it is worth looking at how the arguments for austerity, for callous proportionality, and for pessimism are framed.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a great book. I thought it was going to be more about anarchy as a political theory, as opposed to "anarchy" in the "scary chaos and crime" sense. To his credit, Kaplan writes from a career of deep experience reporting on global politics. Kaplan demonstrates knowledge and at times prescience, but he is fundamentally uncritical of neoliberalism and Henry Kissinger's "realist" approach to foreign policy. The coup de grace of the book is an essay about how war is better than peace because citizens in peacetime will have an easier time criticizing governments and reducing standing armies. It would appear that Kaplan has reported on authoritarian regimes for so long that he has come to identify with them.

[reesebilledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stand out chapters)
Special Intelligence
The dangers of peace
Proportionalism
The coming anarchy
Was democracy just a moment

This book gave me so many new things to think about. While I spent a lot of the book alongside a dictionary, the overall points shone through, and Kaplans realistic view of democracy can be understood. This book does a great job of combining journalism with research of how nations historically rise and fall. Kaplan ties in old literature and new predictions to show the ways in which the future world will be the most grim. Considering this book was written in 1994, it is quite impressive how many of his predictions have been proven correct with time and is a true testament to the caliber of Kaplan’s quality writing.

[Blaine Welgraven · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Before the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power."--Hobbes, Leviathan.

With this quote, Kaplan kicks off nine largely pessimistic essays--written between 1994 and 1999--all firmly steeped in the realist tradition of Hobbes, Niebuhr, and Morgenthau. While some of Kaplan's arguments have proven overstated with time (e.g., "The Coming Anarchy's" Malthusian concerns), Kaplan's observations on such topics as democracy's value neutrality, foreign intervention, tribalism, and the "the tragedy of peace" all display remarkable clairvoyance, and remain deeply relevant to the 21st century world. Highly recommend.

[Kyle Mccloskey · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are certainly interesting ideas in this, particularly given the state of the world as of my reading of the book (July 2025- may this review be a turning point and not a time capsule). Elements of the "Was Democracy a Moment?" essay feel particularly pertinent given the status of the US and other democracies around the world. At the same time, I'm not sure I need an essay reassessing and rehabilitating the life and work of Henry Kissinger. But it was still enlightening to read something published back in 2000, pre-9/11, that managed to see a larger trajectory of the west and of democracies.

[Shashank Goyal · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books where Environmental Determinism is shoved down your throat at several instances. I would like to disagree with the author when he bears a pessimistic view of several countries ofcourse having the benefit of the hindsight. He does however says, “I hope my pessimism is a foundation for prudence”. The author correctly predicts neo-authoritarianism as an emerging model for democracy.

Reading Kaplan always feels nice because of it’s literary brilliance, invoking thought processes and absence of political correctness.

[Ted Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

In many ways, Kaplan prophetically predicts many of the major international conflicts that are happening today. He was right about a Turkish invasion to wipe out the Kurds in Syria, he was right about the collapse of many young democracies in Africa, and the rise of nationalism across Europe. For a realist, I applaud Kaplan's analysis and accounting for cultural, religious, and ethnic identity issues in his arguments.

[Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published 20 years ago and containing essays written several years prior to that, this book is remarkably prescient in its prognostications about the future. As I have been reading this and following the daily news I am amazed at his insights - it often seemed that he was reporting on today’s events. An updated and re-released version would be most desirable; but even so, to anyone who hasn’t read this version I would urge them to do so.

[Maureen Flynn-Burhoe]

September 26, 2007 Hi Jeff, I took out a library book by Robert D. Kaplan called The Coming Anarchy. It is a disturbing look into the way some think. He romanticizes the lives of soldiers and believes peace would not be beneficial to humanity. He thinks we need war to keep us 'civilized.' I'd like to know what you think of his writing. I've started a Google Doc and I'll send it to you with some links.

[Christopher Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book deserves a great deal of credit for (1) effectively predicting the failures of the attempts to instate democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, (2) explaining that democracy is not the best option anyway in many Third World settings, and (3) making a very thoughtful case in favor of the realist school of foreign policy. Lively and insightful.