The American writer Robert D. Kaplan has been serving up elegant, unstinting and often prescient prose about the bleak realities of the world for going on four decades, and his new book Waste Land may be his grimmest yet. It is certainly among his most urgent, important and deeply informed.
A former freelance correspondent, Kaplan first made his name in the mid-nineties with To the Ends of the Earth, a harrowing travelogue that recounted journeys from malarial West Africa through a Middle East with oil but little water, a recently independent but already lawless Central Asia and a Southeast Asia modernising at speed.
In that absorbing book, he depicted a hellish world of resource scarcity, over-population and weak and/or criminalised government administration. He was among the first to predict that climate change and mineral resources would emerge as dominant twenty-first-century foreign policy concerns.
Some among the foreign policy cognoscenti pooh-poohed his observations as doom-mongering: after all, these were the breezily optimistic 1990s — “the end of history” as theorist Francis Fukuyama famously put it. The United States was a unipolar power and democracy was spreading inexorably and permanently across the globe, even to Russia. Inter-state war, it was thought, had been put behind us. Thirty years on from publication, we have a better sense of who saw the future more lucidly.
Kaplan’s output is prodigious. All told he has written more than twenty books that blend far-reaching travel with deep reading and an appreciation for history. A filament that runs throughout his books is geographical and demographic determinism. Physical environment, location and population trajectories shape why countries and regions are the way they are. Kaplan is a conservative in a Burkean sense; he has seen enough in his travels to alert him to the flaws in the human condition and to be sceptical of grand schemes, diplomatic pronouncements and oft-times democracy itself.
He also has a rare trait among public analysts: he admits when he is wrong. In one recent book, he wrote about how completely mistaken he was to cheerlead the American invasion of Iraq. In another, he writes of despair at how US president Bill Clinton drew the wrong conclusion from one of his earlier books, Balkan Ghosts — so much so that Clinton thought for years that intervention in that region was pointless. Kaplan didn’t blame Clinton but rather reproached himself as a writer for muddying his argument.
Now in his seventies, Kaplan is still writing publishing a book a year. His explorations these days are now more literary, relying less on on boneshaking buses or flying deathtraps and more on extraordinarily wide and capacious reading. He has transitioned in status too, from the shoestring journalist he was when he wrote To the Ends of the Earth into a foreign policy eminence.
But proximity to power has not blunted his propensity to pen piquant truths, a trait that is on full display in Waste Land. It is a short book — fewer than two hundred pages of text divided into three chapters — looking at the broad social, political and technological forces that created this claustrophobic, chaotic and nervy world.
Kaplan’s starting point is the baleful history of the Weimar republic, the political arrangement that emerged in Germany after the First World War and ended with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor. “Before two months has passed, [after his elevation] all traces of democracy had been extinguished.” For Kaplan the cautionary tale lies in the naivety of Weimar’s construction. The German intelligentsia were anxious to not have more autocrats of the old order like the Kaiser and Bismarck, but the democratic system they designed did much more harm than good, proving so anaemic, crisis-ridden and disordered that nothing got done.
“It was truly a permanent crisis, with one breathless series of headlines following another,” Kaplan writes. “The public and politicians both were caught up in the moment, in all its intensity, unable to concentrate on what might come next because the present was so overwhelming.” Those sentences seem eerily apropos today.
For Kaplan, Weimar is the ultimate metaphor for “political vacuums and disorganisation,” and he shows that these are two principal features of the world as it is today, a state of affairs hypercharged by constant communication, where population pressures meet depleting resources while workers scramble for jobs. He lauds the potential of AI in science and medicine but dreads its effects on the societal fabric, social media having given us a preview of how it can tear that fabric asunder.
His companions are a diverse cast of writers. He delves into the work of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Paul Theroux, niche urban theorists, philosophers and military strategists, a Bulgarian literary critic and the fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. Naturally, T.S. Eliot appears too, Kaplan’s title a homage to his powerful poem about societal breakdown and anomie.
For all their differences in style and acclaim, many of Kaplan’s authorial companions share some of his history. They are outside the system, frequently dismissed as naysayers yet, in his estimation, proven correct in their judgements in the fullness of time. Kaplan admires those who call the world they was they see it.
Undergirding this sense of uncertainty is his belief that the world’s three major powers, the United States, Russia and China, are each in their own unique periods of aggressive and dangerous decline, just as surely as were the old powers prior to the First World War. Much of this deterioration is of their own making: “all three great powers have produced leaders with a death wish… [T]he more concentrated and unchallenged their individual power the greater their proclivity to do real damage… worldwide.” Two have authored their own downfall by initiating catastrophic wars, the United States in Iraq and Russians in Ukraine.
Kaplan is morose about his own country; it functioned well in what he calls “the print-and-typewriter age of his childhood” but is tearing itself apart in the hyper-partisan distrustfulness of the digital media age. The review copy of the book I read was date-stamped mid-October and it is hard to imagine he’d be any more sanguine since the return of Donald Trump, a man he damns as “the epitome of self-centered, emotional impulses [that] is impossible to imagine outside of a digital-video world.”
Russia, he believes is even more deeply in an “advanced state of rot,” deformed and hollowed out by a succession of tyrannies. His grim prognosis about China surprised me given the consensus-cum-fear that China’s providence is to supplant the United States as the world’s major power. Kaplan’s view is shaped by a combination of two factors that infuse much of his books, the role of demography and the almost Shakespearean tragedy of political leaders not fit for the moment. China’s population is shrinking and Xi Jinping is too intemperate, too psychologically brittle and too closed off from advice. It tells you all you need to know about Kaplan’s disposition that he hankers for the rule of Deng Xiaoping.
Anyone looking for easy or indeed any answers here is going to be disappointed. But maybe that’s the point. This erudite man knows that “history grants no easy solutions.” His goal is to write in a way that will leave no one in any doubt about the challenges in our midst. As I was reading the book, the public version of the Australian’s Independent Intelligence Review was published; its bleak findings about our “contested, fragmented and volatile” region chime eerily with those of Kaplan. I dread to think what is in the classified version.
Waste Land made me reflect on the passage of time. Kaplan began his career almost in a different age — in early books he talks about snail-mailing his articles and receiving payment cheques via post-restante, a phrase now almost obsolete. Now, we are less in an age of words than an age of short video-clips, the equivalent of Eliot’s “heap of broken images.”
In a book perfectly timed for our miserable moment, Kaplan shows why well-chosen words, slow-thinking and appreciation of history matter still. By illuminating our plight so clearly, Kaplan also gives us glimpses of how we can find our way out. •
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis
By Robert D. Kaplan | Hurst | £20 | 244 pages
