Waste Land
A World in Permanent Crisis
A darkly brilliant, wide-angled vision of our chaotic, globalised world, where present crises resonate with past tyrannies – from a bestselling geopolitical expert.
We are entering a new era of global cataclysm; a deadly mix of war, climate change, great-power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, and the end of empire. In Waste Land, renowned world affairs author Robert D. Kaplan explains incisively how we got here and where we are going.
Kaplan’s trademark sweep of history, literature, politics and philosophy draws parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic. Today, too, every national disaster could spread across the world, given this century’s singular dilemmas – pandemics, recessions; urbanisation, mass migration; destabilisation under large-scale democracy and great-power conflict; and the intimate bonds forged by digital media. Could stability and historic liberalism, rather than mass democracy per se, save world populations from anarchic breakdown?
Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by twenty-first–century technology, but remarkably resonant with the past. The situation may be spiralling out of our control – unless our leaders act first.
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty three books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Loom of Time, Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. Foreign Policy twice named him one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers.
