In a world coming together along new geo-political fault lines and falling apart at old ones, few people are as equipped to comment on the political realities of our planet as travel writers, and few such writers are as reputed and reviled as Robert Kaplan.
After spending most of the 1990s wandering through Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Kaplan released two of the post-Cold War era's most influential books, Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth. His chilling accounts of simmering ethnic hatreds, religious fundamentalism and inhuman squalor seemed clairvoyant to readers who, but a few years later, witnessed bloody conflicts erupt in Bosnia and Sierra Leone and tumultuous upheavals in Pakistan and Cambodia.
In his latest release, titled The Coming Anarchy, Kaplan collects nine articles published during the last decade, offering more theory and analysis than the reporting for which he earned his reputation. The pieces present a compelling and often haunting realpolitik vision of what our world may soon become.
The articles address a variety of topics: the place of idealism in directing foreign policy, the global prospects for democracy, the emergence of new specialized intelligence services and the dangers of complacency during extended periods of peace. Throughout the essays, Kaplan applies his trademark realism, which he claims resonates with "the military and intelligence communities, where accountability is based less on false displays of idealism than on the ability to pinpoint trouble spots a few years down the road."
And the "trouble spots," according to Kaplan, are numerous. Though the book as a whole does not embrace one single theme, it does, however, produce a patchwork image of a rapidly bifurcating world in which the haves, read the US, Canada, Europe and Pacific Rim countries, are eclipsing the have-nots in human development at a rate that may undermine global security.
From Nigeria and Mali, to China and Indonesia, Kaplan points to the environmental devastation, ethnic tension, poverty and political instability that are forming powder kegs for conflicts that may be larger than the UN can, or will be willing to handle. To address the grave dangers that these countries or regions represent, Kaplan espouses a doctrine of "proportionalism," in which the US applies aid in doses commensurate to the given country's strategic importance and the likelihood of success of a given program. "Proportionalism is anathema to moral and ideological purists. It tempers implacable principle with common sense," writes Kaplan.
As primarily essays on theory, however, The Coming Anarchy strays into academic territory where Kaplan's brilliance in travel observations is at times overshadowed by the alarmingly wide brush used in painting his grim picture of the world. Readers may be left rolling their eyes at sweeping generalizations like the following: "It [Islam] is the one religion that is prepared to fight [sic]."
Kaplan's regular commentary on issues in America, the focus of a third book released in the 1990's, titled An Empire Wilderness -- The United States, is equally careless. Pointing to trends of inner city crime, walled communities, mind-numbing commercialism and the preeminence of entertainment in the place of social debate, Kaplan attempts to suggest the US is walking the same path toward potential national ruin in the same way some West African countries are imploding. Without a doubt, the US has serious problems. But famine, irreparable environmental damage, and the constant threat of civil war are certainly not among them.
The occasional tendency to take his points too far, however, does not deter from the greater body of work. The strongest points are made in the book's second essay, "Was Democracy Just a Moment," originally published in 1997, in which Kaplan delivers a scathing indictment of the US' crusade to export democracy to Haiti and other states where the lack of a substantial middle class, ethnic tension and low education levels condemn populations to an inevitable downward spiral into chaos. The author instead holds up so-called "hybrid regimes" with open markets and authoritarian governments, such as China under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, as preferable models for countries where democracy, in his view, stands little chance of surviving. It was unreasonable, Kaplan says, "to put a gun to the head of the peoples of the developing world and say, in effect 'Behave as if you have experienced the Western Enlightenment to the degree that Poland and the Czech Republic did."
A decade into the post-Cold War era, we are rapidly learning that the new world order is shaping up much more in line with Kaplan's disturbing vision than, for example Francis Fukuyama's starry-eyed prediction of the end of history. The Coming Anarchy, by laying bare the "uncomfortable truths" of our times, solidifies Kaplan's position as one of the leading voices on international relations.
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