An urgent exploration of a world in constant crisis where every regional disaster threatens to
become a global conflict with lessons from history that can stop the spiral—from the New York
Times bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography “Compelling and helpful . . . Kaplan’s
analysis has enormous implications for U.S. strategy abroad. . . . His conclusion is the only
right one.”—John Bolton The Wall Street Journal One of Financial Times ’ Most Important
Books to Read This Year • One of Foreign Policy ’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year We are
entering a new era of global cataclysm in which the world faces a deadly mix of war climate
change great power rivalry rapid technological advancement the end of both monarchy and
empire and countless other dangers. In Waste Land Robert D. Kaplan geopolitical expert and
author of more than twenty books on world affairs incisively explains how we got here and
where we are going. Kaplan makes a novel argument that the current geopolitical landscape must
be considered alongside contemporary social phenomena such as urbanization and digital news
media grounding his ideas in foundational modern works of philosophy politics and literature
including the poem from which the title is borrowed and celebrating a canon of traditionally
conservative thinkers including Alexander Solzhenitsyn Jeane Kirkpatrick and many others.
As in many of his books Kaplan looks to history and literature to inform the present drawing
particular comparisons between today's challenges and the Weimar Republic the post-World War I
democratic German government that fell to Nazism in the 1930s. Just as in Weimar which faced
myriad crises inextricably bound up with global systems the singular dilemmas of the
twenty-first century—pandemic disease recession mass migration the destabilizing effects of
large-scale democracy and great power conflicts and the intimate bonds created by
technology—mean that every disaster in one country has the potential to become a global crisis
too. According to Kaplan the solutions lie in prioritizing order in governing systems arguing
that stability and historic liberalism rather than mass democracy per se will save global
populations from an anarchic future. Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined
by the connections afforded by technology but with remarkable parallels to the past. Just as it
did in Weimar Kaplan fears the situation may be spiraling out of our control—unless our
leaders act first.
