Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis is a remarkable book. Robert Kaplan twice made Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers and Waste Land is recommended as a Financial Times Book to Read in 2025. Among those praising Kaplan as one of the truly masterful observers and great geopolitical thinkers of our time are Gen David Petraeus, US Army (Ret.), former commander of the surge in Iraq, and James Stavridis USN (Ret), 16th Supreme Allied Commander of Nato. The ideas in this book, therefore, are likely to hold weight at the highest levels in US foreign policy and the military. That is remarkable.
Kaplan begins by arguing that the Weimar Republic, which preceded Hitler’s rise to power, is an accurate metaphor for the current geopolitical state of the world. Weimar, in Kaplan’s telling, was “a candy-coated horror tale”, a vacuum of power that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. Such a dangerous vacuum is now the reality of our geopolitical moment, making Weimar’s chaos-without-order newly pertinent.
The signs of that chaos are everywhere to be seen – in the left-wing mobs rioting after the murder of George Floyd, the ascendance of youth over the wisdom of age (with its memory of culture and tradition) in the liberal media that seeks to silence freedom of speech, and in modern art which (apparently) signals the centuries-long decline of the West.
The perilous state of the contemporary world can be seen above all in its cosmopolitanism, which was the focus of the Eliot poem that gives Kaplan’s book its title. “Eliot’s poem,” Kaplan writes, was about the “breakdown of forms”, “the intermingling of epochs, languages and traditions and the destruction of unitary cultures that had been rooted in soil.”
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D Kaplan - An alarmingly influential book
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This lamentable state of contemporary affairs prompts Kaplan to yearn for the order of the past. For the “moral example” of kings and queens, for example, whose “aesthetic, emotional and numinous power” stabilised vast portions of Earth for millenniums. And for the restoration of American hegemony. Nobody, he writes, “can deny that the American empire from the close of World War II to the early 21st century has been grand, in terms of preserving a semblance of world order”.
Kaplan’s world view is firmly rooted in the security doctrine of realism, the principles of which he clearly reiterates. realism is based on the premise that international politics is characterised by a “state of war”, that international order must ultimately be based on power, and that it is naive to believe otherwise. “Man has such a propensity for violence,” Kaplan asserts, “that it actually required hydrogen bombs to keep him at least temporarily at bay”. In the current world of vast inequality between countries, the accelerating impacts of climate change, and the reality of mass migrations, “the poorest countries simply cannot be at peace”.
Kaplan concludes, quoting scholar of international relations Colin Gray, that while both “optimism and pessimism can be perilous attitudes”, “optimism is apt to kill with greater certainty”.
Although it never states so explicitly, Waste Land strongly suggests that, given such realities, the only option is to rely on force for self-defence, ally with authoritarian regimes for one’s own purposes (right-wing regimes are preferable to left-wing ones, since the latter are liable to seek to upset the status quo) and above all defend against anarchy (presumably arising from the left, youth, modern art and cosmopolitanism).
There is little reason to doubt Kaplan’s starting point, that “there is the raw material in today’s world that can force a true cataclysm”. But it is another thing entirely to retreat into the stark pessimism he offers and accept the realist security doctrine that results.
Waste Land does not mention the liberal strand of geopolitical theory, which stands in stark contrast to realism. Liberal theories of international order insist there exists a firm possibility of a state of peace between states. By focusing on protecting the rights of their citizens and on commerce and international trade, such theories argue, liberal states can move away from antagonism and war. And, as Kant believed, through a slow process of evolution, authoritarian states can become republican governments and establish among themselves a “pacific union”, offering the prospect of a perpetual and universal peace. Such reimagining of the world order is dismissed by realists, of course, as fantasy.
Although Kaplan opposes Trump throughout the book, the worldview in Waste Land is in alignment with the roadmap that the incoming president is likely to follow. Trump is poised to enact his agenda of remaking the world on the basis of power, force and transactional relationships, favouring authoritarian states over democratic allies. The urgent need to overcome Kaplan’s paralysing fear of disorder and instead imagine a better world is set to become even more glaringly apparent.
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Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
