Kaplan - The coming anarchy: shattering the dreams of the post Cold War

Well written and filled with troubling truths.

The Boston Globe

Highly engaging. [Kaplan] comfortably blends academic references with the observations of a journalist reporting on travel. Never less than provocative. [H]e makes the reader think hard thoughts when we would all rather dream.

Rocky Mountain News

Kaplan is a knowledgeable and forceful polemicist who mixes the attributes of journalist and visionary.

The New York Times

The glaring global reality, as the new millennium begins, is not that we are becoming like the Third World but rather that they have so little chance of becoming like us. This is a tragic and perhaps a dangerous circumstance, and, as it happens, over the past 10 years nothing has done more to bring it to the attention of those lucky enough to live in North America than the reporting of Robert Kaplan.

The Washington Post Book World

[Kaplan] has read widely and writes superbly. Even if you shake your head at his extreme prognostications, you may catch yourself fearing that he is right.

The Baltimore Sun

Thoughtful pessimists in the tradition of Hobbes, Conrad, Gibbon, and de Tocqueville will love this, and Kofi Annan will hate it. Kaplan careens through the comfortable and popular assumptions that peace and democracy, marching hand in hand, are leading us into an ever rosier future and scatters sacred cows right and left. Fascinating. Discomforting. Bracing.

R. James Woolsey, former director of the CIA

[Kaplan] has found himself a large and sometimes powerful audience, and he is determined to convey some very practical, big-picture warnings to the more efficacious members of that audience before they get us all into terrible trouble. We should pay close attention.

The New York Times Book Review

Filled with penetrating insight into the grim realities of todays world. Kaplan vividly describes conflicts and contradictions which too many policy makers and scholars attempt to ignore.

Samuel P. Huntington, author of
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Controversial but acute analysis of near-term Third World trends.

Booklist

A brilliant and disturbing manifesto, a wake-up call to those who think our post-Cold War prosperity will last forever. Its impossible not to take Robert Kaplans dire warning seriously.

Douglas Brinkley, director of The Eisenhower Center

At a time when so much serious writing is diseased with self-importance and leprous with footnotes, Kaplan never writes to impress us with his knowledgehe writes because knowledge is a joy to him and he is eager to share the pleasure. With a vivacity absent in writers who confuse quantity of data with quality of thought, he takes on the intelligence world, sugar-coated idealism, and Henry Kissinger. [He is] an American original at a time when few other originals write anything but software. Kaplan has a track record the rest of us can only envy. Let theory rot in campus libraries. This is reality.

Parameters

Robert Kaplan brings the eye of a journalist and the rigor of a philosopher to the task of explaining how tomorrows world will emerge from todays. At a time when all too many leaders and thinkers are entranced by visions of perpetual peace and utopian prosperity, Kaplan reminds us that while countries can succeed or fail at power politics, none can afford to ignore its imperative.

Michael Lind, author of Vietnam: The Necessary War

A refreshing corrective to the dogma of globalization. It is precisely the impossibility of pigeon-holing Kaplan and his work that makes his writing such fascinating reading.

Misha Glenny, The National Post (Toronto)

ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of eight books on travel and foreign affairs, which have been translated into a dozen languages. His bestseller Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the nine best books of 1993 and by Amazon.com as one of the top ten travel books of all time. An Empire Wilderness and The Ends of the Earth were also national bestsellers; the former was chosen by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of their best books of the year and the latter was named a notable book by The New York Times. A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Kaplan was also a consultant to the U.S. Armys Special Forces Regiment. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

An Empire Wilderness:
Travels Into Americas Future

The Ends of the Earth:
From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia
A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

The Arabists:
The Romance of an American Elite

Balkan Ghosts:
A Journey Through History

Soldiers of God:
With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan

Surrender or Starve:
The Wars Behind the Famine

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2001

Copyright2000 by Robert D. Kaplan

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All of the essays in this work were originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly except as follows:
Conrads Nostromo and the Third World was originally
published in The National Interest.
The Dangers of Peace was originally published in the Random
House hardcover edition of this book.
Idealism Wont Stop Mass Murder was originally published in the
November 14, 1997, issue of The Wall Street Journal.
Copyright 1997 by Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Kaplan, Robert D.
The coming anarchy : shattering the dreams of the post
Cold War / Robert D. Kaplan.
p. cm.
1. World Politics1989 2. Post-communism. I. Title.
D860.K353 2000
909.829dc21 99-41034

eISBN: 978-1-4000-3303-4

Author photograph Jerry Bauer

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

T O E DIT B ORNSTEIN ,
A VNER G OREN ,
R ICHARD L OBELL ,
R ICHARD AND V ARDA N OWITZ ,
AND H ARRY W ALL

B EFORE THE NAMES OF J UST AND U NJUST
CAN HAVE PLACE ,
THERE MUST BE SOME COERCIVE POWER .