Robert D. Kaplan - An Empire Wilderness: Traveling into Americas Future

Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of five previous books on travel and foreign affairs. His bestseller Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the nine best books of 1993. The Ends of the Earth (also a bestseller) and The Arabists were chosen by The New York Times as notable books of the year in 1996 and 1993, respectively. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

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 DEPARTURES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1999

Copyright 1998 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 1998.

Vintage Books, Vintage Departures, and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published in The Atlantic Monthly.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.: Excerpt from John Browns Body by Stephen Vincent Bent. Copyright 1927, 1928 by Stephen Vincent Bent. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Liveright Publishing Corporation: One line from Powhatans Daughter by Hart Crane and title usage of the same line from Complete Poems of Hart Crane edited by Marc Simon.

Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright 1986 by Marc Simon. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

Kaplan, Robert D.

An empire wilderness: travels into Americas future / Robert D. Kaplan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-679-45190-0 (acid-free paper)

1. West (U.S.)Description and travel. 2. West (U.S.)Social conditions. 3. Kaplan, Robert D.JourneysWest (U.S.). 4. United StatesSocial conditionsForecasting. I. Title.

F595.3.K36 1998

978dc21 98-10179

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-77687-7

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5349-2

Author photograph Tony OBrien

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To Jim Lewin and Mitchell Pilcer

The fact, then, that all existing things are subject to decay is a proposition which scarcely requires proof, since the inexorable course of nature is sufficient to impose it on us. Every kind of state, we may say, is liable to decline from two sources, the one being external, and the other due to its own internal evolution. It is evident that under the influence of long-established prosperity life will become more luxurious, and among the citizens themselves rivalry for office and in other spheres of activity will become fiercer than it should. As these symptoms become more marked, the craving for office and the sense of humiliation which obscurity imposes, together with the spread of ostentation and extravagance, will usher in a period of general deterioration. The principal authors of this change will be the masses, who at some moments will believe that they have a grievance against the greed of other members of society, and at others are made conceited by the flattery of those who aspire to office. They will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of their leaders, but will demand everything or by far the greatest share for themselves.

Polybius,

The Rise of the Roman Empire
(translation by Ian Scott-Kilvert)

Rome under the mild and generous influence of liberty [might] have remained invincible and immortal.

Edward Gibbon,

The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire

THE WORLD IN the foreseeable future will depend more on the preferences of Americans than on any other single factor. Whether in preserving the balance of power in Europe, in Asia, or in the Middle East or in restructuring the United Nations, the wishes of the United States will be impossible to ignore. Americas enormous technological advantages will sustain it as the military superpower for decades hence. But Americas foreign policy, like that of any other country, is an extension of its domestic inclinations and conditions. Thus it is of the utmost importance to understand the direction American society is going in.

The continued existence of the United States should never be taken for granted. Democratic Athens led its allies in the victorious wars against Persia only to inherit a far-flung maritime empire that later crumbled as Athens gradually faded from history, leaving a vacuum eventually filled by the rise of Alexanders empire. In the wake of Romes decline came the tribal configurations from which modern European states emerged. Americas decline would leave a vacuum every bit as large as that left by Greece or Rometo which America has often been comparedwith immeasurable consequences for the human race. But this book is not about the decline of the United States; it is about its transformation.

MY PROBLEM IN writing about America at first hand was formidable, because it is my own country. The knowledge one accumulates of ones homeland, like the knowledge of oneself, is so varied and complex, so ambiguously objective and subjective at every turn, that each interpretation soon gives way to another: to write about ones own country is the most problematic form of autobiography. In the end, for all of the careful notes and no matter how much one has read and pondered, one is left with the problem of ones unconscious motivations. I have made no attempt here to be comprehensive, much less definitive, but rather to offer an interpretation of our common future based on my best judgment after much travel. My travels were confined for the most part to the West, where it seems to me Americas transformation is most transparent. Nine of the ten states whose populations are growing fastest are in the West. It is in the West, particularly west of the Missouri, where the myth of American individualismof pioneers taming a virgin continenthas been most clearly stated. I had yet another reason for choosing the West: I am from the East, and for me the West meant the chance to travel amid a relatively strange landscape, if not as strange as those abroad.