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Living in a world in permanent crisis
February 06, 2025
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Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis
Robert Kaplan | Random House, 2025 | 224 pages
Robert Kaplan’s newly published Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis provides a short yet wide-ranging overview of our increasingly unstable world.
Along the way, Kaplan draws upon his decades of travel, writing and intense study and uses this deep well of knowledge to examine current trends not just through the lens of history, but through philosophy and literature as well.
Weimar Germany — that brief democratic interregnum between Kaiserism and Hitlerism — is a strong focus here.
Although he is careful to state that he sees no modern-day equivalent of Hitler on the international stage, he believes that the instability of post-war Germany has now been replicated globally.
Kaplan writes approvingly of Churchill’s view that the political institutions of Weimar Germany (and central Europe more generally) lacked the stability of the ancient monarchies that had been replaced.
The Weimar political class never had a firm enough footing to be able to cope with the enormous economic and social challenges of the interwar period.
They also appeared to lack self-confidence, with Kaplan pointing to the lenient punishment dished out to Hitler following the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as an example of a ruling class that would not stand up for itself by punishing transgressions severely.
Changes in national borders and the overthrowing of entrenched dynasties around the time of the Treaty of Versailles were meant to usher in a new democratic era.
Instability
Kaplan, being philosophically conservative, has a clear sympathy with the old order, especially when the alternative is dramatic change.
Rapid change has been a constant in recent decades. In today’s economically interdependent and technologically advanced world, geographic distances have seemingly faded while social distances between atomised individuals have grown.
Like the world as a whole, Western societies are increasingly unstable.
For all the brilliance of the author’s insights, the book is poorly structured — particularly towards the end — and the literary and historical references are overwrought throughout.
Kaplan’s actual observations about where things stand and where they are heading do not get the prominence they deserve, being buried within.
For one thing, he believes, based on recent developments, “that there is and has been no world order or international community, no rules-based system in Europe or anywhere else.”
Utopian affirmations to the contrary are less frequently heard now than in those heady days following the end of the Cold War. Realism is very much back in vogue, along with hard power.
He is also right in his belief that human nature is not going to improve. War has been with us from the start and will be with us to the end as well.
As the memory of American unipolarity recedes into the distance and new conflicts emerge over resources or identity, Kaplan affirms that another reality is that these conflicts will impact developments globally. There is no escape.
“Isolation is the past: full immersion in a chaotic world is the inevitable future,” he writes.
Not being closely aligned with either of the American political parties, the author makes a strong case that the calibre of presidents has declined significantly from the end of the Cold War onwards, particularly when it comes to the knowledge of history that presidents carry with them into office.
Russia’s failings on the battlefield in Ukraine and its increasing unpredictability elsewhere point to a possibility that few other authors have addressed: imperial Russia’s possible collapse.
Kaplan suggests that the institutional weakness of Russia and the societal damage done by Soviet Communism makes it extremely difficult to predict what will happen, but he does believe that Russian instability in the coming years will present Western leaders with a similar dilemma to that faced by their 19th-century predecessors when dealing with a decaying Ottoman empire.
Africa's growth and Europe's decline
The understandable focus on Ukraine in recent years has distracted from the increasing instability of Africa, and this is where Kaplan’s warnings appear most prescient in light of the demographic realities he points to.
In 2000, Africa and Europe had roughly the same population. By 2100, there could be seven Africans for every European. By then, almost half of humanity might be living on that one continent, many of whom are likely to want to move northwards into a more prosperous, stable and temperate Europe.
What this is going to do to European societies, already struggling with today’s levels of inward migration, is hard to comprehend.
Kaplan’s book title comes from the famous T.S. Eliot poem, which “begins with a vision of idyllic aristocratic life in Europe that is wiped out by World War I.”
He is not the first to draw such dark inspiration from Eliot. Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’ includes a tremendously evocative scene in which Anthony Blanche recites part of the poem to his Oxford classmates.
Its significance is often overlooked. Just like the main characters in his masterpiece, Waugh was part of the generation which was slightly too young to have experienced the slaughter of the trenches, and which entered into adulthood in a world forever changed by that conflict.
The peace and prosperity of the 1920s was fleeting. It was therefore pleasant for Eliot, Waugh and others to imagine the simpler world of the pre-war era, for something far worse was about to begin.
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James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including history, culture, film and literature.
Image credit: Pexels
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