Waste Land: A World In Permanent Crisis

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm, with the world facing a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of empire, and countless other dangers. In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of over twenty books on world affairs, explains incisively how we got here and where we are going.

As in much of his work, Kaplan looks to history, literature, politics and philosophy to interpret our world, drawing parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic. Weimar faced myriad crises inextricably bound up with international systems, and its emergency became a global one. Today, too, every disaster in one country could spiral across the world, given the singular dilemmas of our century—pandemics, recession, urbanisation, mass migration, destabilisation under large-scale democracy and great power conflicts, and digital media’s intimate bonds. Could stability and historic liberalism, rather than mass democracy per se, save world populations from anarchic breakdown?

Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by twenty-first–century technology, but remarkably resonant with the past. The situation may be spiralling out of our control—unless our leaders act first.