Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

By Robert D. Kaplan

An urgent exploration of a world in constant crisis, where every regional disaster threatens to become a global conflict, with lessons from history that can stop the spiral—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography

“Compelling and helpful . . . Kaplan’s analysis has enormous implications for U.S. strategy abroad. . . . His conclusion is the only right one.”—John Bolton, The Wall Street Journal

One of Financial Times’ Most Important Books to Read This Year • One of Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm in which the world faces a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of both monarchy and empire, and countless other dangers. In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of more than twenty books on world affairs, incisively explains how we got here and where we are going. Kaplan makes a novel argument that the current geopolitical landscape must be considered alongside contemporary social phenomena such as urbanization and digital news media, grounding his ideas in foundational modern works of philosophy, politics, and literature, including the poem from which the title is borrowed, and celebrating a canon of traditionally conservative thinkers, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and many others.

As in many of his books, Kaplan looks to history and literature to inform the present, drawing particular comparisons between today's challenges and the Weimar Republic, the post-World War I democratic German government that fell to Nazism in the 1930s. Just as in Weimar, which faced myriad crises inextricably bound up with global systems, the singular dilemmas of the twenty-first century—pandemic disease, recession, mass migration, the destabilizing effects of large-scale democracy and great power conflicts, and the intimate bonds created by technology—mean that every disaster in one country has the potential to become a global crisis, too. According to Kaplan, the solutions lie in prioritizing order in governing systems, arguing that stability and historic liberalism rather than mass democracy per se will save global populations from an anarchic future.

Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by the connections afforded by technology but with remarkable parallels to the past. Just as it did in Weimar, Kaplan fears the situation may be spiraling out of our control—unless our leaders act first.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 28, 2025
• ISBN: 9780593730348

Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of nineteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the US Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine has twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

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Cover for Waste Land

By Robert D. Kaplan

Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian

The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century

Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World

In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground

Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese

Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

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

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War

An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future

The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia

The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea

Book Title, Waste Land, Subtitle, A World in Permanent Crisis, Author, Robert D. Kaplan, Imprint, Random House

Copyright © 2025 by Robert D. Kaplan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names:

Kaplan, Robert D., author.

Title:

Waste land / By Robert D. Kaplan.

Description:

First edition. | New York, NY: Random House, [2025] | Includes index.

Identifiers:

LCCN 2024034855 (print) | LCCN 2024034856 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593730324 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593730348 (ebook)

Subjects:

LCSH: Geopolitics. | Power (Social sciences)—History. | Globalization—History. | International relations—History.

Classification:

LCC JC319 .K336 2025 (print) | LCC JC319 (ebook) | DDC 320.1/2—dc23/eng/20240802

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024034855

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024034856

Ebook ISBN 9780593730348

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Title-page art from Adobe Stock, Inset: Sofiia, and large image: zef art

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Pete Graceau

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Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

I. Weimar Goes Global

II. The Great Powers in Decline

III. Crowds and Chaos

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

_150089376_

To Devon Cross

…hope, detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history, is a dangerous asset, and one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.

—Roger Scruton The Uses of Pessimism

I.

Weimar Goes Global

P

remonitions can be precious. They

offer an uncanny, decipherable warning about something or other, especially if the person having them is at the right place at the right time. Consider the Anglo-American Christopher Isherwood and the German Alfred Döblin, novelists who each wrote about Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the guise of fiction, a writer can more easily tell the truth, hiding behind his characters and other forms of make-believe. Their Berlin is a fantastic, neurotic nightmare.

Isherwood, in Goodbye to Berlin, describes an edgy, decadent demimonde; marked by wholesale perversion and end-of-the-world partying; flaky characters on unending sprees of drinking and carousing all set against the backdrop of a bankrupt middle class living amid secondhand furniture in shabby, leaking buildings plastered with hammers-and-sickles and swastikas. He zooms in on a down-at-heel innkeeper, cleaning chamber pots, battered by the Great War and inflation. There are bank closures, sullen crowds, and the eerie pageant of burying social democracy amid black banners of one extremist group or the other. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold, Isherwood writes. This town is sick with Jews. Turn over any stone, and a couple of them will crawl out. They’re poisoning the very water we drink! exclaims one of his characters.[1]

Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, so Goodbye to Berlin, as prescient as the author’s initial experiences were, was helped a bit by hindsight. Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in the fall of 1929, when people had still not given up on the Weimar constitutional experiment and the future did not seem hopeless. But only a few weeks after the book’s publication, the stock market crashed on Wall Street, sending tremors all over Europe and especially Germany.

Berlin Alexanderplatz contains a stunning premonition not just of chaos but of something far worse and murderous that succeeds it, and also of the general instability of cities in the 20th and 21st centuries, including those in the developing world. Berlin, in Döblin’s rendering, is Sodom on the eve of its destruction.[2] Döblin’s book is hard to read, almost plotless. It is filled with cluttered rhythms and long asides, and its low-down, scummy characters go from one petty disaster to another. But the book is also full of sound and streetwise wisdom. Listen:

On Alexanderplatz they’re tearing up the road for the underground railway. People are made to walk on duckboards. The trams cross the square and head up Alexander- and Munzstrasse to get to Rosenthaler Tor…. In the streets, there’s one house after another. They are full of people, from cellar to attic…. The tenancy protection law isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Rents are going up all the time. The middle class are finding themselves out on the street, bailiffs and debt collectors are making hay. The protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, an ex-con, sells far-right-wing newspapers on the street. Not that he’s got anything against the Jews, but he is a supporter of order, says the narrator. The book concludes with a vision of people, arms linked, marching into war, now that the old world is doomed.[3]

Doom is the word that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the Weimar Republic. Weimar is a candy-coated horror tale: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. Weimar signifies an artistically and intellectually vibrant period—defined by the novels of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, the expressionist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the atonal music of Arnold Schönberg, the design and architectural experimentation of the Bauhaus—a period replete with so much social and cultural experimentation, yet packed with nasty racial and religious tensions, to say nothing of inflation and depression, all leading, without skipping a beat, to…Hitler. Yes, we all know how it ends. But its participants, caught in freeze-frame in the act of everything that they were doing, could have no idea what was in store for them.

Will we be any the wiser?

I ask because Weimar now beckons us.

But not at all in the way we think.

We think about Weimar only in terms of the weakening of American democracy. While we should really think about it in terms of the world.

---

—

At the moment,

we rush headlong into a soulless and gleaming future, our lives grimly routinized and yet full of overwhelming possibilities, determined by gadgetry that we cannot do without. Technology has made us both masters and victims to a previously unimaginable degree. We believe we can defy gravity, yet we are weighed down by a mountain of worries that arrive instantly in our devices. This is a very claustrophobic and intimate world, yet also limitless: we may be connected with friends and relations around the globe, but just as often the people in the house or apartment next to ours might as well be in another universe. This alienation carries over from our neighborhoods to our politics. Politics has rarely before been played out on such an intense, globe-spanning, and consequential level, even as electronic communications have made it abstract and therefore more extreme—creating vast political distances between even our closest neighbors.

Yet, technology has also contracted our world, erasing the distance across oceans and between continents. We directly experience the burgeoning of new cities defined by technology and glittering financial centers, which vaguely look the same no matter the hemisphere or latitude where they are located. The future is here, and wherever we are, we are stuck in traffic.

We are building a truly global civilization that connects us all, and that is the challenge. Precisely because this global civilization is still in the act of becoming, and has not yet arrived, and will not arrive for some time, there is this phenomenon of both intimacy and distance between the various parts of the globe. True globalization is still an illusion until technology and world governance advance a few more orders of magnitude. Yet we dramatically affect each other and depend upon each other, so that we all inhabit the same, highly unstable global system. It is like in Sartre’s play No Exit, in which the three characters are locked in a small room and torment each other. With no mirrors on the walls, they only know themselves by the gaze of the others upon them. Indeed, we are liberated and oppressed by connectedness, with the media increasingly directing governments rather than the other way around. Russia and America, China and America, Russia and China, to say nothing of the mid-level and smaller powers, are all, because of their tense standoffs and the way that technology continues to contract the earth, running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic: that weak and wobbly political organism that governed Germany for fifteen years from the ashes of World War I to the ascension of Adolf Hitler. The entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.

I see no Hitler in our midst, or even a totalitarian world state. But don’t assume that the next phase of history will provide any relief to the present one. It is in the spirit of caution that I raise the subject of Weimar.

---

—

Analogies can be futile,

I know, since no thing is exactly like another. Analogies can lead us down a perilous path. Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain. While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world. It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the depth of our global crisis. We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.

---

—

What, exactly, was Weimar?

The great German historian Golo Mann, son of the Nobel laureate in literature Thomas Mann, called Weimar a sprawling and unwieldy empire without an emperor.[4] World War I, which lasted four long years, and which ordinary Germans thought originally would be a triumph, ended in defeat, 1.75 million German military deaths, and almost a half-million German civilian deaths. The country was shattered, the royal imperial governing structure had collapsed, and Germany was on the verge of social chaos. It was in that context that leading German politicians and lawyers, meeting in the Thuringian town of Weimar, devised a new constitutional arrangement that sought to avoid the autocratic tendencies of the Kaiser and Bismarck before him. But the new arrangement was just too weak to withstand the pressures of what was to come. There was no night watchman to keep the peace between its constituent parts. The federal states, or Länder, legislated through the Reichsrat, or upper house of parliament, retaining all rights not explicitly transferred to the central government. The nation as a whole elected the head of state, or Reich President. The President then appointed the Chancellor, who with his cabinet ran the government at the behest of the Reichstag, the lower house, which was elected by the people. Two-thirds of Germany was still called Prussia, and was governed under different rules than the Länder. As for Bavaria, which, like Prussia, was a veritable state within a state, there was constant talk of separation from the Reich. If all this seems like a far more complicated version of the U.S. Constitution with its separation of powers, it was—and made more unwieldy by economic and social anarchy. There was catastrophic inflation during the early Weimar years and catastrophic depression toward the end: a result of a very difficult postwar economy, made worse by reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, and by world economic dislocations. Germany during the Weimar period from 1918 to 1933 was a vast and barely united world unto itself, where the rules of order scarcely applied. It was less a government than a system of belligerent and far-flung competing parts, given the regional differences of a sprawling and, in historical terms, recently united Germany. Again, this is like our world today, with its great cultural and even civilizational differences, yet on another level becoming increasingly united at the same time. Weimar’s normal state was crisis, writes the late Stanford historian of Germany Gordon A. Craig.[5]

In that sense, Weimar was like our planet now: intimately connected, so as to have crises that cut across oceans, whether it be Covid-19, a global recession, great-power conflicts, or unprecedented climate change, things that we can all argue and talk about in the same conversation. To recall Weimar is to emphasize and admit the growing interdependencies of our own world, and to accept responsibility for them. So rather than interrelated German states, so that a crisis in one becomes a crisis in all, all countries are now connected in ways in which a crisis for one can contain a domino effect that becomes almost universal. The Weimar phenomenon, therefore, becomes one of scale.

Roaming the cities and towns of Germany in the early Weimar years were the Freikorps, rowdy and ill-disciplined young militiamen unwilling to disband after World War I for fear of suffering the deprivations of civilian life. They would provide the recruiting base for the first Nazi storm troopers. In fact, by the mid-1920s all the major political parties—the Communists, the Social Democrats, and so forth—had their own private little armies. Governments within greater Germany were constantly in the process of collapsing and regrouping with slightly different cabinets. It was one long cabinet crisis where everything always seemed to be at stake. Central authority exhausted itself just trying to preserve order, and in the final Weimar years, all anyone could talk about in Germany was daily politics. It was truly a permanent crisis, with one breathless series of headlines following another. The public and politicians both were caught up in the moment, in all of its intensity, unable to concentrate on what might come next because the present was so overwhelming. Everyone was hanging on for dear life, unaware of where they were going.

Golo Mann writes: Divided and alienated from itself, led by weak or reluctant politicians, the nation was confronted by problems the hopeless confusion of which would have daunted a Bismarck.[6] Again, this is a rough metaphor for our time, in a world beset by multiple crises, when one takes into account not only the West but all the turbulent reaches of Eurasia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. The former third world may be no more unstable now than it used to be, and in many cases it is more developed, but globalization has rendered it much more deeply entwined with our own destinies.

Outrages were manifold. Famously there was the Freikorps’ murder in 1922 of the very able Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, a philosopher, intellectual, and liberal Jewish politician. Rathenau had negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo, which allowed Germany to trade more with Soviet Russia at a time when Germany was under severe economic restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Gunmen lobbed grenades and opened fire on him at close range.

The next year, in 1923, came Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup d’état that began at the Bürgerbräu Keller, a beer hall in Munich. The event would have a comic-opera aspect to it if it hadn’t been so ugly: demonstrative of all the thuggery, rowdiness, incipient anarchy, and general incompetence of the politics of the era. The Beer Hall Putsch was an example of how law and order could begin to disintegrate even in an advanced country. It started when Bavarian leaders were in a rage to establish a right-wing, nationalist regime in Berlin and met at the Bürgerbräu Keller to plan strategy. Rightist elements in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, had long been obsessed with decadent and cosmopolitan Berlin, so well described by Isherwood and Döblin, and its weak, defeatist, democratic governments. But Hitler and his Nazis, supported by other paramilitary groups, feared those same nationalist politicians as potential rivals. Hitler entered the beer hall, backed by dozens of uniformed street fighters armed with knives and blackjacks, fired his pistol in the air, and while surrounded by bodyguards addressed the crowd and loudly bullied its leaders. Yet this far-right uprising, now led by Hitler, began to collapse when it failed to secure key buildings in the city, and it fell into general disorganization, which featured diversions such as haphazard, armed attacks against Jews and Jewish stores in Munich. But once out of Hitler’s sight, the Bavarian nationalists, whom he and his armed goons had bullied, denounced his coup. In a last-ditch effort to rally support, Hitler led 2,000 Nazis in a thunderous and riotous march to a local monument, where Munich police bloodily put down the uprising. Hitler, wounded and almost killed in the melee—a bullet came within a foot of him—was sentenced to five years in prison but was released after eight months in a minimum-security facility, where he was allowed to write Mein Kampf.[7]

Thereafter Hitler vowed to work within the democratic system to achieve power—ostensibly, that is—which is exactly what would happen a decade later. Democracy, when weak and unstable,