Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

‘Robert Kaplan is one of the most sophisticated and incisive geopolitical analysts of today’s world. His latest work is typically elegant, grounded in a vast range of philosophy, travel and literature. The book is a tribute to the role that history can play in illuminating a path for policymakers in an ever-more uncertain and chaotic world.’ — John Bew, Professor of History and Foreign Policy, King’s College London, and senior foreign policy advisor at No 10 Downing Street

‘A darkly brilliant and engaging survey of our world in chaos. And yet in this deeply erudite literary, cultural and historical narrative, Kaplan offers both warning and hope that America amid such confusion and danger will be alright—if it remembers to reestablish and cherish its traditions of order, the rule of law, moderation, humility, unity, borders, and its unique commitment to economic, individual and constitutional freedom and tolerance.’ — Victor Davis Hanson, author of The End of Everything

‘A provocative thought experiment, of much interest to students of contemporary geopolitics.’ — Kirkus Reviews

‘A compelling, stark, critically important book that conveys the urgency of the present moment and the unprecedented challenges that face mankind. Once again, Robert Kaplan has brilliantly distilled an exceedingly complex set of issues that have to be resolved. Waste Land solidifies Kaplan’s reputation as one of the truly masterful observers and thinkers of our time!’ — General David Petraeus, U.S. Army (Ret.), former Commander of the Surge in Iraq, U.S. Central Command and Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, and former Director of the CIA

‘One of the great geopolitical thinkers of our time has produced yet another compelling, scholarly and eminently readable book of thoughtful global analysis. Weaving everything from the gorgeous poetry of T.S. Eliot to the neo-realistic thinking of Jeane Kirkpatrick to the tragic history of the Weimar Republic, Robert Kaplan provides a dark mirror held to a dangerous world that commands our attention page after page. A cautionary tale of absolute brilliance!’ — James Stavridis U.S. Navy (Ret.), 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO

‘Kaplan is one of my favourite Neo-Malthusian pessimists. He has an incredible bandwidth—prodigious reader, inveterate traveller, journalist, thinker, writer. Waste Land's relevance manifests itself immediately.’ — Joe Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Primary Colors, writer of the Sanity Clause newsletter

‘Waste Land is a provocative but penetrating diagnosis of the anomie that marks the evolving international order. Obviously, nothing is inevitable in history but perspicaciously understanding its rhythms is essential to help avert the looming catastrophe. The reader will not find a better guide toward that end than Kaplan’s Waste Land.’ — Ashley J. Tellis, Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

‘Kaplan challenges readers with the breadth of his vision and erudition, and his grasp of so many diverse strands of culture and history makes this a great read for those looking to make some sense of things.’ — Booklist, starred review

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

WASTE LAND

WASTE

LAND

A WORLD

IN

PERMANENT

CRISIS

ROBERT

D. KAPLAN

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2025 by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

© Robert D. Kaplan, 2025

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United Kingdom

The right of Robert D. Kaplan to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781911723493

This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources.

www.hurstpublishers.com

Title-page art from Adobe Stock, Inset: Sofiia, and large image: zef art Book design by Barbara M. Bachman

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

CONTENTS

I.

WEIMAR GOES GLOBAL

II.

THE GREAT POWERS IN DECLINE

III.

CROWDS AND CHAOS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

WASTE LAND

I.

WEIMAR GOES GLOBAL

PREMONITIONS 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