Waste Land

Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.
Robert D. Kaplan.
C. Hurst & Co. Ltd. 2025. ISBN: 9781911723493.

Robert Kaplan’s Waste Land is a short, three-part meditation arguing that the contemporary international order resembles a global Weimar: a tightly interconnected but chronically unstable system in which crisis has become the normal condition rather than a temporary disruption. Driven by a deadly mix of war, climate change, demographic pressure, great-power rivalry, and rapid technological disruption, especially in communications, Kaplan contends that great powers, including the United States, China, and Russia, are all in different forms of erosion, leaving no actor capable of underwriting a durable global order. He presents current politics as increasingly anxious and claustrophobic, with events everywhere tightly coupled so that shocks in one region cascade rapidly across the system.
 
Robert D. Kaplan is an American writer and geopolitical analyst best known for books on international affairs and travel, with a strong focus on strategy, geography, and U.S. foreign policy. He was born on June 23, 1952, in New York City. Kaplan has held research and advisory roles, including senior fellow positions at the Center for a New American Security and the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and has served on U.S. defence advisory boards.