Rating: 
Summary: Must Read, Even if You Disagree with Conclusions
Review: Kaplan's essays collected in this volume are required reading, even if you disagree with his conclusions. As he writes a propos West Africa: "West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real 'strategic' danger...West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization."The author, however, paints with broad strokes and makes no pretence to being a specialist in politics or history. He is a journalist. For details (as well as more reliable historiography and statistics) a good survey of the West African conflict such as Stephen Ellis's MASK OF ANARCHY (New York University Press, 1999) or John Peter Pham's LIBERIA: PORTRAIT OF A FAILED STATE (Reed Press, 2004) is recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Storms on the Horizon
Review: Robert Kaplan's dark vision of the future is a very engaging one. Kaplan does a good job of portraying how and why he believes chaos and instability will become a rule rather than the exception. The book itself is titled for the first essay by the same name, and consists of several other pieces on similar topics. This surpirsed me as I expected a more uniform book on that topic. However, it was not a dissapointment. Each chapter explores a thought provoking topic. "Special Intelligence" was one of my favorites- it detailed the future coordination of the Intelligence agencies and military Special Forces. Before reading The Coming Anarchy I was a firm believer in the universal applicability of democracy the world over. Now I am not so sure. Kaplan makes a good case of his hypothesis that democracy is a culmination of social, economic and historical achievments that some areas of the Earth have not achieved. He conceeds that democracy is the long term goal, however, sometimes a stable authoritarian regime that will enhance the quality of life while advancing these prerequisites is preferable to an election that leads to ethnic cleansing. Kaplan fails to consider the effect that international trade policy has on these societies, in one of the books shortcomings. Taken in this light the trends of the emerging international order are described in a creative and revealing fashion but the causes of these changes are neglected. He does breifly touch on environmental degredation and comes close- but not quite. It is economic motivation that causes the environment to be destroyed in many cases. This is a very good book, but it is composed of previously published articles with one addition at the end. These are great essays, but Kaplan falls short by not expanding them or at least giving us more new material than old. If I had known this before hand, I might have checked out his writing at the library in "The Atlantic Monthly", where the first essay and the book's namesake appeared.
Rating: 
Summary: a little spotty; surely Kaplan has done better
Review: This book collects 9 essays by Kaplan, known for political realism and bold travel writing. The first and last essays are the worst; the middle seven are not so bad. In the first essay Kaplan argues that the present peace will not last long, that its "degeneration" in places like sub-Saharan Africa will lead to anarchy, with disturbing results even in the first world. His main evidence is environmental change and resource depletion (especially soil and water--his argument would be stronger if he included oil). I don't know what golden age Kaplan is looking back to in sub-Saharan Africa (in Eastern Europe I guess it must be the Ottomans); so anarchy there will be no surprise. But with grand assumptions and meager evidence--surely he has more than he cites, but he has to deal with apparently contrary evidence to be truly convincing--he declares breathtaking conclusions, such as the dissolution of the USA into ethnic warfare. Perhaps he's right, but his analysis is so thin that he's not persuasive. Yet there are moments of light, as when he describes the historical perspective of the occupants of Ankara's slums, quoting Naipaul. Or when he analyzes the "lies of the mapmaker," more precisely the lies of the post-WWII statesmen who carelessly created the states defined by the lines on the map. So many people naively believe that the 3rd world will inevitably become like the 1st; but Kaplan believes it will go the other way just as inevitably. His first essay is a polemic for his belief. I'm sorry; it has little useful analysis or insight. Reading the second essay, "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" is like stepping from darkness into light (of course there are still shadows). If you believe that democracy is always the best government, this essay will be challenging for you. The third essay, "Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder," will be interesting for anyone interested in the causes and preventions of genocide and similar massive tragedies. Let me skip around a bit, for it is no small irony that an author concerned with mass murder would write in defense of Henry Kissinger, yet that is the purpose of the seventh essay. Kaplan defends a man who is perhaps American history's worst criminal against critics by systematically understating everything Kissinger did in Vietnam, Cambodia, (Kaplan doesn't mention Laos), Cyprus, Chile, (and he doesn't mention East Timor). See Christopher Hitchens' "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," to which Kaplan's essay is a weak response. The fourth essay explains the need for special forces and institutions such as the CIA. He believes--and I agree--that these are the future of warfare. The fifth essay is a review of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." If you don't know why that's famous, Kaplan's essay might even inspire you to try reading it. That happened to me. The eighth essay is another book review, this time of Conrad's "Nostromo." Kaplan compares the book to "Heart of Darkness" and considers its application to the contemporary third world. (A few years ago an edition of "Nostromo" and "Lord Jim" was published with introductions by Kaplan.) Another book was added to my reading list. The sixth essay advocates "proportional" responses to foreign policy. Few would argue with the vague philosophy Kaplan presents, except those who eagerly throw American troops into murky conflicts with unclear goals (Kissinger?). Of course, practical applications and interpretations are the real problem. Anyway, this essay is solid and concise. With the ninth essay Kaplan descends again. Nostalgic for the Cold War and MAD--"the Cold War may have been as close to utopia as we are ever likely to get" p. 171--he wants to be sure that the US rather than the UN is the power of the future. He is sure that the UN wouldn't have enough war, so it would be unprincipled. I'm not making this up! "The US should... take over the UN in order to make it a transparent multiplier of American and Western power. That, of course, may not lead to peace, since others might resent it and fight as a result; but such action would fill the [UN]'s insipid ideological vacuum with at least someone's values--indeed ours. Peace should never be an expediency." Whoa. Of course he's right that peace won't last forever; he's right that we (whoever we are) should be prepared to protect ourselves from evil; he's right not to trust the UN unconditionally (don't trust anything unconditionally). But he's wrong to believe that America is not capable of evil. In this respect he's as naive as any idealist: "Of course, [America's] post-Cold War mission to spread democracy is partly a pose." (71). Partly? PARTLY? This was my first book by Kaplan. I'm going to read another. Perhaps he has written some more well-reasoned arguments elsewhere. Kaplan is relevant because he understands human ambition; he is wrong because he doesn't believe it can be channeled productively and peacefully. No one should ignore such a voice, but no one should read uncritically.
Rating:
Summary: Sobering Vision of THe Future
Review: Robert D. Kaplan is a realist whose vision of where the world - especially the Third World - is headed is solidly based on history. He looks at Africa in particular and sees a continent degenerating into chaos as large masses of unemployed young males roam cities in countries which are barely functioning administrative entities. Kaplan pours cold water on our comfortable Western notions that all these places need is a little touch of democracy. His title essay describes the chaos in Sierra Leone. The front page story on the New York Times yesterday about the utterly meaningless and pointless war in the Congo (Zaire) was a chilling illustration of Kaplan's no-rose-colored-glasses vision of what is really happening in this distressed part of the Third World. His vision of mankind is Hobbesian, i.e. that life in these places is indeed "nasty, brutish and short". Conflicts are simply not going to go away, says Kaplan, and peace - desirable as it may be - may not always be what we are going to experience. I especially liked Kaplan's essay on Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo" which depicted how the brutal world of Conrad's mythical Costaguana remains a reality today, rather than a distant fiction. I similarly enjoyed his use of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to illustrate that we need to see clearly that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Rating:
Summary: The World According To Robert D. Kaplan!
Review: This is a book full of fascinating and absorbing essays portraying Robert Kaplan's insightful vision of a world suddenly full of frightening, endlessly fragmented, unstable and chaotic nations launching into violence and internal genocide at the drop of the proverbial hat. So what has changed, Bobby, other than the fact that the balance of terror provided by a catastrophically expensive, wasteful, and useless Cold War that Kaplan aches nostalgically for since it provided some means of international stability? While everything Mr. Kaplan argues for is ostensibly true in the narrow sense, I have a problem with the fact that for all its flashes of insight and brilliance, his perspective is sadly lacking in any genuine insights in terms of a rational and progressive policy for righting what he rightly views is ailing the collective world at large. Moreover, I suspect from these essays that like many neo-conservatives desperately searching for reasons and rationalizations to reignite the home fires now languishing so petulantly beneath the American arms industry, he neglects to mention how flagrantly the transnational corporations he often lectures to negatively influence the regional conflagrations he so conspicuously deplores. In short, I fear the author doth protest too much; for all his urgent protestations, he seems more like a wolf dressed in wool baying like a sheep than an ardently sincere proponent of peace in our time. Certainly ours is a much more dangerous and fractious world than it was before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. But it is a serious mistake to conclude that this is solely due to the lack of a continuing balance of terror that kept each opposing orbit of influence circling within tolerable political tolerances. Instead, the circumstances represented by the momentous change the author refers to must be viewed in a better defined, developed, and articulated context, one recognizing that while we enjoy a enviable lifestyle while producing what most of the rest of the world wants and cannot find the means to afford, we also act to undermine their positions, as well. For example, both the nation itself and the transnational corporations it serves also conspicuously withhold (for reasons of profit and advantage) humanitarian aid and support of the rest of the world's basic needs for such elementary supplies and services as pharmaceutical assistance for the third world tuberculosis epidemic, or control of HIV infections in Africa, or a more rational crop management system that doesn't ruthlessly exploit third world countries by condemning their leaders to grow cash crops for export to meet their World Bank payment obligations instead of allowing them to feed their burgeoning populations. This is a hardly an enlightened, disinterested, or progressive way to aid and assist the emerging third world countries. In short, far from being innocent observers of dangerous trends going on "out there' in Kaplan's sterile and superficially defined world of nation states, we need to integrate what we know about the way the world really works, not just in the notional and abstract political world discussed in foreign policy statements for public consumption. Rather, we need one that recognizes the fact that nations often conduct foreign policy in service to their corporate sponsors' perceived interests, that the flag often follows commerce, that the profound social, economic, and political influence wielded with great purpose by the cynical, indifferent, and anonymous corporations who are in fact almost exclusively oriented and motivated by profit considerations affect what is going on in the world. I agree with much of what Mr. Kaplan has to say in terms of individual statements about the dangerous, unpredictable, and provocative times we are moving into. But I hardly believe it serves public discussion to voice these concerns so articulately only to then retreat to a silly and superficial set of notions about what the larger social, economic and political realities are or what an enlightened foreign policy would be to guard against these dangers. It is a sweet but insubstantial confection, one that patently disregards the profound issues of corporate globalization and how it views its role in the unfolding drama the author addresses so interestingly.
Rating:
Summary: Sobering and thought-provoking
Review: This is a great read - if you're an American, especially a liberal or progressive, it will really cause you to re-think the inherent bias we have toward "democracy" - through Kaplan's lens you begin to appreciate that building democracies takes a kind of social, economic and political evolution - you can't just arrive on the shores of a hungry, war-torn country and think that elections will save people - you can't define democracy by elections alone. And democracies need a middle class to be created and then to survive for a period of time. As one person stated, "Give us an economy first... then give us elections." A good read for these times. Also VERY interesting are his comments on the changing American social fabric - one where public life is being jettisoned by the middle class for a social and economic life that is private (malls, gated communities, corporations, edge cities dominated by corporate planning and architecture).
Rating:
Summary: Must Read, Even if You Disagree with Conclusions
Review: Kaplan's essays collected in this volume are required reading, even if you disagree with his conclusions. As he writes a propos West Africa: "West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real 'strategic' danger...West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization." The author, however, paints with broad strokes and makes no pretence to being a specialist in politics or history. He is a journalist. For details (as well as more reliable historiography and statistics) a good survey of the West African conflict such as Stephen Ellis's MASK OF ANARCHY (New York University Press, 1999) or John Peter Pham's LIBERIA: PORTRAIT OF A FAILED STATE (Reed Press, 2004) is recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Another powerful Kaplan vision.
Review: Another excellent book by Kaplan. He writes two types of books: 1) traveling books with a foreign affair analytical perspective, and 2) books directly about foreign affair analysis. This book belongs to the second type. For my part, I prefer this type; it is so much easier to extract all the information he gives. I love Kaplan's practice of what I call "intellectual aggregation." He does not just tell you what he thinks. He shares with you what all the other luminaries think. Thus, within this book there are some priceless information gathered from references, including: Samuel Huntington, Kissinger, Van Crefeld, Homer-Dixon, Hobbes.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down, read it twice, a little too bleak
Review: This book was written in 1997 and I read it in 2003 and still found it worth reading -- twice. Kaplan is more than a journalist -- he's an important voice for realpolitik in for this century. Dissolution of the nation-state, blurring of the lines between terrorism and crime, and the wisdom of implementing democracy in environments without solid economic foundations are the three key takeaways for me. Kaplan can be a little too bleak in his outlook, however, and it's important to read this in the context of other political and technology books, lest you give up all hope, but I find his writing fascinating and his prose hard to put down. The fact that this is a collection of essays seemed immaterial to me as the threads were all connected and the points complementary.
Rating:
Summary: The Coming Anarchy: Dispelling the Illusion of Idealism
Review: The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
Robert D. Kaplan
Vintage Books, 2000.
198 pages. The 1960s forged a generation of raw journalists whose idealism was slowly stripped away by the moral bankruptcy and the dehumanizing experience of America's involvement in Vietnam. Wide eyed innocents such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan walked away disillusioned and bitter, and their seminal analyses of America's failed experiment in Vietnam earned them wide acclaim along with the journalist's ultimate badge of respectability---the Pulitzer. If Halberstam and Sheehan were products of the Cold War, Kaplan is their natural successor in the Post Cold War. The Coming Anarchy, a collection of nine essays, is not the work of a traditional realist, such as Henry Kissinger, who nonetheless maintains an unassailable belief in American exceptionalism, but that of an über-realist, a neo-Malthusian hardened by many years in forgotten corners of the world such as the Balkans, Western Africa, and Southwest Asia. The nine essays encapsulated in The Coming Anarchy range from grim predictions of future conflicts to book reviews to a catechism on proportionalism as a litmus test for American intervention. Though seemingly unrelated, Kaplan's penchant for lucent, occasionally acerbic, and consistently powerful prose cogently connects the articles with the assiduous advocacy of realism.
The documented triumphs of the American will make realism a difficult sell and Kaplan's book extremely controversial. From Manifest Destiny to World War II to the end of the Cold War, American ideals, buttressed by her military and economic hegemony, appear as poised to serve as the guiding principles of the twenty-first century as they had in the twentieth. Kaplan challenges the old order with wisdom borne from the crucible of insidious conflict. He describes the multitude of problems that assail Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, as an "epiphenomena in a larger pattern of demographic and environmental upheaval." Issues such as environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic density, and localized, tribal warfare are by no means new. Kaplan contends that whereas these problems, endemic to the poorest corners of the world, have been subordinated in previous decades to the primacy of the Cold War, in the absence of a single monolithic threat, the multitude of the previously latent ones have emerged that directly challenge the American version of the new world order. Americans that have long been accustomed to ignoring the plight of Sub-Saharan Africans, Pakistanis, and Afghans, can no longer afford to so.
Kaplan's first essay, essentially a bleak portrait of the third world teeming with human suffering and violence, is left wanting. While it serves as a premonition of danger, he offers no solutions. In another essay, titled, Proportionalism: A Realistic Approach to Foreign Policy, Kaplan espouses a version of realpolitik that is tempered by America's experience in Vietnam. Kaplan's proportionalism is a decision-making matrix determined by calculations of national interest and considerations of the terms of the Powell Doctrine. As in the proportionalism of Catholicism, it is a realist's acknowledgement of having to commit lesser evils to achieve the greater good. Proportionalism, as applied for foreign has three tenets: the aid itself, early warning, and extremely rare intervention. American doles will be provided to countries not of direst need but those most promising of some form of a return on investment. Kaplan predicts that this search for a positive bottom line in the determination of foreign aid will be an "anathema to moral and ideological purists" but he asserts its necessity because proportionalism "tempers implacable principle with common sense".
Kaplan openly challenges convention with his advocacy for realism and his prediction of a certain "anarchy" that will be almost inevitable if the issues and tensions that tear at the social and political fabric of the world's periphery are not resolved. Although his arguments are vulnerable to a quick dismissal as being extreme, Kaplan's prescient prediction of the Balkans catastrophe in his celebrated (and also controversial) Balkan Ghosts lends much credibility to his analysis. He declares open warfare on idealists with articles that assert that peace and democracy are not necessarily desirable ends. Kaplan warns, "A long period of peace in an advanced technological society like ours could lead to great evils." The pivotal shortcoming of the book is that it is not. Although Kaplan's essays are brilliantly written that draw from an eclectic mix of history, literature, and anecdotes, his ideas and arguments in their current form are incomplete. For instance, given "the coming anarchy", proportionalism is not sufficient to address the challenges presented by "the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war" in the third world. A prerequisite to the useful application of proportionalism is a clear definition of American national interest, and with the dissolution of Communism, America needs a new "north star" in order for any measure of realpolitik, particularly proportionalism, to work. A master polemicist, Kaplan's bold ideas add a significant dimension to the current discourse on American foreign policy.
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