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Summary: Warns about the terror that has and will come!
Review: The author in succinct detail describes what has been happening since the end of the "Cold War." He vividly describes how so many middle-eastern and African nations are without much law and order. The result is a growing attraction to terrorists groups like Bin Laden's, which give poor and disilusioned teenagers and youth a purpose for living.
This is a scary book, but Westerners should read this and Kaplan's other books, and become better prepared for years of terrorism from America's bitter enemies.
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Summary: A surprisingly good book
Review: I approached this book as a light analysis of devloping world politics, something to read at night before going to bed. I was surprised at how well it is written and the scope of the topics, which include essays on Joseph Conrad and Edward Gibbon and how their works - despite their age - are still very relevant to our own understanding of the modern world. I was almost disappointed at how quickly I got through it and I think his ideas are especially worthwile now in trying to understand - if only in part - the divide between East and West.
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Summary: A Primer on the 21st Century
Review: The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism led to a search for a new paradigm to explain the post-Cold War world. Three major works have been written (originally as articles in Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Affairs) to explain this new era. Robert Kaplan's A Coming Anarchy, Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man, and Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order attempted to provide a framework for international relations in the 90s and beyond.
Of the three authors, Robert Kaplan approaches the subject not from an academic background but as a reporter and a world traveler. The Coming Anarchy is he view of the state of the world. It is a world where globalization only serves to link the Western World towards a sinking Third World. It is a world where stability is a fleeting goal that can never be achieved. Of the three authors, Kaplan's view is the most stark and unforgiving. Fukuyama presents a more optimistic view where liberal democracies have triumphed over the world and the next golden age is in the world's grasp. The truth probably lies between them. Kaplan has no confidence in the abilities of the Western world to help stabilize the Third world. The relative success of the United Nations and NATO in Bosnia serve to contradict Kaplan's argument but the real test will occur when forces withdrawal.
Samuel Huntington attempts to paint a new Cold War not between ideologies but between the fundamental civilizations of the world. This echoes Kaplan's articles and the events between Israel and Palestine.
As one of the three signature attempts to envision the post Cold War world; the Coming Anarchy alone deserves attention. For good or ill, the article presents a reasoned approach towards world affairs that policy makers are in part basing US policy on.
The remainder of the book presents other essay's the Robert Kaplan has written. Although they display the breadth of Kaplan's knowledge, the star of the book is the Coming Anarchy. Without that article, the book looses it focus... Despite this, the book is must read for anyone interested in international affairs and want to understand how the world is changing and why.
Rating: 
Summary: Snack Food, Not a Main Course, Good Samples
Review: Initially I reacted very badly to this collection of very short essays, reprints from the past. My reaction was largely a compliment to the author, whose deeper work on "The Ends of the Earth" I had just digested, and from whom I was expecting a "capstone" sort of work that was integrated and complete. Upon reflection, however, I realized that one should not confuse hors d'ouerves with the main course, and that this book is just that: a delightful set of simple samples from the author's much deeper and more complex writing and reporting. The author is strongest on historical continuity and ground truth reality. He is weakest on intelligence issues but asks the right question: how do we reduce risk around the world when traditional military forces are unsuited to the task? Writing as he does for the prestigious and eclectic Atlantic Monthly, where he is the primary (some would say the only) voice on foreign policy matters, one can only hope that he will focus in the coming year on the fundamentals of information sharing across national, cultural, and organizational boundaries--this book, and all the other books by this author, are highly recommended because they open a window on the real world that has not been opened by our very expensive government intelligence and diplomatic capabilities, and is not available from our inexpensive but all too mundane media. I would go so far as to suggest that this kind of personal travel and reflection--that the author represents so ably--is precisely the kind of future alternative intelligence capability (in the open legal ethical sense) that we must have more of, and so the question we should all be asking when we finish this book by Robert D. Kaplan is: how do we clone this guy so we have 1000 more like him, and all their reporting is easily accessible to citizens? If you like this kind of information, I highly recommend two other books: World's Most Dangerous Places, by Robert Young Pelton, and Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers, and a World of Endless Conflict by William Shawcross.
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Summary: Anyone who cares about the future MUST read this book.
Review: Robert D. Kaplan has the courage to tell what is realy going on and I admire him greatly for it. This book has opened my eyes more than any book I have ever read. The two concepts that I got out of this book are 1) the idea that the nation state is coming to an end and 2) all too frequently democracy has lead to such wonders as ethnic cleansing and other pervsities we humans are famous for. I know that these are not the sort of ideas taught in civics (if civics is even taught anymore) but if anyone wants to know what the future will bring, Kaplan presents it in a scholarly and unemotional manner. PS I only wish our famous 'C' student president 'W' would read this. He probably woulden't understand it, but what the heck, miracles can always happen.
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Summary: We're all doomed - but how 'bout Henry Kissinger???
Review: INSTRUCTION FOR READERS: Open your book. Now rip out all but the first three chapters. Now you have what you paid for! After that, forget it - it's a different book.
This book represents a favorite writer's trick. If you need a book, pull all your essays together and presto - instant book! Unfortunately, the essays have little relationship to one another. Especially when Kaplan really gets into a painful analysis of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall..." and then genuflects endlessly in an interminable essay on Henry Kissinger's thoughts on 19th Century strategists and then does a Community College, everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about Conrad's "Nostromo". (If you need a good Cliff's Notes version - this is it.) Please Bob. Either write a real book or call your essay collection for what it is. PS. The first three chapters leave the reader quite content that they got what they actually paid for. Just don't forget to rip out the rest.
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Summary: Mad Max for Highbrows
Review: While Mark Kaplan writes well, he gives the impression of being more interested in shock value than in thinking his own vision through to its ultimate consequences. Unfortunately a balanced view of the future is probably less of a crowd-puller than a vision of the apocalypse. While certain parts of the earth are rendered infernal by their inhabitants, it is tendentious to assume that the hell-like quality of such areas will engulf everywhere else. A look at every moment of history, the earth has always had hellish corners, but the fact remains that we are not ruled by the successors of Stalin, Hitler, Franco or Mao. The Sendero Luminoso did not establish a gigantic slave empire in South America. Many countries that were profoundly awful and repressive places three or five decades ago have redemocratized, with results that even former revolutionaries approve of. The urban riots that rocked civilised countries like Britain in the 1980s have died down and appear, in retrospect, to have been largely due to insensitive policing. The world is thus not fated to an inevitable process of disintegration and increasing entropy. Kaplan admits to this in an oblique fashion, by pointing out that his Turkish shanty town on the outskirts of Ankara is a world away from the slums of Sierra Leone that are terrorized by adolescent thugs. He nevertheless seems to suggest that such examples are peculiar examples of popular Islam at work that are exceptions to the general principle of social breakdown. A country like Brazil, which is experiencing a huge upsurge of charismatic Christian movements that tend to reinforce the social fabric of communities, should show that such examples of popular organisation are not the exclusive preserve of one religion. This is a key flaw in his analysis. For in projecting a bipolar world of civilisation and anarchy, he overlooks the fact that many countries have institutions that are not perfect and do not deliver to the whole population, but that are not wholly ineffective. Politicians are not philosopher-kings who govern in disinterested fashion on behalf of society as a whole but have to court special interest groups in order to get elected. There is nothing to prevent grassroots organisations from lobbying effectively for action by the state. If he had visited favelas in São Paulo, he would see the housing projects that are gradually changing the face of its periphery. Granted, there is enormous corruption involved in these projects, in the absence of which twice as many apartments could be built, but just because it is imperfect does not mean that it is doomed to failure. He instead seems to revel in telling us just how dark his African heart of darkness is. Kaplan is equally suspect in the historical parallels for decay that he cites - notably Gibbon. It is a shame that he did not mention some counterexamples, such as the early 11th century "Peace of God", where peasants and the Church spontaneously lobbied the aristocracy to curb the anarchic behaviour of the more unruly members of the latter. His vision of Nostromo is equally tendentious. Granted, in Western African countries, there may be only a few people who are able to get things done. Anyone who has done business in a large developing country like Brazil will know that there are well-defined codes of conduct and large classes of people that make things work, even if it sometimes requires 'informal' approaches to achieve results. Kaplan is right to remind us of the phantoms that haunt us. It is possible to imagine a dispossessed native underclass joining forces with an influx of marginalised immigrants to form a radical movement that challenges the hegemony of the elite. Then again, such groups may simply fight each other and thus become amenable to control. Both outcomes are possible, but the impact on the well-being of the elite would be profoundly different in each case. It is thus misleading to assume that social breakdown is inevitable everywhere, and a shame that he did not highlight an equally serious danger - of the loss of personal freedom in the name of protection against the anarchy he so enthusiastically forecasts.
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Summary: A Traveller's Forecast of the Landscape to Come
Review: Robert Kaplan raises the important questions that the end of the Cold War and the effects of Globalization will have on the world. A very interesting viewpoint that sparks a debate we need to have.
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Summary: A Ripping Read for Students of Life
Review: Anyone who thinks will be glad to read this book (and anyone who reads or watches the news really should). Great for book clubs and salons, required reading for classes in various fields, and, for the solitary reader, the total experience -- a heady blend of history, philosophy, literature, and more, worthy of the hackneyed descriptor "tour de force". Precise communication via utterly gorgeous writing. Had he only given us his explications of Kissinger and NOSTROMO, dayenu. (I'm another of those who waits for Kaplan's next releases, even though I read him in The Atlantic or, rather, read The Atlantic for him; this one, a quantum leap from great to greater.)
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Summary: Anarchy?
Review: 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.
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