185 pp. New York
February 2001
Vintage. US $12.00 CDN $18.00
Check it out at Barnes and Noble
Vancouver- Robert Kaplan has made quite a name for himself peddling doom and gloom predictions of what the future holds. Not that I am against this kind of talk, he is after all using the realist model of thinking to suggest why there are places in the world that, well, just plain suck.
Kaplan, part journalist, part philosopher, has used his writing in the past decade to predict that already there is evidence today that the world’s future is not one of prolonged peace that many have suggested. Instead he uses his travels to illustrate that in the post-Cold War world there is a ”Coming Anarchy”.
And the lead essay in his book of the same name, originally published in a 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, is the heart of his argument.
In simple terms, his premise is that crime, overpopulation, hunger, disease, tribalization, and scarcity of resources are tearing apart the social fabric of the planet.
But what Kaplan does, and make no mistake he does it well and eloquently too, is to illustrate the problems of places like the nations of West Africa and draws conclusions about what is likely to be the outcome of the 21st century.
For Kaplan, West African nations are the symbols, “of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real strategic danger.”
He goes on to suggest that in places like this, and for most of the developing world for that matter, there is a, “withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war.”
He paints a picture of what is happening in failed nations all over the world and concludes that this is the seeds of our own destruction. That somehow he seems to be saying that the future of even places like the Industrialized nations is one of war and disease.
But written so long ago some of what he talks about already seems terribly dated. His dire predictions about the environment for instance are an unhealthy acceptance of thirty years of junk science from overpopulation to global warming to rising sea levels.
His extended devotion to the cultural and racial clashes of the world, what he refers to as tribalization, in places like the Balkans and the Middle East are insightful. He seems to be warning us about the explosions of these areas over religion, race, and culture. Most importantly he makes the case that we ignore these hot spots, specifically Africa, at our own peril.
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