# Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis - Hardcover

by **Robert D. Kaplan** (Author)

**An urgent exploration of a world in constant crisis, where every regional disaster threatens to become a global conflict, with lessons from history that can stop the spiral--from the _New York Times_ bestselling author of _The Revenge of Geography_**

"Provocative and wide-ranging . . . can be read slowly to savour its complexities and historical resonances or in one sitting, as I first read it, compelled by the force of its arguments."--_The Sunday Times_ (UK)

**One of _Financial Times_' Most Important Books to Read This Year - One of _Foreign Policy_'s Most Anticipated Books of the Year**

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm in which the world faces a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of both monarchy and empire, and countless other dangers. In _Waste Land_, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of more than twenty books on world affairs, incisively explains how we got here and where we are going. Kaplan makes a novel argument that the current geopolitical landscape must be considered alongside contemporary social phenomena such as urbanization and digital news media, grounding his ideas in foundational modern works of philosophy, politics, and literature, including the poem from which the title is borrowed, and celebrating a canon of traditionally conservative thinkers, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and many others.

As in many of his books, Kaplan looks to history and literature to inform the present, drawing particular comparisons between today's challenges and the Weimar Republic, the post-World War I democratic German government that fell to Nazism in the 1930s. Just as in Weimar, which faced myriad crises inextricably bound up with global systems, the singular dilemmas of the twenty-first century--pandemic disease, recession, mass migration, the destabilizing effects of large-scale democracy and great power conflicts, and the intimate bonds created by technology--mean that every disaster in one country has the potential to become a global crisis, too. According to Kaplan, the solutions lie in prioritizing order in governing systems, arguing that stability and historic liberalism rather than mass democracy per se will save global populations from an anarchic future.

_Waste Land_ is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by the connections afforded by technology but with remarkable parallels to the past. Just as it did in Weimar, Kaplan fears the situation may be spiraling out of our control--unless our leaders act first.

### Author Biography

**Robert D. Kaplan** is the bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including _The Loom of Time_, _Adriatic_, _The Good American_, _The Revenge of Geography_, _Asia's Cauldron_, _Monsoon_, _The Coming Anarchy_, and _Balkan Ghosts_. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hup? Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for _The Atlantic._ He was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. _Foreign Policy_ twice named him one of the world's Top 100 Global Thinkers.

**Number of Pages:** 224

**Dimensions:** 1.1 x 9.3 x 6.3 IN

**Publication Date:** January 28, 2025

## Details

- **Price:** 31.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 31.00 USD | In stock |

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- Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis - Hardcover

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