Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

By Robert D. Kaplan

Penguin Random House/January 2025

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

April 1, 2025

We find ourselves, writes Robert Kaplan in Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, in an “exceedingly fragile phase” of technological and political transition, with no assurance of a happy ending.

Our world is more anxious, more claustrophobic, more interconnected than ever before. Our politics — local, national, and international — has rarely before, says Kaplan, been played out on such an intense, globe-spanning and consequential level. Technology, especially digital communications, makes it abstract and therefore more extreme. As a result, we are creating vast political distances between even our closest neighbors and losing the bonds of community and shared purpose.

Kaplan’s explorations of global trouble spots, in some cases before they become trouble spots, make him seem remarkably prescient. Balkan Ghosts provided early context for Slobodan Milosevic’s reign of terror. Monsoon was a scene-setter for both China’s supply chain and security designs on the Indian Ocean and the rise of Narendra Modi. They are just two of his 20-plus previous books. Kaplan complements his travelling and writing by also holding the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The title Waste Land is, of course, drawn from Nobel Laureate T.S. Eliot’s epic, dissonant 1922 poem The Waste Land. Kaplan’s Waste Land is a short book in three parts: really three essays linked by the common theme of the threat of civilizational decline.

The first essay looks at the Weimar Republic which, born out of the First World War, was designed to prevent autocracy. While Weimar produced a deeply artistic flowering of art and literature and statesmen including Walther Rathenau and Gustav Stresemann, it collapsed when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

The Weimar story reminds us, says Kaplan, how fragile governmental authority is in many parts of the world and how little it takes to undermine it. Weimar operated in a world beset by multiple crises, “divided and alienated from itself, led by weak or reluctant politicians” confronted by problems including catastrophic inflation and depression that would have daunted a Bismarck.

The second part addresses the problem of preserving order as the precondition to liberty and freedom. Order, for Kaplan, means basic institutions that function with checks and balances. Kaplan likes constitutional monarchy because it takes the pomp and circumstance from the politicians and parks it with a ceremonial and politically impotent monarch.

Devoting a long section to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his books on life under Stalin, Kaplan says it is a ‘conceit’ of the modern world, especially of the West, that “history is governed by reason.” He points to Shakespeare’s plays, especially the histories and tragedies, to demonstrate that leaders decide based on fear, passion or honour.

Kaplan also points to the role of contingency. The Russian Revolution, Hitler’s rise and, arguably, the re-ascendency of Donald Trump are contingent events that could easily have gone in another direction but, once in place, set in motion a train of tragic events. The lesson here is to not take good fortune for granted and assume it is a permanent condition. We need, says Kaplan, to think tragically to avoid tragedy.

The title Waste Land is, of course, drawn from Nobel Laureate T.S. Eliot’s epic, dissonant 1922 poem The Waste Land. Kaplan’s Waste Land is a short book in three parts: really three essays linked by the common theme of the threat of civilizational decline.

The third section looks at civilizational decline. Kaplan believes China, Russia and the United States are all in ‘decline’. But decline can take decades or, in the case of the Ottomans, centuries to play out. The British Royal Navy, the arbiter of British power, began to decline in the 1890s, but that did not stop Great Britain from saving the world half a century later in the 1940s. It was only after the war that Britain literally ran out of money, obliging the retreat and disappearance of an empire where once the sun never set.

Revolutions, warns Kaplan, begin with idealism and end with fanaticism. In their times, nobody could foresee the vast death machines of Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Nor how Vladimir Putin’s unnecessary war in Ukraine might “chain-react with other upheavals to forge a new world of permanent crisis.”

The abolition of stabilizing norms and traditions allowed the rise of abstract and utopian movements from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks to Pol Pot and Ayatollah Khomeini. Each in its own way, writes Kaplan, constituted a “dictatorship of perfect virtue since, in each case, ideology was paramount.”

In his Harvard doctoral dissertation, A World Restored, Henry Kissinger wrote of the Napoleonic upheavals that, “the most fundamental problem of politics … is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”

More dangerous these days than limited righteousness may be untethered self-righteousness, which lies at the heart of some of our pettiest tyrannies. Kaplan worries that many of our elite universities, responsible for educating our future leadership, are succumbing to the “tyranny of perfect virtue in regard to race and foreign policy”.

What made America great, observes Kaplan, is not just its ideals but its institutions and a political order that aimed for the vital centre. That centre has evaporated as the two traditional parties moved to the extremes, putting its institutions under stress as never before. With Donald Trump seemingly intent on abandoning, if not actively undermining, the rules-based order created and sustained by successive American presidents, there is “no night watchman to keep the peace between its constituent parts.”

In their farewell addresses, presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Joe Biden warned, respectively, of a “military-industrial complex’’ and a “tech-industrial complex”. As technology makes our world more connected, the pace and quality of connectivity and of closeness will accelerate, delivering many wonders. But it will also transmit disease variants and toxic destabilizing elements that can threaten to overwhelm us.

By failing to hold onto our values and traditions, concludes Kaplan, a nation or civilization loses “form”. The most obvious sign of this in advanced civilizations is its takeover by a “money culture” with no sense of a past or where it came from.

Waste Land is not a read for the pre-depressed (I read it listening to Angele Dubeau, whose music always uplifts). But in a time of seemingly permanent crisis and declining democracies, Waste Land is an insightful book from an author whose work, had it been paid as close attention by the righteous as by the wicked, might have helped avoid some of our current chaos. As Kaplan concludes; “the future is here and, wherever we are, we are stuck in traffic.”

Policy Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow and host of the Global Exchange podcast with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa.