The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War - Hardcover

Kaplan, Robert D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375503544 ISBN 13: 9780375503542

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

When "The Coming Anarchy" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1994, it was hailed as among the most important and influential articulations of the future of our planet, along with Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" and Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations." Since then, Robert Kaplan's anti-utopian vision of the fault lines of the twentyfirst century has taken on the status of a paradigm. "The Coming Anarchy" has been hailed as the defining thesis for understanding the post-Cold War world.

At the heart of this book is a question as old as America and one that is crucial to our national self-definition: what can and should we do when violence breaks out in countries far from our borders? A work of uncompromising honesty, The Coming Anarchy is the first book to present a coherent picture of the political views of a man who has shaped national dialogue in this decade on key issues of international relations. (The New York Times called Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts "the bestknown volume associated with the Clinton Presidency.")

The Coming Anarchy takes on some of the most difficult issues we will be grappling with and living through in the next century. When we speak about the resurgence of ethnic violence, the social pressures of disease, environmental scarcity and overpopulation, and the rise of criminal anarchy, we are using language that Robert Kaplan brought into our homes.

In "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Kaplan offers a fierce indictment of American plans to export democracy abroad, in places where it can't succeed. In "Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder," he looks with a clear eye at the consequences of the new Holocaust mentality in American foreign policy. In "Proportionalism," he lays out boundaries for a successful policy toward the developing world. And in "The Dangers of Peace," he proposes a theory of war and peace in the modern world and a vision of the future of the United Nations that will be as controversial as "The Coming Anarchy" was when it first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

Impassioned, iconoclastic, visionary, and stubbornly original, The Coming Anarchy will be one of the most important and controversial books of the new century.

About this title

Review:

Robert Kaplan warns of a "bifurcated world divided between societies like ours, producing goods and services that the rest of the world wants, and those mired in various forms of chaos." This is a familiar theme for previous Kaplan readers (Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth). For those unacquainted with Kaplan, however, The Coming Anarchy is a fine introduction to one of the most important voices on the future of society and international relations. Kaplan mixes the intense reportage of a travel writer with the sharp wisdom of a foreign-policy expert to deliver what he calls "an unrelenting record of uncomfortable truths, of the kind that many of us implicitly acknowledge but will not publicly accept." The Coming Anarchy is also a disturbing book: Kaplan's vision of the future is a bleak one, full of ethnic conflict as the world falls away from a cold war that at least provided a kind of stability in even the shakiest of countries. That's gone now, of course, and Kaplan's descriptions of life and politics in Sierra Leone, Russia, India, and elsewhere are keenly troubling. Much of the book--but not all of it--has already seen print, mainly on the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The Wall Street Journal. It is brief in length but not in importance. --John J. Miller

From the Back Cover:

"Ambitiously eclectic". [Kaplan] is one of America's most engaging writers on contemporary international affairs. --The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375503544
• ISBN 13: 9780375503542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224