Waste Land

One of the Financial Times' Books to Read in 2025

One of Foreign Policy's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

A darkly brilliant, wide-angled vision of our chaotic, globalised world, where present crises resonate with past tyrannies—from a bestselling geopolitical expert.

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm; a deadly mix of war, climate change, great-power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, and the end of empire. In Waste Land, renowned world affairs author Robert D. Kaplan explains incisively how we got here and where we are going.

Kaplan’s trademark sweep of history, literature, politics and philosophy draws parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic. Today, too, every national disaster could spread across the world, given this century’s singular dilemmas—pandemics, recessions; urbanisation, mass migration; destabilisation under large-scale democracy and great-power conflict; and the intimate bonds forged by digital media. Could stability and historic liberalism, rather than mass democracy per se, save world populations from anarchic breakdown?

Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by twenty-first–century technology, but remarkably resonant with the past. The situation may be spiralling out of our control—unless our leaders act first.

Robert D. Kaplan’s books include The Loom of Time; The Tragic Mind; and The Coming Anarchy. The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics, formerly a Pentagon and U.S. Navy advisor, and for three decades an Atlantic foreign affairs reporter, he twice made Foreign Policy’s ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’.