By John Bolton T.S. Eliot wouldnt have minded Robert D. Kaplans expropriating the title of his most famous poem for Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. The decline of the West and the birth of modernism are among the poems themes; Mr. Kaplans book, on the unhappy and precarious state of the globe, is similarly pessimistic on many fronts. Grab a Copy Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis By Robert D. Kaplan Random House 224 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Mr. Kaplan, a scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the author of many books on global affairs, makes three broad points. First, he analogizes the current world, all of it, to Germanys interwar Weimar Republic. He argues that, as Weimar was in permanent crisis, so the entire planet is now an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules. That has long been true, but the extraordinary density and rapidity of modern communications now create a closeness that people in earlier eras did not experience. And since complexity leads to fragility, as Mr. Kaplan says, instability and conflict are riskier and more pervasive than in bygone days when geography prevented local conflicts from becoming global.Second, Mr. Kaplan argues that America, China and Russia are all in decline, although at varying rates and for widely different reasons. The U.S. suffers from decay in the culture of public life, especially the media, Mr. Kaplan writes. As the media has become less serious, so have our leaders. He compares Dwight Eisenhower, general and war hero, to Donald Trump, whom the author calls the epitome of self-centered, emotional impulses.Drawing an analogy with the late Ottoman Empire, Mr. Kaplan thinks contemporary Russia is the sick man of Eurasia. But he stresses that Russias decline is on a different scale entirely and that its in a far more advanced state of rot than the U.S. Both America and Russia had their own disastrous wars of choice, in Iraq and Ukraine respectively, but Iraq was not nearly as important to American interests as Ukraine is to Russias. U.S. decline, he says, is subtle and qualitative, while Russias civilizational slide is fundamental and quantitative. TrackingChinasworsening political leadership, Mr. Kaplan contrasts the underrated record of Chinas Deng Xiaoping with that of his successor Xi Jinping, a Leninist ideologue who has returned China to a die-hard authoritarianism comparable to the totalitarianism of Mao Zedong.Copyright 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8