Robert Kaplan Expresses the Nihilism of Our Ruling Class

Review of Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (Random House, 2025).

So much has been written about the naive optimism of the 1990s that trashing it now feels otiose, even cowardly. Few thinkers have been so panned in hindsight (or so widely misrepresented) as Francis Fukuyama and his inauguration of the End of History and the Last Man. What could fairly be read as a rather forlorn prognosis — the termination of the epic journey of human progress in a liberal paradigm that fails to satisfy human yearning — has since generally been received as a hubristic claim to earthly utopia.

Part of the myth surrounding the text is the impression that it stood alone and spoke unanimously, at least in establishment circles. But there was always a dissenting opinion. The underbelly of elite pessimism found its most articulate voices in the likes of British philosopher John Gray and the US realist international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. In its more caustic versions, such as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, such thinking envisaged a scenario where civilizational conflict would supersede the ideological struggles of the twentieth century.

Robert Kaplan established himself as part of this scene with his 1994 essay “The Coming Anarchy.” His warnings of disorder in the wake of the Cold War, of the new geographies of chaos that would be released from the interimperial deadlock, won him a hearing in Washington circles struggling to come to terms with the scope and function of US global power.

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