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

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.

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of six previous books on travel and foreign affairs, translated into a dozen languages. His bestseller Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Best Books of 1993 and by Amazon.com as one of the top ten travel books of all time. An Empire Wilderness and The Ends of the Earth were also national bestsellers; the former was chosen by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as Best Book of the Year. Kaplan lectures frequently to the U.S. military, was a consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces Regiment, and is a fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written the Introduction to the Modern Library's edition of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim & Nostromo. Kaplan lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.