Rating: 
Summary: gloriously and sublimely depressing
Review: I was introduced to Robert Kaplan's work through his articles for Atlantic Monthly. His analysis of the world stage is so insightful and realistic it makes most of the other things I've read in the area seem like Fairy Tales and Demagoguery. In a previous book he successfully foretold the crisis in the Balkans, in this book he brings his pen and his observational acumen to the edge of civilization.This book is essentially a travel journal; Mr. Kaplan joins up with backpackers, gets hassled at borders, gets overcharged for train tickets. Fortunately for the reader, Mr. Kaplan's travels have the singular, though somewhat opaque purpose of divining the state of the societies in which he travels. The things observed, though interesting in their own right, are weaved by Mr. Kaplan into a roughly hewn picture of the cultures in which he travels. Things as simple as the look in the eye of a street urchin or the way in which a woman covers her head contribute to this picture in invaluable ways. Kaplan's assessments are, on the whole, fairly pessimistic and he is skeptical about the efficacy of foreign assistance. One of Kaplan's overarching themes is that many of the dynamics that are at work in these places are nearly impossible to disarm from the outside, and that attempts to do so often cause more harm than good.
There is a tinge of fatalism in the accounts of many regions, West Africa, for one. But Kaplan does leave his readers with a mere series of plaintive elegies. His reification of the mechanics of chaotic polity offer many constructive lessons on how to offer modest assistance, and more important, how to avoid exacerbating these situations through well-intentioned meddling. My understanding of the volatile regions of our world was greatly improved by this book. For that reason alone, I recommend it to all readers.
Rating:
Summary: Well-Read Traveler Trumps $30 Billion a Year Spy World
Review: If you ever wondered why the U.S. Intelligence Community tries so desperately to keep its annual budget secret from Congress and the citizens, this book might provide a clue: one man, very well-grounded in historical and contextual reading, is capable of reporting extremely valuable insights that neither a $30 billion a year spy world nor a $3 billion a year diplomatic community seem capable of either comprehending or communicating to the public. Robert D. Kaplan gets three big things right: he studies history before visiting; he is firmly grounded in a geographical or geophysical appreciation of every situation; and he travels on foot and at the lowest common level. The world he sees and reports on is not the world that the pampered and sheltered diplomats, businessmen, and journalists see or understand. Reading Kaplan is a treat for anyone who takes the rest of the world and America's naivete with some seriousness. He is correct when he posits a new World War, "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population pressure, environmental degradation, disease, and culture conflict." He is at his best when mixing his historical reading with his personal intellect and observations, to arrive at conclusions that contradict conventional wisdom--for instance, his appreciation of Iran as a structured and stable society, and of Turkey as the next mega-power and the keeper of the Islamic flame. His extremely sharp observations about Saudi Arabia as the hidden enemy of the United States of America are very very provocative, especially when one realizes that we are providing them with an extremely generous military and economic program at U.S. taxpayer expense. Saudi funding of terrorism, including Bin Laden, is increasingly documented in the public domain, and U.S. taxpayers need to begin questioning U.S. policy in this specific area. This personal travel narrative is invaluable as a means of contemplating the realities of nations that exist (e.g. the Kurds) alongside states that continue to persecute and deny these nations a right to live. Although another hundred pages follow, the real end of the book is on page 336 where he discusses a living map of the future world, one that is constantly changing and that reflects several realities--a reality of overlapping group identities such as those of language and economic class; a reality of legal boundaries and overlapping and sometimes conflicting cultural boundaries; a reality of power distributed and often shared openly between police, criminals, terrorists, white-collar thieves, and politicians; and a reality of population growth, disease, refugee migrations and genocide; as well as soil and water scarcity. His bibliography is quite worthwhile, and helps make his personal reporting even more valuable. I have but one disappointment, and that is that this prolific author and policy commentator, a major force (indeed, the only continuous voice on foreign policy matters for The Atlantic Monthly), has failed to provide a concluding section that pulls it all together in an executive briefing suitable for policy consideration. There are many valuable lessons and observations in this book, I recommend it highly, but I fear that the policy-makers who most desperately need to be educated will never, ever actually read the book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Realist's Take on the World
Review: Those familiar with Kaplan’s work know the author doesn’t exactly travel to the world’s vacation spots. When most Americans go abroad, they explore prefer to Paris or sip espresso in a warm villa in Tuscany. When Kaplan goes abroad he finds himself traveling in countries where underpaid soldiers shake him down for bribes to pass their checkpoints and people live in appallingly squalid conditions. “Ends of the Earth†will give the reader a vivid feel for life in the Third World.
Kaplan’s “Atlantic Monthly†article, “The Coming Anarchyâ€Â, is kind of a primer for reading “Ends of the Earth†(portions of it re-appear): much of the world depicted by Kaplan is nasty, brutal and harsh, as the collapse of law and order leads to a repeating circle of violence and chaos. The more the state collapses under the strain of violence, the more the violence increases. Environmental decay, in turn, makes natural resources scarce, which causes people to fight over these ever-dwindling resources. Kaplan concentrates on Africa in the original article but he has expanded on that point in “Ends of the Earthâ€Â, by pointing out that his thesis is applicable to other problems in the world: China, India, Egypt, Turkey, etc. Kaplan basically backpacks around each of the countries, staying in slummier hotels and living with local families. Like any good travel writer, Kaplan gives the writer a vivid feel for the places he goes to. A lot of travel readers might find Kaplan’s focus on history uninteresting, but I appreciate it because I agree that where we’ve been is the closest indicator of where the world is going. Someone once said that a page of history is worth a volume of logic, and I think Kaplan illustrates how history and geography dictate what sort of culture, economy and foreign policy a nation has. I particularly enjoyed the sections of the book dealing with Iran. I’ve long been fascinated by the Persian land, with its ancient culture. Kaplan presents a country that is misunderstood in the Western world: Iran is a land of rich culture and a deep appreciation of art and beauty. The picture that Kaplan presents to the reader is that, unlike the rest of the Arab world, with its spare and dogmatic adherence to Islam, Iran is a country with a deep appreciation of beauty and a great capacity for tolerance. Its people are intelligent and open-minded, its society is not rife with chauvinism and hatred and there is great possibility in Iran for a meaningful dialogue. The cultural observations Kaplan noted: how open-minded Iranian students were, how Iranian women were treated better and were more assertive than their Saudi counterparts, how tolerant the Shi’ite brand of Islam seemed compared with its more warrior-like Sunni counterparts, are all important clues to Kaplan that Iran is a nation far more willing to break bread with the U.S. and have some sort of partnership. The section on Iran is well-worth the price of the book. One of the great things about Kaplan’s writing is his ability to smoke out trends or facts that escape the notice of the modern media. His comments about Iranian culture and society are an example of this. Also interesting is seeing how environmental scarcity and ethnic and religious tensions drive history: the growth of the Thai sex industry, for example, has much to do with deforestation in northern Thailand. (In the book Kaplan explains that logging by the Thai military means that rural villagers in the north can no longer make ends meet because their farmland is being destroyed, so many girls in their teens and twenties go to Bangkok to work in the massage parlors and the go-go bars.) Before reading “Ends of the Earth†I didn’t know that, and I doubt that people would make the causal connection between the two. Liberals, I suspect, won’t have much to cheer from reading “The Ends of the Earthâ€Â, and most of Kaplan’s critics sit on the left. Kaplan sees himself as a classical realist, so he has no words of praise for idealists or those who bring their ideological causes to an analysis of the world. These liberals who think U.S. law enforcement customs are possible in the Third World are, Kaplan believes, getting the world wrong by bringing their own ideology to the table. Unsurprisingly, Kaplan’s unsparing criticism of African politics and government has provoked many to roundly denounce him as a racist, a charge that simply doesn’t hold water. Kaplan is no racist: he sees disorder and writes about it, and he sees the lack of African development and freedom (as compared with Europe and America) as mostly being a function of environment and social factors. Unlike many liberals, Kaplan has actually bothered to try and travel like a native citizen would: no limousines, no private jets. The world that he sees is the world that people live in. There is nothing racist in that. Critics also fail to note that Kaplan has criticized Western nations like France, England, Portugal, and Germany for drawing borders in Africa without any sort of concern for having them actually make geopolitical sense. As a consequence, Kaplan notes, often ethnic tribes are cut in half by European borders, contributing to the lack of unity and the social strife that has engulfed West Africa. Finally, I wish that Kaplan had devoted a bit more time in his travels to India and Southeast Asia, instead of Central Asia. As Kaplan notes, he’s been to Pakistan ten times in his life, so he has written volumes about the country. I was fascinated to read about India, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand because they were so different from the places Kaplan usually goes culturally and politically. After I got done reading the final section on Indochina, I thought: “I want to know more!†In the final analysis, “Ends of the Earth†is a terrific book. Those interested in the world around us will be fascinated. I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: A Provocative Travelogue
Review: Kaplan presents more than a travelogue of some of the most inaccessible places in the world, he also makes a compelling case about why these forgotten pockets need to be of more than passing concern to citizens of developed countries. While the author's characterization of these "frontiers of anarchy" is provocative, his arguments cannot be ignored. This book's first third, which focuses on West Africa, can be profitably read alongside an in-depth study like LIBERIA: PORTRAIT OF A FAILED STATE by John Peter Pham, published by Reed Press, which gives a detailed analysis of the strategic importance that Kaplan ascribes to regional conflicts.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Use of Reading Time
Review: Although Kaplan attempts to style this dense book as a semi-linear travel narrative, it is actually more of an heavily footnoted eyewitness account of the dramatic transitions occurring in various developing regions. Chock full of provocative and disturbing ideas culled from many social sciences, the book starts with a largely pessimistic 89 pages of West Africa and 37 pages of Egypt. I didn't find anything particularly new or illuminating in these two sections, but they serve as a good introduction to the issues if you aren't familiar with what's happening there, although recent events somewhat date his account of West Africa in particular. It didn't take me long to get fed up with Kaplan's machine gun use of statistics to support his observations. That, and his tendency to repeat himself, undermine his attempts at literary narrative. Fortunately, I came to a deeply engrossing 45 pages of Turkey and the Caucuses, 70 pages of Iran, and 96 pages of Central Asia. These three sections were what made the book for me, even readers already familiar with the areas will find value in Kaplan's account. It was here that Kaplan seemed most comfortable and most knowledgeable. Lots of great info about the ethnic dynamics of the areas and great historical tidbits make these worth interesting even if you don't read the sections before or after. What follows is a sporadically interesting 100 pages on the Indian subcontinent and "Indochina." The book is greatly aided by its maps, and Kaplan is careful to acknowledge the sources of the ideas he presents. There is also an excellent bibliography for those interested in followup reading. The great value in this book lies in Kaplan's insistence (correct in my belief) that population growth is the single most destabilizing force in the world today and that it must be addressed before all else.
Rating:
Summary: Uncovering the new threats of the 21st century
Review: Robert Kaplan sought to achieve a rather ambitious aim when he set out to research and write this book; he wanted to find a new paradigm to understand the early decades of the 21st century. Kaplan noted that some experts focused on the effects of overpopulation and environmental degradation as the dominant forces (particularly in the developing world), while others spoke of a "new anarchy" (such as former UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar, he and others noting that of the eighty wars between 1945 and 1995, forty-six were either civil wars or guerilla insurgencies). In 1993, forty-two countries were involved in major conflicts and thirty-seven others were suffering some lesser form of political violence (sixty-five of these seventy-nine nations were in the developing world). Kaplan journeyed through sub-Saharan West Africa from Guinea to Togo and through Egypt, Turkey, Iran, former Soviet Central Asia, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia in his research for the book. He found a predictably bleak situation in Africa. While 13 percent of the human race lives in Africa, they contribute only 1.2 percent of the world's gross domestic product. Crime - particularly violent crime - is soaring in much of Africa; for a time the United States suspended direct flights from the U.S. to Lagos, Nigeria due to the rampant violent crime at the terminal and nearby, the first time any such embargo had occurred for non-political and non-terrorist reasons. Soaring malaria in Africa is intensifying the spread of AIDS (as malaria can result in anemia, which requires blood transfusions), just as AIDS and tuberculosis are helping each other's spread. As bad as the economy, crime, and disease in Africa are though, Kaplan believes the real problem in sub-Saharan Africa is too-rapid urbanization, a problem he comes to again and again in the book. Festering "bush-slums" that appear on few maps border many African cities, where relatively prosperous cities end up being "slum-magnets for an emptying countryside." He visited several such slums in Ivory Coast and elsewhere in West Africa, many packed with migrants from Mali, Niger, and elsewhere (50% of the population of the Ivory Coast is now non-Ivorian). The native forest culture of Africa, however primitive, was being destroyed by soaring birthrates, alcohol, cheap guns, and extremely dense concentrations of humanity in slums that lacked any stabilizing and unifying government or culture. Though he does not believe this to be the only factor in the bloody conflicts in Liberia and elsewhere, he does believe it to be a dominant one. Though not leading to the level of social breakdown as seen in Africa, rapidly growing cities - packed with peasants drawn in from the countryside - was a dominant feature in other nations he found as well. China, while touted at the time of writing as having a 14 per cent growth rate, really meant that coastal China was growing; this growth did not apply to inland China (and also could be said to favor the cities and not the countryside), leading to a mass migration from the countryside. Migration to shantytowns in Pakistan is tremendous, owing in large part to a skyrocketing population rate (only 9 percent of Pakistani women use contraceptives and the population of Pakistan is close to doubling every twenty years), a situation leading to empty villages and a poorly urbanized peasantry that cities are unable to cope with. Kaplan found similar problems in Egypt, where urban poverty and newly urbanized peasants, threatened with the loss of traditions, the government unable to help them, with basic services like water and electricity breaking down, having found something to turn to; Islam. Islam is thriving in a time of unregulated urbanization and internal and external refugee migrations. With increasingly militant Islamic Egyptians turning against Christian Arabs (both Coptic Christians, who like the Lebanese Kaplan met in West Africa and the Korean grocers of South Los Angeles, formed a "middlemen minority" in Egypt, as well as the Christian leaders like UN secretary-general Boutros-Ghali who failed to aid Bosnian Muslims) and turning to the Ikhwan el Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) for social services instead of an increasingly overburdened state, Kaplan sees scarcity and woes of the urbanized peasantry of the shantytowns as the driving force in many ways in Egypt. The growing marriage of Islam and urbanized peasantry was not unique to Egypt. To a somewhat lesser extent Kaplan found a similar process on-going in Turkey, as the Turkish migrants to the gecekondus (literally "built in the night;" shanty-town houses) on the fringes of Istanbul found more aid from the Islamic Welfare Party in the form of water, coal, and food than from the Turkish government itself. In some areas of western China such as Kashgar, overcrowding, unemployment, and the lack of any real middle class was leading to a Muslim resurgence there among non-ethnic Chinese. So what did Kaplan learn from his travels? He was quite frustrated, and found that the more he traveled the less he felt he knew. Kaplan did grow disgusted with the idea of political "science," paraphrasing Tolstoy in _Anna Karenina_ in writing that while successful cultures are in many ways alike, unsuccessful ones fail each in their own way. He did come to the conclusion that nation-states at least in West Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia were weakening. In some cases organizations and entities outside or beyond the state - such as the various Islamic groups in Egypt and Turkey - were starting to fill in the vacuum, while in other, failed states such as Sierra Leone, nothing was taking its place. Borders in some regions, the legacy of long-gone European imperial powers, were becoming less and less important. Laos and Cambodia were in some sense creations of the French, areas that might have long been swallowed by the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai and were now being divided up economically if not politically by these countries. I think his firmest conclusion though was that poorly and newly urbanized rural poor flocking to the cities represented the greatest challenge.
Rating:
Summary: The possible fracture lines
Review: I give this book five stars for one reason: it is important to read it and to keep thinking about its main subject: the future of the nation-state and the possible consequences of its demise. Kaplan knows he is going to be subjective. That's fine. He is well-read and travels with a good piece of luggage: previous knowledge of the history of the places he's going to -unlike most of the backpackers he correctly mocks at-. Kaplan is a good writer. He goes to fascinating and really different places. But the important thing about the book is his reflections on the future of the world, from the standpoint of these societies. This book takes us to some of the places where the future of humanity will be decided, within the next decades. These are regions in crisis, in its clinical, primary meaning: artificial borders, paper-States, overpopulation, an exhaustion of natural resources, forced and vertiginous urbanization, and one more thing: the rapid increase in violent religious fanatism, as a consequence of the erosion of identity in the misery-ridden slums of the Third World. The rank-and-file of the fundamentalist threats is formed by poor peasants who suddenly had lo leave their land and become lumpen-proletariats in Cairo, Ankara or some other megalopolis. West Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeastern Asia, are "fracture lines". These regions are living the beginning of the end of the Nation-state as the basic cell of human political organization, only in the other end of the spectrum, compared with the European Union. And yet there is hope. As in Rishi Valley, what we still call the Third World need not be lost for peace, prosperity and a promising future. At least, not all of it. For that outcome to happen, the West has to turn its eyes and minds to help. Clearly, the West can not do what these peoples themselves are not willing to do. But the West must help when it is possible. The elites of these nations must come to terms with their responsibilities in leading their peoples out of the bleak way in which some of them are embarked. It is possible, but first we have to know the problems. And Kaplan is helping with his books.
Rating:
Summary: A Realist's Take on the World
Review: Those familiar with Kaplan’s work know the author doesn’t exactly travel to the world’s vacation spots. When most Americans go abroad, they explore prefer to Paris or sip espresso in a warm villa in Tuscany. When Kaplan goes abroad he finds himself traveling in countries where underpaid soldiers shake him down for bribes to pass their checkpoints and people live in appallingly squalid conditions. “Ends of the Earth†will give the reader a vivid feel for life in the Third World. Kaplan’s “Atlantic Monthly†article, “The Coming Anarchyâ€, is kind of a primer for reading “Ends of the Earth†(portions of it re-appear): much of the world depicted by Kaplan is nasty, brutal and harsh, as the collapse of law and order leads to a repeating circle of violence and chaos. The more the state collapses under the strain of violence, the more the violence increases. Environmental decay, in turn, makes natural resources scarce, which causes people to fight over these ever-dwindling resources. Kaplan concentrates on Africa in the original article but he has expanded on that point in “Ends of the Earthâ€, by pointing out that his thesis is applicable to other problems in the world: China, India, Egypt, Turkey, etc. Kaplan basically backpacks around each of the countries, staying in slummier hotels and living with local families. Like any good travel writer, Kaplan gives the writer a vivid feel for the places he goes to. A lot of travel readers might find Kaplan’s focus on history uninteresting, but I appreciate it because I agree that where we’ve been is the closest indicator of where the world is going. Someone once said that a page of history is worth a volume of logic, and I think Kaplan illustrates how history and geography dictate what sort of culture, economy and foreign policy a nation has. I particularly enjoyed the sections of the book dealing with Iran. I’ve long been fascinated by the Persian land, with its ancient culture. Kaplan presents a country that is misunderstood in the Western world: Iran is a land of rich culture and a deep appreciation of art and beauty. The picture that Kaplan presents to the reader is that, unlike the rest of the Arab world, with its spare and dogmatic adherence to Islam, Iran is a country with a deep appreciation of beauty and a great capacity for tolerance. Its people are intelligent and open-minded, its society is not rife with chauvinism and hatred and there is great possibility in Iran for a meaningful dialogue. The cultural observations Kaplan noted: how open-minded Iranian students were, how Iranian women were treated better and were more assertive than their Saudi counterparts, how tolerant the Shi’ite brand of Islam seemed compared with its more warrior-like Sunni counterparts, are all important clues to Kaplan that Iran is a nation far more willing to break bread with the U.S. and have some sort of partnership. The section on Iran is well-worth the price of the book. One of the great things about Kaplan’s writing is his ability to smoke out trends or facts that escape the notice of the modern media. His comments about Iranian culture and society are an example of this. Also interesting is seeing how environmental scarcity and ethnic and religious tensions drive history: the growth of the Thai sex industry, for example, has much to do with deforestation in northern Thailand. (In the book Kaplan explains that logging by the Thai military means that rural villagers in the north can no longer make ends meet because their farmland is being destroyed, so many girls in their teens and twenties go to Bangkok to work in the massage parlors and the go-go bars.) Before reading “Ends of the Earth†I didn’t know that, and I doubt that people would make the causal connection between the two. Liberals, I suspect, won’t have much to cheer from reading “The Ends of the Earthâ€, and most of Kaplan’s critics sit on the left. Kaplan sees himself as a classical realist, so he has no words of praise for idealists or those who bring their ideological causes to an analysis of the world. These liberals who think U.S. law enforcement customs are possible in the Third World are, Kaplan believes, getting the world wrong by bringing their own ideology to the table. Unsurprisingly, Kaplan’s unsparing criticism of African politics and government has provoked many to roundly denounce him as a racist, a charge that simply doesn’t hold water. Kaplan is no racist: he sees disorder and writes about it, and he sees the lack of African development and freedom (as compared with Europe and America) as mostly being a function of environment and social factors. Unlike many liberals, Kaplan has actually bothered to try and travel like a native citizen would: no limousines, no private jets. The world that he sees is the world that people live in. There is nothing racist in that. Critics also fail to note that Kaplan has criticized Western nations like France, England, Portugal, and Germany for drawing borders in Africa without any sort of concern for having them actually make geopolitical sense. As a consequence, Kaplan notes, often ethnic tribes are cut in half by European borders, contributing to the lack of unity and the social strife that has engulfed West Africa. Finally, I wish that Kaplan had devoted a bit more time in his travels to India and Southeast Asia, instead of Central Asia. As Kaplan notes, he’s been to Pakistan ten times in his life, so he has written volumes about the country. I was fascinated to read about India, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand because they were so different from the places Kaplan usually goes culturally and politically. After I got done reading the final section on Indochina, I thought: “I want to know more!†In the final analysis, “Ends of the Earth†is a terrific book. Those interested in the world around us will be fascinated. I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: An Intellectual Journey Through Turmoil
Review: Robert Kaplan succeeds in transporting the reader to East Africa, West Africa, Soutwest Asia, and Southern Asia all in one fantastically written. Kaplan has cemented his place as my favorite author of all time!
Rating:
Summary: Travels from hell and back
Review: This is the kind of travel you don't want to do. Yet, you have to be grateful a Westerner is daring enough to do it on your behalf for the sake of enhancing your awareness in the comfort of your home. His depiction of Africa and Central Asia are unforgetable if not almost terrifying. His specific analysis of Pakistan is fascinating, looking at 'social' factors and then the 'physical' factors. He borrows this social vs. natural factor analysis from Homer-Dixon. As mentioned above, a dimension to his writing, is Kaplan's quality as an "intellectual aggregator." He borrows material from tens of luminaries on various subjects. So, he rarely develops a theory in vacuum. He first aggregates different blocks of a political theory and then connects the dots between the blocks. He does that better than most. This makes for a very insightful and informative book.
|
