In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan—the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics and author of seminal works like The Revenge of Geography and The Coming Anarchy—delivers a stark diagnosis of our global condition. His harrowing analogy is that the world has become "one big Weimar": a system "connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent." This structural fragility, Kaplan argues, has plunged the globe into a state of "permanent crisis."

This predicament compels an urgent inquiry into the defining questions of our era: Why does our technologically advanced world fragment under the pressure of cascading instability? What lessons can historical parallels, from the fall of empires to the Russian Revolution, offer about the perils ahead? Kaplan provides a vital guide for navigating the treacherous geopolitical landscape of the 21st century—a global "Waste Land" where anything is possible.