My fourth (read) book by Kaplan is the apex of his thesis. What thesis? First, geography matters. Still true, Kaplan says, but in this book, modified by other forces. Second, geography does not determine history but strongly conditions it. This conditioning remains, but a set of global and interlocking destabilizing phenomena skew its impact. Third, individuals make a difference from two directions. On one side are rare individuals, typically members of the political elite, whether democratic or autocratic, whose choices can shift historical momentum in one direction or another. Kaplan refers to these individuals as “hinge persons.” On the other side is the mob (and he means a literal mob), whose actions can constrain, for good or ill, what the elite can do, even having the ability, sometimes, to force them from power.
Waste Land is Kaplan’s most inclusive view of everything, and its overall effect is pessimistic. He considers:
- Rising populations are, in most places, becoming poorer by the year. Many populations, including China’s, are rapidly aging and shrinking, deviating from the typical demographic trend. By contrast, Africa, which in 2025 hosts about twenty percent of the world’s population, is expected to grow to forty percent by 2050. India, South America, and much of Southeast Asia are also increasing. Overpopulation exacerbates every other destabilizer.
- The fragile economics of interconnected supply chains rest on a non-existent global political order. An international order only appears to exist when relations between nations are peaceful. However, peace between trading partners can easily collapse: witness Russia versus the EU. As the population expands and, in particular, as expectations rise (see technology below), continuing peace and progress depend on the smooth functioning of these mechanisms.
- The technology revolution, and in particular the now globe-spanning Internet. People in poor places now see how people in rich places live, stoking demand for a bigger slice of the pie. Events are reflected across the world almost instantly, but not their more nuanced causes or other details. Partial information can impel political elites to act precipitously before they fully understand what has happened. The lack of detail also opens the door to malicious actors who take such opportunities to flood the Internet with false information, lending strength to counterproductive, precipitous action, sometimes by mobs. AI, for all the good it could do, also enhances this problem. Large Language Model AI can generate such volumes of disinformation and misinformation at the behest of malicious actors that it becomes impossible to discern what is true from what is false.
- Pollution and ecological degradation. We are poisoning our biosphere. Carbon and methane foul our atmosphere, the oceans become acidic, and plastic accumulates on our cropland, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Most of the Earth’s populations now live with measurable amounts of plastic in their brains. Microplastics are bad. Nanoplastics—so small that ordinary microscopes cannot see them —are much worse. A disproportionate amount of these (estimates vary from 30 to 70 percent) comes from one source: the daily wearing down of trillions of automobile and truck tires, whose residue is picked up by winds and rain and deposited everywhere. Nor is plastic the only material poisoning us. Industries and large-scale farms have been dumping toxic pollutants into waterways and landfills for two centuries. Many of the coastal dead zones and declines in fish and shellfish populations stem from this. More esoterically, every satellite that burns up in the atmosphere releases toxic metals that slowly settle into the air we breathe. The settling process can take a decade or two, but satellites have been burning up at an increasing rate, year after year, for over sixty years. Kaplan doesn’t get into these last details. I include them for the edification of my readers.
- Resource exhaustion. In the late twentieth century, oil appeared to be a significant constraint. We have figured out how to coax more from the Earth, but there is still only a limited amount in the ground. Today, water is the greater geopolitical issue. Half the world lives with water scarcity. Larger populations demand more water, while the sources of water are shrinking. The glaciers that supply fresh water to much of the world are shrinking faster than anyone thought possible. Upstream countries (China in Tibet, Turkey in the Middle East, and Ethiopia in North East Africa, to name a few) are damming rivers to hold more of the water for themselves while the downriver nations dry up even faster than they otherwise would. If anything immediately exposes the lack of a formal global order, it is this.
- Climate change is the bookend to population expansion. The carbon we put into the atmosphere is slowly warming the planet. Warming the planet is akin to pressing down on the accelerator of a car. More energy means faster transitions in our weather, more tornadoes and hurricanes, floods, and wildland fires. More energy means more chaotic behavior. Wind, floods, and fires destroy crops, making it harder to feed growing populations as seasonal cycles (longer droughts, larger floods) become less reliable. Sea levels are rising steadily as glaciers melt away. Even the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting back more rapidly than expected.
Everything in the above list is a destabilizer of what falsely appears to be a world order based on trade, and it so happens that at this historical moment, what order exists is being deliberately undermined by a hinge person: the presently unhinged president of the United States.
What does a destabilized world look like? We are already experiencing it, and the international state of affairs is on a deteriorating path. More and deadlier wars, mass migration, expanding disease, and starvation of people due to food and water shortages. As resources dwindle, those places that have vital resources will hoard them. More nations will become failed states. More people will be left to their own devices with ever-diminishing resources, along with steadily rising temperatures. There will be no safe place to move tens or even hundreds of millions of starving people. Wars of the have-nots against the haves will become an existential necessity: starvation the only other option. All this Kaplan foresees.
But even Kaplan does not see (yet) how climate change, in combination with ecosystem collapse (to which climate change contributes directly), will gradually grow to overwhelm everything else, possibly precipitating a global nuclear holocaust. Even if hinge people prevent the exchange of H-bombs, conditions everywhere will grow worse at an ever-quickening pace. Year after year, disaster mitigation will consume more of the world’s accumulated capital. The U.S., the world’s wealthiest country, cannot keep up with its annual disaster bill even now. Fragile supply lines will collapse if there is no capital to maintain them. In no place on Earth will there be seasonally reliable weather in which to grow the food needed to feed the planet’s population.
Technology will not save us. Capital, not to mention polluting energy, is required to maintain the technology we have, from the mining and smelting of raw materials to transport and assembly—and maintenance—of finished products. Electricity grids will fail when supply chains break, and there are no parts to maintain them. Our technological way of life will come to an end. With the collapse of industrial capacity, large portions of the Earth will become uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures. With no viable air conditioning or sufficient water, through much of the year, temperatures will exceed the limits of the human body to cool itself.
The severity and frequency of humanitarian crises will grow in inverse proportion to the world’s ability to mitigate them. It will not be possible for parts of the world to assist other parts because disasters will become financially and then physically overwhelming everywhere, and roughly at the same time.
As energy, food, and water become scarce or vanish, protest mobs seeking the impossible — to recover what has been lost — will grow and become progressively more violent, accelerating the decline of order. Local, national, and international orders will unravel. In the end, anarchy, Kaplan’s most dreaded political outcome, will prevail everywhere.
Kaplan tells us that even all of the destabilizers taken together do not determine our future. Hinge people may redirect the course of history into stabilizing channels. I believe he knows in his heart that it is too late. Summing up his take on the world situation as a whole, I have to think Kaplan’s message is: we’re fucked!
Here are some references pertaining to claims I’ve made above. If I have reviewed these in the blog, I will link to my review. The source link is always in there.
On the world’s fresh water problem.
On the economics of disaster mitigation.
On the unraveling of the world order: From Peter Zeihan, and another from Kaplan
Ruminations 
Dear Matthew rapaport,
The review of Waste Land by Robert D. Kaplan is a fasinating read to me because his words and themes echo my own articles in Medium. Of course this should not be a suprise because we are both using the same current world situation as the basis of our writings.
Robert D. Kaplan and I are clearly looking at the same world. That’s what struck me right away reading your summary. His work, like Jared Diamond, tries to step back and make sense of the big picture, how geography, population, and politics shape history over time. What Kaplan adds, and what I found interesting in your description, is that he leaves more room for people to matter. Not just leaders, but crowds too. That feels closer to how things actually play out.
Where I felt the strongest overlap is in how we both see the world now. Not as separate problems, but as everything pressing on everything else at the same time. Population, climate, resources, supply chains, information, none of these sit still on their own. They interact, they amplify each other, and they don’t stay contained. Your summary captures that really well. It’s the same underlying reality I’ve been trying to get at, just from a different angle.
The difference, at least as I see it, is in how we approach it. Kaplan is telling the story of what’s happening. I’m trying to break that story down and ask, “What is actually doing the work here?” Instead of listing the pressures, I’m focused on how change moves through a system, what connections carry it, where there’s still room to absorb it, and where that room is already gone. He shows you the storm. I’m trying to understand how the structure reacts when the wind hits it.
I’m very much relationship based he is historically oriented.
His idea of “hinge persons” stuck with me. I don’t disagree with it, but I’d frame it a bit differently. People matter, but not in isolation. What they can actually do depends a lot on where they sit in the system. Some positions give you leverage, others don’t. So it’s less about the person alone and more about the position they occupy and what flows through it. That doesn’t take away their importance, it just explains it.
There’s a real alignment in our themes. The difference is that Kaplan is offering a powerful synthesis of what the world feels like right now, while I’m trying to build something you can use to pick it apart and compare one situation to another. Same terrain, just a different way of viewing it.
Looking forward to reading more from you in the future.
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Thanks David. I’m working on a geopolitical piece now. I’ll put it up on medium in not too long. Meanwhile, I get your approach. Not what happens, but what makes it happen. When you address the socio-economic-cultural-political there is a lot of over determination. Chaos theory might be helpful. Also, on “hinge persons” all that I can think of had and have loyal (even syncophantic) lieutenants. Nobody literally does it by himself (Ayn Rand not withstanding)
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