The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

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.

This book will make you squirm   April 14, 2002
Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)
41 out of 41 found this review helpful

This book is not your average travel memoir. It is an introspective analysis of the social and political conditions of developing countries from West Africa to Thailand. Typical travelogues can be titillating, but because the authors actually know so little about the cultures that they are visiting for a short time, readers learn more about the authors themselves than about the countries being described. However, this book is quite different in that respect--Kaplan obviously knows this region well, having worked as a journalist in the region for years. As a journalist, he knows which questions to ask and from whom. He describes conversations with high government officials (many of which wish to remain anonymous), as well as tidbits that he picks up from traveling companions and encounters with ordinary people. He backs up all of these personal anecdotes with hard facts and statistics footnoted to hundreds of resources listed in the bibliography. What he has to say can about the countries and cultures that he visits can be quite disturbing.

One of Kaplanys goals for his trip is to try to discover why some regions of the developing world are bordering on anarchy, or have actually slipped over the edge, and others seem to be working well for the community. By observing societies and talking to leaders as well as ordinary people, he attempts to discover what works to build a civil world. He considers the varying influences that tradition, religion, education, government, and environment may have on a society. While he points out that education, particularly literacy, seems to be vital for maintaining civilization, he finds that there are no absolute factors that can predict which societies will succeed and which will devolve into barbarism.

Many of Kaplanys observations are quite disturbing, such as when he points out entire regions where per capita income has fallen dramatically since the 1960s, yet population has risen, in contrast to other regions with similar levels of development in 1960 where exactly the opposite has happened. Whatys more, Kaplan points out that many of the reasons for these problems are internal to the societies themselves, such as corruption and traditional practices. The people are understandably frustrated, they have little or no education, and they have easy access to powerful weapons. Unscrupulous or ill-educated leaders can easily point the blame for these problems entirely at the yWesty, redirecting the anger of the masses so that the society does not implode with its own violence.

Some readers may find some of Kaplanys comments racist or bigoted, but having lived for 4 years in a place where the majority of the population comes from the countries that Kaplan describes, I find that every word rings true for me. Kaplan has put into words my own observations and speculations about what I see around me. The book is filled with hundreds of short remarks that capture so much of my experience here, such as when he quotes an Indian educator as saying yOnly when children are taught to categorize and to analyze, rather than merely to memorize, can they achieve anything in the modern world. Intercommunal and tribal hatredsyarise from too much faulty oral memory and too little self-motivated analysis.y But the one that will stick with me for years is his point that you canyt give wealth, and you canyt pump it out of the ground. You can only create wealth. This book will be of interest to anyone who is trying to understand the forces behind current world events. It should be read by all top-level policy makers.


The possible fracture lines   October 28, 2000
Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico)
29 out of 32 found this review helpful

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.


social science travel lit   December 2, 1999
Adam Luedtke (Salt Lake City)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

Basially, in "The Ends of the Earth", Kaplan employs the same finely-honed writing technique that he used to good effect on the topics of Yugoslavia and North America, respectively, in "Balkan Ghosts" and "Empire Wilderness" -- namely, to combine travel writing with social scientific analysis to craft a perspective on a locale that is both personal and abstract, immediate and general at the same time. This is a wonderful method, which makes his writing much less dry than other "country studies", but also leads to Kaplan's fatal flaw of over-exaggeration and over-generalization. His theses on the third world and its future (the basic topic of "Ends of the Earth") are ground-breaking, original, and probably a little bit too sensationalistic and over-hyped. Nevertheless, it's eye-opening stuff that takes you way beyond the news headlines and guidebooks.


A Good Use of Reading Time   April 29, 1999
A. Ross (Washington, DC)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

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.