Volume 53, Number 1 · January 12, 2006
The Mirage of Empire
By John Gray
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
by Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, 421 pp., $27.95
The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century
by Michael Mandelbaum
PublicAffairs, 283 pp., $26.00
Robert Kaplan was one of the few who did not share the complacent sense of triumph that accompanied the end of the cold war. In an article entitled 'The Coming Anarchy,' which he published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1994, Kaplan outlined a very different prospect from that anticipated by most other observers. He saw a world in which some states collapsed or rusted away, leaving their populations to scramble for survival, while powerful states acted ruthlessly to ensure their control of the world's dwindling resources. In many countries, he wrote, the struggle for resources would be intensified by ethnic and religious conflicts, and nationalist demagogues and fundamentalist prophets would come to power, imperiling what remained of order and security in the international system.
Review, 4241 words
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