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The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. By Robert D. Kaplan. New York: Random House, 2000. 184 pages. $21.95. Reviewed by Ralph Peters, author of Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? and a frequent contributor to Parameters.
Two articles towered above all the scribbling about strategy back in the 1990s. The first was Samuel Huntington's courageous and acute "The Clash of Civilizations," published in Foreign Affairs, a piece so original and useful it was hated instantly by academics. The second was Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and was reproduced (illegally) by every military headquarters with a copy machine. Kaplan described a changed world even as that world was changing. Eyewitness knowledge shaped his work. He wrote clearly and forcefully of the rancid societies and endemic violence that made up the real "peace dividend." The article was a brutal, necessary foil to the thousands of ludicrous commentaries insisting that the Age of Aquarius had dawned at last (with the brightest sunrise expected in Russia, of course). Taken together, the Huntington and Kaplan essays identify our primary international challenges. Were we to lose every...