More than a decade ago I wrote briefly here about The Waste Land as a poem of seasonal disquiet — April as the month that promises renewal yet exposes the brittleness beneath. I reminded myself how Eliot’s lines feel like a diagnosis of spiritual exhaustion, a culture unsure of its footing. At the time, as I always do ( I have the Waste Land to heart, it helps) I also reminded myself of elements in the poem which hint at the possibilities of renewal - be they ever so distant. I find myself returning to that terrain now, not through poetry but through Robert D. Kaplan’s new book, The Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, which feels like a companion volume to those anxieties I explored back in 2015.
Kaplan borrows Eliot’s title knowingly. Where Eliot mapped the inner desolation of the West, Kaplan surveys the outer landscape — the geopolitical world of the early twenty‑first century, cracked and shifting under our feet. His argument is that we are living in a kind of permanent Weimar, a global order so interconnected that every tremor becomes an earthquake, yet so weakly governed that no one can steady the ground.
What strikes me most is Kaplan’s insistence that history is not a machine grinding toward a predetermined end. ( Is this true? How about Paul Kingsnorth's view in "Against the Machine?). Personalities still matter. Decisions still matter. The follies and vanities of leaders can tilt continents. In a time when many writers speak of drift, decay, and the slow unravelling of shared narratives, Kaplan reminds us that chaos is not inevitable — but neither is progress.
He is equally sharp on the internal pressures of our age: the rise of ideological certainties that leave no room for dissent, and the swelling bureaucracies — public and private — that flatten human difference into procedure. These forces, he suggests, do not merely irritate; they suffocate. And suffocation breeds its own forms of extremism.
I’m struck by how Kaplan relects Eliot as they both circle the same question: what does it mean to live in a civilisation that feels stretched thin, pulled between hope and dissolution? Eliot answered with fragments shored against ruin. Kaplan answers with a call for vigilance, for the kind of disciplined hope that refuses both fatalism and naïvety.
If Eliot’s waste land was spiritual, Kaplan’s is political — but the two landscapes are complementary. Both ask us to look unflinchingly at the world as it is, and still to believe that renewal is possible. Not guaranteed, not automatic, but possible.
And perhaps that is the thread that ties my earlier reflections to this book: the sense that we are living through a long season of change and decay, one that many writers now recognise. Kaplan’s contribution is to remind us that the task is not to predict the future but to prevent the worst of it. To keep fighting for order without extinguishing freedom. To cultivate hope without forgetting history’s darker lessons.
In other words: to live alertly in the waste land, and still plant something that might grow.
