“Hope, when severed from belief and unrestrained by historical realities, becomes a dangerous value; it threatens not only those who embrace it and place their faith in it, but also all those who fall within the radius of their illusions.”
This warning appears in “The Uses of Pessimism” by the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton (1944–2020) and is cited by Robert D Kaplan, a member of the US Defence Policy Board and one of the most influential geopolitical thinkers of the past three decades, to open his provocative and intellectually unsettling new book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.
Kaplan deploys Scruton’s insight to alert readers to the perils of unbridled optimism. When optimism is detached from the conditions that render it achievable, it becomes a form of self-delusion, he says.
Kaplan’s view is not merely rhetorical dramatisation; it signals a larger worldview. Humanity, he argues, has entered a dark tunnel shaped by war, sustained conflict, climatic deterioration, disruptive technologies that have upended human life, chronic poverty, unprecedented inequality, and recurring pandemics.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, the world has become trapped in this tunnel – a “waste land” in the sense evoked in the Anglo-American poet T S Eliot’s modernist poem of that name published in 1922. Eliot wrote this poem in response to the devastation of his own age, and Louis Awad translated it into Arabic in the 1960s.
Kaplan starts from the premise of global crisis. Geography, once a source of strategic advantage and the foundation of imperial dominance, has become the site of intense competition among old and rising powers, regional authoritarians, ethnic groups, popular movements, and non-state actors, he argues.
The capacity to expand territorially, militarily, and economically, once the prerogative of a handful of powers, now encounters a dense web of constraints. For Kaplan, the international arena has grown saturated and entangled. Manoeuvring space now exists only at escalating cost, producing exhaustion across the system and afflicting major, medium, and small powers alike.
Crises, therefore, no longer constitute episodic disruptions; they have become structural and perpetual. The global system lurches from crisis to crisis, each overlapping with the next, forming a mesh of irresolvable tensions: recurrent local-regional conflicts instead of epochal world wars; the rise of regional powers to fill vacuums left by fatigued great powers; and proliferating conflicts without closure.
These dynamics have transformed the world into a waste land that is more than just a metaphor.
Political geography, Kaplan contends, is no longer merely terrain that can be seized by force. Contemporary geopolitics has acquired a cross-border, networked character. On the one hand, global finance, its trillions circulating through multinational corporations, stock exchanges, and investment houses, and on the other hand, shadowy operations to control resources through private military companies and illicit networks, have become decisive forces.
In such a system, even a local spark can trigger global tremors: disruptions in supply chains; mass migratory waves; ecological collapses; systemic life crises; and nuclear escalation.
Kaplan likens this moment to the interwar period between 1918 and 1939 and the age of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The Weimar experience, emerging from Germany’s defeat in World War I, exhibited flashes of cultural brilliance but was otherwise defined by chaos and the withdrawal of the great powers, the hollowing out of international institutions, and the widening gulf between political elites and citizens.
This created fertile ground for Nazism. Digital technologies today, Kaplan argues, have accelerated a similar dynamic, multiplying crises, amplifying mass anxiety, manipulating public sentiment, and fragmenting collective capacity for coherent response.
Geopolitics, therefore, has undergone a profound transformation. Military force remains relevant, but power now demands the control of knowledge and digital capabilities. In the digital age, geopolitical influence is no longer tethered to fixed territorial dominance. Power and hegemony have migrated from physical maps to digital ones, eroding the post-1945 order.
This has not been fully destroyed, Kaplan admits, but it has been internally corroded. International institutions persist, but in a skeletal form, and they are unable to enforce agreements, uphold justice, or resolve crises. This erosion, he notes, extends not only to institutions, but also to the Earth’s capacity to sustain life and to humanity’s psychological resilience. The waste land encompasses both the planet and the human condition.
Kaplan’s thesis is compelling because it foregrounds the pressures exerted on individuals by this emergent geopolitical order. The exploitation of land for the benefit of predatory minorities renders vast regions barren, inhospitable, and degraded for the majority.
For most of humanity, the Earth no longer provides mobility, resources, or natural protection. Geography thus ceases to empower the citizen; it becomes a burden, even a threat, at the very moment when it was supposed to guarantee safety from ruin.
The writer is an intellectual and author.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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