wenty-five years ago, in the February,

1994 issue of The Atlantic, I published a

decidedly unAmerican cover story:
unAmerican in that it was pessimistic,
deterministic, and, most importantly,
declared that the victory of the United
States in the recently concluded Cold War
would be not so much short-lived as
irrelevant, because of various natural,
demographic and cultural forces underway
in the world that would overwhelm
America’s classically liberal vision. It
eschewed the debate over ideals that have
traditionally been the fare of intellectual
journals and newspaper opinion pages.
Moreover, because of the unrestrained
optimism of the era—globalization in the
1990s was being employed as a freshly
conceived buzzword—the pessimism of
my essay was deeply alienating, if not
abhorrent, to many. The title that the
editors chose said it all: “The Coming
Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime,
Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease
Are Destroying the Social Fabric of the
Planet.” They turned “The Coming
Anarchy” into “the most xeroxed article of
the decade,” in the words of Lester Brown,
president of the Worldwatch Institute.

My aim was to expose the illusion of

knowledge where none actually existed
among elites. At fancy conferences and in
the major media of the era people spoke
breezily about how democracy would soon
be overtaking the world, without knowing
firsthand what the world they were talking
about was really like, especially in
developing countries beyond the luxury
hotels, government ministries and
protected residential enclaves. To counter
this trend, I visited the slums of cities in
West Africa and Turkey, comparing the
culture of poverty in the two regions, and
drawing conclusions. What I said was
provocative, or at least deemed to be by
complacent champions of globalization.

I claimed that in an increasingly

claustrophobic world made smaller by
technology and the spread of disease, the
most obscure places in Africa could
eventually become central to the future of
the West; that Africa, rather than be placed
on a protective pedestal and treated
exclusively on its own terms, should be
legitimately compared in vivid cultural and
developmental detail to other parts of the
world.

Finally, I emphasized how political and

social interactions, including war, would
be increasingly subject to the natural
environment, which I labeled “the national-
security issue” of the twenty-first century.
Whereas the opinion pages of the time,
both liberal and conservative, were
obsessed with the clashing ideas shaping
the post–Cold War world, I zoomed in on
how the increasing lack of underground
water and the increasing lack of nutrients
in overused soils would, in indirect ways,
inflame already existent ethnic, religious
and tribal divides. And this factor, merged
with an ever-growing number of young
males in the most economically and
politically fragile societies, would amplify
the chances of extremism and violent
conflict. Natural forces were at work that
would intensify political instability: if not
necessarily everywhere, then certainly in
the world’s least governable parts. The
most benighted parts of West Africa were a
microcosm, albeit in exaggerated form, of
turmoil to come around the globe.

This all ran counter to the paradigm

celebrated at the time by Stanford
University’s Francis Fukuyama in The End
of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama
suggested—in profound and riveting form
—that the triumph of liberal democracy in
the Cold War indicated a thematic
conclusion to the story of civilization,
since no other system would ever make
human beings as personally fulfilled.
Democracy’s triumph, while certainly not
assured, was nevertheless likely to
succeed. This was agreeable to global
elites whose own lives fixated on personal
achievement and fulfillment. But it was an
extremely American- and Euro-centric
vision, taking insufficient account of what
was going on beyond the West. And it did
not comport with what I was witnessing in
Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Critics said that my dark vision was

demoralizing. But I was merely following
the dictum of the late Harvard professor
Samuel P. Huntington, who said that the
job of a scholar or observer is not
necessarily to improve the world, but to
say bluntly what he or she thought was
actually going on in it. To do that meant
focusing on matters that would be
inappropriate to raise at a polite dinner
party—that would elicit an embarrassed
silence among the guests. For I have
always believed that the future often lies
inside the silences, inside the things few
want to discuss.

And I would say something further.

When it comes to making predictions, a
journalist like myself cannot know the
specific, short-term future: whether a
country will have a coup or not within the
next week. That depends on the
Shakespearian dynamics between vital
political actors and key intelligence that
even the best spy agencies have difficulty
uncovering; nor can a journalist or analyst
know the situation of a country several
decades hence, since so many factors,
especially the advance of technology, make
such a prediction mere speculation. But
what a journalist or analyst can do is make
the reader measurably less surprised by
what happens in a given place over the
middle-term future: five-years, ten-years,
or fifteen-years forward, say. And that is
not an original idea. Ten-year forecasts or
thereabouts are the time frame utilized by
many corporations in their planning
exercises, as I know from my own work as
a geopolitical consultant.
SO JUDGED by the standard of a middle-
term future assessment, how does “The
Coming Anarchy” hold up?

It begins with a detailed description of

Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire (the Ivory
Coast) in mid-1993, with references to the
general situation in West Africa during this
period. This constitutes roughly the first
part of my lengthy essay, and it essentially
paints the bleakest of possibilities for those
places, which I basically describe as
countries that are so weakly governed that
they are not really countries at all, but
merely places with fictitious, meaningless
borders on the map. Sierra Leone was in an
extremely fragile political state when I
visited there, and Cote d’Ivoire, though
imperceptibly deteriorating, was then still
seen in the West—according to the cliché
—as an African success story. Articles in
major world newspapers through the
second half of the 1990s painted an
optimistic picture for the prospects of these
places as fledgling democracies. In
particular, the 1996 elections in Sierra
Leone drew favorable press notices,
declaring that West Africa was showing
the way for the future of the continent.

But my point in “The Coming Anarchy”

and a related Atlantic cover story titled
“Was Democracy Just a Moment?” in the
December 1997 issue, was that elections
by themselves didn’t matter nearly as much
as the building of modern bureaucratic
institutions. And West African countries
had developed virtually none. That made
me pessimistic. In 1999, half a decade after
my essay was published, Sierra Leone had
descended into utter anarchy, with drug-
crazed teenagers hacking the limbs off
more than a thousand civilians in the
capital of Freetown alone and killing an
additional several thousand, as armed
groups—mobs of young men more than
disciplined soldiers—terrorized the city.
The number of refugees and displaced
persons was well over a million, almost a
quarter of the total population. (UN
peacekeeping troops would be forced to
remain in Sierra Leone until 2005.) During
the same time-frame, a coup rocked Cote
d’Ivoire, and the country descended into a
period of civil war and chaotic,
geographically based political fractures
lasting a full decade until 2011. War in
Liberia continued through 2003, and
Nigeria never arrested its decline as a
coherent, centrally governed state. Over
the past few years, Sierra Leone and Cote
d’Ivoire have gradually gained a modicum
of stability, even as political violence,
tribalism and crime continue to rear their
heads. In 2013–2016, Sierra Leone, Liberia
and Guinea experienced a major Ebola
outbreak. Of course, further afield in the
Middle East, the chaotic meltdowns of
Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen following
either American-led interventions or the
rigors of the Arab Spring indicated that
beneath the carapaces of tyranny in those
places lay complete institutional voids,
comparable to what I had found in West
Africa.
In Turkey in mid-1993 I also found slums,
but of a completely different sort. There
was poverty, but no crime or social
dissolution. As I wrote in another lengthy
part of “The Coming Anarchy:”

Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural

strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples
whose cultures can harbor extensive slum
life without decomposing will be, relatively
speaking, the future’s winners. Those
whose cultures cannot will be the future’s
victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—
do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar
between people and family groups is
stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent
Islam and Turkic cultural identity have
produced a civilization with natural
muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial
nomads, take disruption in stride.

My take was that Turkish geopolitical

power would grow in coordination with a
rising Islamic identity. At the time, Turkey
had been a secular republic for sixty years
already. The idea that Turkey would
emerge as an Islamic power—with a
religious, authoritarian firebrand in control
—was not on the horizon in 1994. As I
wrote then:

Islam’s very militancy makes it attractive

to the downtrodden. It is the one religion
that is prepared to fight. A political era
driven by environmental stress, increased
cultural sensitivity, unregulated
urbanization, and refugee migrations is an
era divinely created for the spread and
intensification of Islam . . . 

Moreover, in the course of arguing how

maps lie, and how legal borders would
become increasingly less meaningful, I
stated that the Turkish-Kurdish frontier
dispute would eventually become more
central to the Middle East than the Israeli-
Palestinian one.
“The Coming Anarchy” also focused on
how elites would increasingly come to see
the natural environment, especially water
shortages and soil erosion—in addition to
shifts in the earth’s climate itself—as a
major foreign policy concern. This was far
less obvious in 1994 than it is today.
Moreover, I said that future wars would be
motivated by communal survival,
aggravated in some cases by environmental
scarcity. The Middle East’s diminishing
water table would never be mentioned in
reports of armed conflict, but would
operate as a silent indirect factor,
nonetheless.

Of course, this was very Malthusian. And

few thinkers are as regularly disparaged as
Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798
wrongly predicted that as population
increased, the world would effectively run
out of food supplies. However, what critics
fail to note about Malthus is that merely by
introducing the subject of ecosystems into
discussions of contemporary political
philosophy, he immeasurably enriched
such discussions. Humankind may be
nobler than the apes, but we are still
biological. Making nature itself part of the
argument when it comes to geopolitics is
something we owe to Malthus.

I also referred to the work of an Israel-

based military historian, Martin van
Creveld, to describe a “pre-Westphalian
vision of worldwide low-intensity
conflict,” in which “technology will be
used [by warrior bands] toward primitive
ends.” This was twenty years before isis
would use the video camera to publicize its
beheadings of hostages. Major interstate
conflicts like the two world wars were not
necessarily in the offing, in my view.
Rather, the future would be “bifurcated”—
between populations “healthy, well fed,
and pampered by technology”—and
therefore decidedly optimistic about the
human condition; and others condemned to
low-level violence and instability in many
parts of the globe from which I had
reported in the 1980s and early 1990s.

There were also a number of things that I

got quite wrong. In particular, I drew too
close a link between dissolution in the
developing world and instability in the
United States and the West. The American
political system may now be in trouble, but
it is for reasons—like the impact of video
and digital technology on politics and
society—that have little to do with the
factors that I discussed then. Finally,
though in almost all cases I wrote
specifically about “West Africa” in the
essay, it was quite understandable that
people would conflate “West Africa” with
“Africa” as a whole. But that was wrong.
For example, whereas what happened in
Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire was a
consequence of the virtual absence of
institutions and authority, the genocide in
Rwanda was unconnected to Hobbesian
chaos. In fact, Rwanda was the opposite of
West Africa. With a tightly organized
political and security apparatus, which
perpetrated a crime with a distinctive
modernist and systematized aura, Rwanda
represented the evil possible under a strong
state. Indeed, race was an ideological
weapon in Rwanda, as it had been in Nazi
Germany; in West Africa ideology simply
did not exist.

UNSURPRISINGLY, “THE Coming

Anarchy” suffered the same fate as other
essays and books that have become
famous: they are alternately praised and
criticized for the wrong reasons. Whenever
the headlines are especially dreary
anywhere for whatever cause, “The
Coming Anarchy” is periodically invoked.
Conversely, whenever something good
happens, especially in Africa, “The
Coming Anarchy” is periodically
disparaged. What happened five years, ten
years and fifteen years later in the specific
places I wrote about has now been
forgotten; so too have the details of the
essay itself, and thus all that remains is a
vague, general impression. For as news
cycles become more vivid and intense,
they also become more quickly erased
from memory, as fresh images replace old
ones. Wait long enough and a news cycle
will come around that will prove any big
idea either wrong or right, depending on
the circumstances. Fukuyama’s essay has
suffered a similar fate: his nuanced,
brilliantly argued thesis has been reduced
to a bumper sticker. The truth is, “The
Coming Anarchy” accurately captured the
beginning of an arc of dissolution and
upheaval in significant regions of the world
that may now be completed and is thus
transforming itself into something new.

Nearly a decade ago, in my

book Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the
Future of American Power, I wrote about a
whole new cycle of economic development
that was just starting to characterize
significant tracts of sub-Saharan Africa,
especially East Africa, which I included in
an emerging Indian Ocean prosperity
sphere. In fact, it is becoming more and
more superficial to think of Africa as
Africa. Globalization is producing more
identifiable regions: as the Persian Gulf,
India and China have been able to invest
increasingly more money in East Africa; as
southern Africa attempts to garner more
Western investment following the end of
the disastrous reign of Robert Mugabe in
Zimbabwe and that of Jacob Zuma in
South Africa; as the West African sub-
region of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia
continue to struggle following decades of
real and incipient anarchy; and as the vast,
often-densely forested tracts of the
continent’s interior—far from any coastline
and thus less effected by globalization and
the outside world—remain trapped in
ethnic-tribal disputes and overwhelming
underdevelopment, from the Central
African Republic and South Sudan clear
through the whole of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
Modernism has been especially cruel to
both West Africa and the wider African
interior, where ethnic, tribal and linguistic
boundaries “crisscross and overlap,
without the neat delineations so much
beloved by Western statesmen since the
treaties of Westphalia,” observes the
French Africa scholar, Gerard Prunier.
Here, he says, borders work best as
“porous membranes” that are not set in the
“cast-iron” lines favored by Western
imperialists. “The Coming Anarchy”
happened to describe West Africa at a
moment when traditional culture was still
being shredded by modernism and by
modernism’s false boundaries, but before
new political and societal forms could take
hold.

Yet evolution is inexorable. Technology in

particular is not so much defeating
geography as shrinking it. This means the
geopolitical world is becoming smaller,
that much more claustrophobic, and
consequently more nervous, with the fate
of the West increasingly tied to that of
Africa and other places. While Europe’s
indigenous population stagnates, Africa’s
population could grow from one billion to
as much as four billion by the end of the
century—and that is even with declining
rates of population growth. Nigeria, whose
population stands at 200 million, could
reach 750 million by then, with
concomitant erosion of agricultural soil.
Thus, an era of migration from south-to-
north may be only just beginning. This at a
time, when, as experts suggest, the
combined effects of automation, artificial
intelligence and so-called 3d printing could
make Western companies far less
dependent on cheap labor in poor
countries, further destabilizing them.
Though middle classes are emerging in a
number of African countries, that will only
empower more people to vote with their
feet and migrate. Peasantries rooted in
place are far more politically stable than
newly literate and empowered masses with
rising expectations.
Don’t think even for a moment that
economic development, where it does
happen, will assuage political upheaval in
Africa or anywhere else. In fact, it will
only lead to great upheavals of a different
kind. As Huntington wrote in his most
important book, Political Order in
Changing Societies, social and economic
change in the developing world creates
demands for new institutions and drastic
reform of institutions that already do exist,
leading to ever more sophisticated forms of
political turmoil. An increasingly
interconnected world, beset by vast
technological change and absolute rises in
population in the poorest countries, simply
cannot be at peace. This means that I may
have been wrong about downplaying major
interstate wars as I did, especially given
the hardening of military power in
authoritarian states like China and Russia.
Tumultuous change, both positive and
negative—some of it violent and greatly so
—must occur. For there will be no night
watchman to preserve world order (and the
established hierarchies upon which order
depends). Of course, that is the very
definition of anarchy, as intimated by the
late Columbia University political scientist
Kenneth Waltz. My vision—then and now
—of vast geopolitical disruption is not
ultimately pessimistic, but merely
historical. n

Robert D. Kaplan is the author most

recently of The Return of Marco Polo’s
World: War, Strategy, and American
Interests in the Twenty-first Century .  He is
a senior fellow at the Center for a New
American Security and a senior adviser at
Eurasia Group.