Aperture Book of the Month - March 2025

A year or so ago we reviewed Robert Kaplan’s ‘The Tragic Mind’ with its argument for humility and wisdom in designing strategy. The timing was, of course, perfect and the same can be said for Kaplan’s new book, ‘Wasteland’ which is our Book of the Month for March 2025.

In true Kaplan style, ‘Wasteland’ sweeps across a broad and deep geographic and historical landscape. A fascinating cast of characters – both old ac

quaintances and new introductions – provides a rich framework to expose the shifting tectonic plates of culture and politics in the world today. There’s so much to be taken from it. It’s an unsettling read, but as Kaplan says, ‘pessimism can be constructive’.

Woven throughout the book is a comparison of the globalised world of today with the fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933. Kaplan sets much store with the importance of enduring stable institutions, which the Republic lacked, and he argues that the disintegration of the ‘international rules-based order’ of the Cold War period bears the similar threat of being followed by totalitarianism.

Kaplan also explores alienation, ideology, urbanisation, racial tension, culture, governance, the ‘tyranny of the mob’, technology and digital media; the aggregate effect of all this is a permanent state of instability and permanent crisis. He reflects on a fully interconnected world in which ‘prediction is impossible’ and ‘hindsight…induces complexity to counterfeit clarity’. The only constant on which we can depend is change, and in the contemporary world the immediate impact of that change is instantly visible given the 24-hour news cycle.

And yet progress is still regarded (in the ‘Western convention’ at least) as predictable, linear, and deterministic. The blunt narrowness of that way of thinking is arguably to blame for missing the early, weak signals (and then the more obvious, strong signals) of COVID-19, Chinese technical and military  expansion, and Russian irridentism.

Kaplan makes an appeal for a different mindset, which inherently embraces uncertainty, ambiguity, and systemic relationships. The modernist, mechanistic approach is no longer able to cope with the post-modern context. In this, of all Kaplan’s themes, culture is perhaps key. He points out that following the dilution of national cultures the world is in transition to an international culture, which ‘is still too superficial to take its place’. That transition remains something that can be influenced and stabilised through creative engagement; Kaplan suggests this may be a finite opportunity.

Perhaps the most impactful passage in ‘The Wasteland’ is crafted around Orwell’s ‘1984’ and the nature of truth, which suffers under the pressure of an ‘endless present…with no-one looking over their shoulder for any perspective or meaning’. With this alone, Kaplan captures the current mood so perfectly. Tiresias could not have done so more effectively.