An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future [Paperback]

Robert Kaplan has reported from locales as diverse and chaotic as shantytowns in the Ivory Coast, death camps in Cambodia, and the frontlines of the war-ravaged Balkans, but his most challenging assignment may have been covering his own country. In this ambitious and evocative study, Kaplan vividly chronicles his "travels into America's future," a journey that begins in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas--"the starting point for what would one day be called Manifest Destiny"--and continues across the West, where the population is growing faster than anywhere else in the country and multiple American identities reveal a nation in flux. He explores cities such as St. Louis and Omaha, Nebraska, that typify the increased urban fragmentation of the heartland; onward to Tucson, Arizona, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where great wealth and poverty exist cheek by jowl; through the sprawl of multiethnic Southern California, where the landscape is perched somewhere between urban and suburban; and up through the Pacific Northwest into Canada. He also visits towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, dipping as far south as Mexico City, to investigate the conditions driving so many Mexicans north, despite feverish efforts by the U.S. to keep them out, and the new cultural hybrid being formed by this migration.

Kaplan uncovers a nation polarized along ethnic, economic, and political lines, where the uneven distribution of rapid technological advances allows some groups to surge forward, cultivating a radically different world-view than their poorer, less educated neighbors. Much of his report is bleak, but despite his insistence on documenting the worst, plenty of examples of prosperity and hope appear in these pages. What comes across most clearly is that there is still plenty of room for speculation on exactly how and where the new boundaries will be drawn. In this respect, America's future still carries the promise of the Wild West: equal parts opportunity, possibility, and uncertainty. --Shawn Carkonen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Having spent more than two decades reporting on ethnic strife and political upheaval in far-flung regions of the world, Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts), turns to his own backyard, trekking across the American West, Mexico and western Canada to map out America's shifting socio-political landscape at the turn of the millennium. The nation, he argues, is losing its identity as one union and splintering, like the Balkanized areas of the globe that have long captivated Kaplan, into a mosaic of different regions with sometimes conflicting cultural identities. In crossing the American Plains and Rocky Mountains, Kaplan sees the growth of city-states and the growing income gap as leading to class-stratified, post-urban pods, in which government does little to improve the living conditions of the poor. The rising Hispanic population in the Southwest has fostered "binational" cities, he says, while the shared interests of America's Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is creating Cascadia, a self-contained region predicated on the eventual breakup of Canada. Kaplan's fluid, razor-sharp travelogue is peppered with references?to Gibbon, the Founding Fathers, ancient Greek and Civil War history?and powerful descriptions of the landscape (a Greyhound bus in New Mexico is "a prison van transporting people from one urban poverty zone to another"; the Arizona desert resembles "the glazed surface of a red earthen jar"; the Pacific Northwest "a magical frontier" of "brooding cathedral-dark forests" and place-names suggesting "an icy clean, mathematical perfection"). As dystopian as it is soberly prescient, Kaplan's vision of 21st-century America will command the attention of readers from all corners of our increasingly decentralized continent. Editor, Jason Epstein; agent, Brandt & Brandt.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"The continued existence of the U.S. should never be taken for granted.... But this book is not about the decline of the U.S.; it is about its transformation." Beginning in Fort Leavenworth, KS, Kaplan (The Ends of the Earth, LJ 1/96) travels west through the American heartland and then south and north along the Pacific coast. He summarizes the history of the cities and regions he visits, observes their distinct cultures, and presents an impressionistic vision of the American future. Kaplan covers a vast range of territory?immigration, Native American influences, the environment, racial antagonism and cooperation, the impact of telecommunications, and the tensions between individualism and government. His narrative meanders in and out of the communities he visits and the historical eras he describes, and he intersperses his text with the voices of the people he meets along the way. Less about America's future than its past and present, Kaplan's travelog informs despite his highly speculative and inconclusive view of a future strongly influenced by American political and economic models but no longer dominated by her power.
-?Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Some of Kaplan's keenest observations occur in restaurants, ideal microcosms for any community, but no matter where he is, he doesn't miss a trick. Author of the best-seller The Ends of the Earth (1996), Kaplan undertook a long and meandering journey across the American West in the belief that intimations of the nation's future are manifested most conspicuously there. Seamlessly merging history with vital reportage and creative analysis, Kaplan offers eye-opening readings of places such as Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the catalyst for an arresting scrutiny of the military; St. Louis, a study in the unexceptional; the mallscapes surrounding cities such as Omaha, evidence of the corporate imperative; and Tucson and Santa Fe, striking examples of the polarization of rich and poor. In each locale, he assesses the impact of rapidly increasing Latin American and Asian immigrant populations, the international scope of business, and technology's impact on everything from pig farming to religion. Provocative and critical yet hopeful and open minded, Kaplan holds up a mirror to our motley society and asks tough questions about the viability of democracy and the shape our society will take in the near future. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The best travel writing not only describes a place but also explains it. In a series of well- crafted books (The Ends of the Earth, 1996, etc.), Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Kaplan has performed these dual tasks with eloquence and insight. Here he turns his attention to his own country and finds a troubling present and a discomfiting future. America is literally coming apart at the seams, and in the west Kaplan most clearly finds evidence of this. As America's geographical boundaries no longer shield it from the international economy, the middle-class ideal of America is becoming the reality of a two-class system: the technologically skilled haves and the unskilled have-nots. The skilled leave the cities, retreating further and further into the west's open spaces, to suburban oases of gated communities and private police. In a world economy, such people have more in common with their counterparts around the world than with the have-nots theyve left behind amid urban decay. Meanwhile, the core ideological values of America, though the author remains vague as to what these are, are becoming displaced, as he writes, ``by the cultural patterns of Old World societies, such as hierarchy and paternalism, which are being imported by immigrants. Other processes are also at work. Canada and the northwest, Mexico and the southwest threaten to become autonomous economic and social entities. ``How much longer,'' Kaplan wonders, ``will the patriotic marches of John Philip Sousa move America's inhabitants?'' Kaplan captures well the postmodern uneasiness adrift in America, but the above quote seems presumptive of what America once was. He has, in other words, already defined what America should be before he begins his journey. But if his America is not there, does that mean America is gone for everyone? A flawed work, to be sure, alarmist and overwrought at times. A clarity of vision remains, however, that demands our attention. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

It may be worth remembering that the country Kaplan is describing is America in the late 1990's--a country with low unemployment, low inflation, declining crime rates, high consumer confidence, manifold opportunities, and general satisfaction. It is far from a perfect place, but few have ever been so fortunate as those who live here. Whatever merit there may be in Kaplan's theory about the loss of national cohesion and our devolution into "city-states," his description of America is so skewed that it is often difficult to make the leap from the America he describes to the country that really exists. -- Commentary, David Brooks --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

What People Are Saying About Robert D. Kaplan:

"An Empire Wilderness contains a very large number of new insights, startling observations, and provocative suggestions. The term 'fresh look' has become somewhat of a cliché, but even those who disagree with some of the conclusions in this book will find that it fully deserves this characterization. No rehashing here of yesterday's editorials. A true original."--Amitai Etzioni

"President Clinton cannot stop talking about Robert D. Kaplan's cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, White House aides say. . . . Clinton was so impressed he ordered an interagency study of the issues. Clinton also devoured Kaplan's recent book Balkan Ghosts."--U.S. News & World Report

"The finest foreign correspondent of his generation turns his eye and ear to his own country. Kaplan's tour of the American West is a tour de force of journalism and a provocation to anyone wondering where America's future is coming from and where it is going."--H.W. Brands

"When you look at the long-run trends that are going on around the world--you read articles like Robert Kaplan's article in the Atlantic a couple of months ago--you could visualize a world in which a few million of us live in such opulence we could be starring on nighttime soaps. And the rest of us look like we're in one of those Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies. I was so gripped by many things that were in that article . . . and I keep trying to imagine what it's going to be like to bring children into this world in this country."--President Clinton

"A brilliant and insightful writer whose ability to see the world as it is, not as he'd like it to be, has made him one of the most prescient chroniclers of our time."--Wade Davis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Robert D. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and the author of fourteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate; Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power; Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History; and Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century. In 2011 and 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan among the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”
 
From 2009 to 2011, he served under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a member of the Defense Policy Board. Since 2008, he has been a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.

LAST REDOUBT OF THE NATION-STATE

1

Fort Leavenworth

Whereas east coast monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas-overlooking the Missouri River at the edge of the Great Plains, with the rails of the Union Pacific visible in the distance-invokes blood and soil. The chapel was built from local limestone in 1878, two years after the massacre of George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry. Six brass pack howitzers from the Indian Wars are embedded in the wall. In addition to plaques commemorating the U.S. Army dead at Little Big Horn and other frontier engagements, the walls are studded with the names of heroes of every war since; Colonel Ollie Reed (July 30, 1944) and First Lieutenant Ollie Reed Jr. (July 5, 1944), for example, a father and son killed weeks apart in France and Italy in the Second World War. In early May 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day, as I stood within this darkened holy of holies, my eyes struggling to read the names in the gloom, I felt as if I were within the core of nationhood.

The poignancy of the moment overwhelmed me, stretching beyond the deaths of those men. For after several weeks at Fort Leavenworth, freighted as it is with historical reference, and after heated discussions with army officers about the failure of ancient Greece and Rome, how could I not think about the future of the United States?
The officers and I did not assume that the United States was going to decline like those ancient empires. That is not the lesson of classical history. Rather, it is that change is inescapable and the more gradual and hidden the change, the more decisive: the great shifts in fortune for ancient empires were usually not apparent to those living at the time. At Fort Leavenworth I was intensely aware of such transformation-of history moving silently beneath our feet however much we deny it-and thus the memorial chapel affected me more intimately than any monumental ruin in Greece or Italy or Egypt.


The setting is fifteen miles northwest of Kansas City, where the Missouri flows swiftly, several hundred yards wide, encumbered with logs and other debris, the untamed signature of the New World. Here the river arcs before turning north. On July 2, 1804, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped nearby, en route to the Pacific. In May 1827, during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, Colonel Henry Leavenworth, sailing upriver from the direction of St. Louis, commenced construction here of what would become Fort Leavenworth: the advance post of European settlement within the western half of the American continent. Colonel Leavenworth's orders were to construct the fort on the east bank of the river. However, because the east bank was a floodplain, he built on the bluffs of the west bank, in what was officially "Indian territory" beyond the Union, in the future state of Kansas. By the time Washington bureaucrats learned of Leavenworth's decision, the colonel had already begun building.

As much as it is an army base or a war college, Fort Leavenworth is a living museum. French cannons, brought here before Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from France, look out over the Missouri. Lining the parade ground are nineteenth-century redbrick Victorian houses, their facades framed by white porticoes. George Armstrong Custer lived in one, Douglas MacArthur in another. In 1926, when Fort Leavenworth was almost a hundred years old, Dwight D. Eisenhower lived with his family in nearby Otis Hall. It was at Fort Leavenworth that "Ike" learned to play golf. In another brick building, in the winter of 1917-1918, a young officer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote the first draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The post cemetery, designated by President Abraham Lincoln as one of our first twelve national military cemeteries, contains the graves of 19,000 soldiers who served from the War of 1812 through Desert Storm, including Shango Hango, an Indian soldier-guide, four officers from Little Big Horn, and a casualty from Fort Sumter. Fifteen hundred graves are unmarked.

The piece de resistance is the Buffalo Soldier Monument, a sixteen-foot bronze statue of a black trooper mounted on his horse, rearing up before two reflecting pools. The "buffalo soldiers" were two African-American regiments, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, which, from the end of the Civil War through the closing of the western frontier, escorted cattle drives and wagon trains, installed telegraph lines, and fought Indians and Mexican revolutionaries. The monument was dedicated in 1992 and was the idea of Colin Powell when he was deputy commander here, in 1981-1982. The magnificent bronze horse and rider could have leapt out of a painting by Frederic Remington: a binding myth, true and necessary.

Inside the post buildings, the theatricality demanded by tradition deepens. The pictures lining the corridors range from a painting of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene to a giant photo of MacArthur striding ashore in the Philippines in 1944. For several days, army officials let me visit the varnished meeting rooms with plush red carpets, where I listened to officers in black boots and battle fatigues discuss future war scenarios in the Balkans, Central America, and Africa. The battle fatigues express the difference between Leavenworth and other war colleges, where dress greens and jackets and ties are required: Leavenworth is a frontier post still, and a nostalgic view of the United States is deliberately cultivated here, as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable past.

Fort Leavenworth symbolizes the frontier. As the most important fort in the West, the place from which the first group of white settlers moved into Indian country, it was the starting point for what would one day be called Manifest Destiny. It was the main base for the exploration of the Great Salt Lake in Utah and of the Columbia River in Oregon. Eight miles west of Fort Leavenworth, the newly opened Oregon and Santa Fe Trails separated. Here a young man from Illinois, James "Wild Bill" Hickok, experienced the West for the first time, amid wagon trains as far as his eye could see. Fort Leavenworth was the base camp for building the transcontinental railroad. From here, troops marched off to the Mexican War and Custer's Seventh Cavalry trekked to the Little Big Horn. In 1881, General William Tecumseh Sherman established a staff college at Fort Leavenworth, and when the frontier closed in1890, Leavenworth began to train officers for fighting overseas-another territorial threshold-which they did in 1898, when U.S. troops carried the flag to Cuba and the Philippines. This has always been the place where the army prepares its commanders "to fight the next war." "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Powell, to name only a few generals, were indelibly marked by Leavenworth.

Almost every member of the army's top brass has spent at least several months, if not longer, at Fort Leavenworth. More than 90 percent of Army captains take a nine-week course here. More than 50 percent of all majors spend a year at Leavenworth before they are eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel; of those majors who eventually make it to general, the percentage is much higher. Leavenworth is where military warfare doctrine is written. It was Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies that, in 1990, outlined
the strategy for Operation Desert Storm. When the United States intervenes overseas, the phones and computers at Leavenworth work overtime.

Leavenworth's Battle Command Training Program runs simulated war games-for example, "Prairie Warrior," an annual exercise in which computers link Leavenworth with other U.S. military installations around the world in a "virtual" war situation, with isolated command headquarters, battlefield observers, and so forth. During my visit, Prairie Warrior featured a scenario in an "imaginary Europe" menaced by a failing nation-state in the "north-central" sector near present-day Berlin. The state is both threatened by its neighbors and tearing itself apart through civil unrest and guerrilla insurgencies in densely populated urban areas. Because this scenario was set fifteen years in the future, the weaponry for the war game included "intelligent mines" that can distinguish among trucks, tanks, and people and identify the enemy. While other military institutions look "strategically" and thus more abstractly at the future, Leavenworth, because it concentrates on training captains and majors, the "middle ranks," is "where the rubber meets the road," explained Major Chris Devens.

Another exercise I looked in on involved a humanitarian emergency in Memphis and St. Louis after a major earthquake along the Mississippi Valley's "New Madrid" fault line, where a series of big quakes did in fact occur in 1811 and 1812. More earthquakes are expected, and buildings in Memphis and St. Louis have not generally been constructed to withstand major tremors. This exercise tested the army's ability to work with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, or private relief agencies), as it has had to do in the Third World.

It was assumed that there would be civil disorder after the quake. "Martial law has rarely been declared in the United States," noted Lieutenant Colonel Marvin Chandler. "That's another thing we look at." Many times in the course of my visit to Leavenworth I heard discussion of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the National Guard to act as a local police force once it has been federalized by the army in a civil emergency. The implication was that turbulence within the United States might one day require the act to be repealed. "The future is icky," said Lieutenant Colonel Chandler, showing me a cartoon of a cow, representing an awkward, slow-moving army, trying to negotiate a ser...