The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Vintage) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Certainly ours is a much more dangerous and fractious world than it was before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. But it is a serious mistake to conclude that this is solely due to the lack of a continuing balance of terror that kept each opposing orbit of influence circling within tolerable political tolerances. Instead, the circumstances represented by the momentous change the author refers to must be viewed in a better defined, developed, and articulated context, one recognizing that while we enjoy a enviable lifestyle while producing what most of the rest of the world wants and cannot find the means to afford, we also act to undermine their positions, as well. For example, both the nation itself and the transnational corporations it serves also conspicuously withhold (for reasons of profit and advantage) humanitarian aid and support of the rest of the world's basic needs for such elementary supplies and services as pharmaceutical assistance for the third world tuberculosis epidemic, or control of HIV infections in Africa, or a more rational crop management system that doesn't ruthlessly exploit third world countries by condemning their leaders to grow cash crops for export to meet their World Bank payment obligations instead of allowing them to feed their burgeoning populations. This is a hardly an enlightened, disinterested, or progressive way to aid and assist the emerging third world countries.

In short, far from being innocent observers of dangerous trends going on "out there' in Kaplan's sterile and superficially defined world of nation states, we need to integrate what we know about the way the world really works, not just in the notional and abstract political world discussed in foreign policy statements for public consumption. Rather, we need one that recognizes the fact that nations often conduct foreign policy in service to their corporate sponsors' perceived interests, that the flag often follows commerce, that the profound social, economic, and political influence wielded with great purpose by the cynical, indifferent, and anonymous corporations who are in fact almost exclusively oriented and motivated by profit considerations affect what is going on in the world. I agree with much of what Mr. Kaplan has to say in terms of individual statements about the dangerous, unpredictable, and provocative times we are moving into. But I hardly believe it serves public discussion to voice these concerns so articulately only to then retreat to a silly and superficial set of notions about what the larger social, economic and political realities are or what an enlightened foreign policy would be to guard against these dangers. It is a sweet but insubstantial confection, one that patently disregards the profound issues of corporate globalization and how it views its role in the unfolding drama the author addresses so interestingly.