In Waste Land, geopolitics veteran commentator, Robert Kaplan’s wide-angled vision of our chaotic, globalised world, where present crises resonate with past tyrannies, and assess the outlook for the 21^st century, and reveals the society is  a hair’s breath away from the abyss. Donald Trump is taking office amid mini Trumps elsewhere, as steely autocrats steer Russia and China.

We are entering a new era of global cataclysm, a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, and the end of empire. Kaplan explains incisively how we got here and where we are going.

His trademark sweep of history, literature, politics and philosophy draws parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic.  Welmar was truly a permanent crisis after foray through the novels of Isherwood and the German-writer Alfred Doblin, set in the 1920s writes Kaplan. “Everyone is hanging on for dear life, unaware of where they were going.”  Kaplan argues just as in Weimar, where a crisis in one state “becomes a crisis in all, all countries are now connected in ways in which a crisis for one can contain a domino effect.” Kaplan is compelling on the perilous state of global authority, and not just in the west, as he thinks that what beckons is at best “ a fragile phase of technological and political transition”. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have in different ways reinforced this trend, and he was always sceptic of the starry 1990s idea that democracy and free markets would now flourish.  In the chapter of Great Powers in Decline, he recalls 9/11, the west’s focus on Islamists terrorism and the US-led wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a giant distraction even as China was building up its navy and Vladimir Putin replenishing Russia’s imperial resolve.  Both Beijing and Moscow exemplify one of the most dangerous periods of all for political systems, late-stage autocracy. Both countries are ruled by authoritarians with no obvious successor, no obvious way to retire in peace. Wasteland’s depiction of life in cities and the atomising force of technology does not allow for the uplifting effects that urbanism and tech have had on many people’s life. He says “ We believe we have morally progressed in our values, with an unprecedented emphasis on  human rights, and environment, but this says little about the stability of a global system beset by clashing interests”.

Today, too, every national disaster could spread across the world, given this century’s singular dilemmas – pandemics, recessions, urbanisation, mass migration, destabilisation under large-scale democracy and great-power conflict, and the intimate bonds forged by digital media. Could stability and historic liberalism, rather than mass democracy per se, save world populations from anarchic breakdown?

Waste Land, while bracing glimpse into a future defined by twenty-first -century technology, but remarkably resonant with the past. The situation may be spiralling out of control- unless our leaders act first.

Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D Kaplan, Hurst £20/ Random House $31, 226 pages.