Twenty-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.