"Robert Kaplan, bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts, offers up scrupulous, far-ranging insights on the world to come in a spirited, rousing, and provocative book that has earned a place at the top of the reading lists of the world's policy makers." ""The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning. The crack-up of the Soviet empire and the coming end of the Arab-Israeli military confrontation are merely prologues to the really big changes that lie ahead." So says Robert Kaplan, who foresees a host of terrors in the wake of the Cold War. Volatile new democracies in Eastern Europe, fierce tribalism in Africa, civil war and ethnic violence in the Near East, and widespread famine and disease -- not to mention the brutal rift developing as wealthy nations reap the benefits of seemingly boundless technology while other parts of the world slide into chaos -- are among the issues Kaplan identifies as the most important for charting the future of geopolitics. Historical antecedents in Gibbon's Decline and Fall and in the legacies of statesmen such as Henry Kissinger contribute to Kaplan's bracingly prophetic framework for addressing the new global reality.