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An
Empire Wilderness
Travels into
America's Future
by Robert D. Kaplan
- Book Description
Having reported on some of the world's most violent,
least understood regions in his bestsellers Balkan Ghosts
and The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan now returns to
his native land, the United States of America. Traveling,
like Tocqueville and John Gunther before him, through a
political and cultural landscape in transition, Kaplan
reveals a nation shedding a familiar identity as it
assumes a radically new one.
An Empire
Wilderness opens in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the
first white settlers moved into Indian country and where
Manifest Destiny was born. In a world whose future
conflicts can barely be imagined, it is also the place
where the army trains its men to fight the next war.
"A nostalgic view of the United States is
deliberately cultivated here," Kaplan writes,
"as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable
past."
From Fort
Leavenworth, Kaplan travels west to the great cities of
the heartland--to St. Louis, once a glorious shipping
center expected to outshine imperial Rome and now touted,
with its desolate inner city and miles of suburban gated
communities, as "the most average American
city." Kaplan continues west to Omaha; down through
California; north from Mexico, across Arizona, New
Mexico, and Texas; up to Montana and Canada, and back
through Oregon.
He visits
Mexican border settlements and dust-blown county
sheriffs offices, Indian reservations and nuclear bomb
plants, cattle ranches in the Oklahoma Panhandle,
glacier-mantled forests in the Pacific Northwest, swanky
postsuburban sprawls and grim bus terminals, and comes,
at last, to the great battlefield at Vicksburg,
Mississippi, where an earlier generation of Americans
gave their lives for their vision of an American future.
But what, if anything, he asks, will today's Americans
fight and die for?
At
Vicksburg Kaplan contemplates the new America through
which he has just traveled--an America of sharply
polarized communities that draws its population from
pools of talent far beyond its borders; an America where
the distance between winners and losers grows
exponentially as corporations assume gov-ernment
functions and the wealthy find themselves more closely
linked to their business associates in India and China
than to their poorer neighbors a few miles away; an
America where old loyalties and allegiances are vanishing
and new ones are only beginning to emerge. The new
America he found is in the pages of this book. Kaplan
gives a precise and chilling vision of how the most
successful nation the world has ever known is entering
the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.
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