An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future

In An Empire Wilderness, journalist Robert Kaplan wanders about the American West, where `transformation is most transparent/to ferret out the future of the country.

Every year brings a new batch of books about America -- nothing so tempts writers as this exasperating, inspiring, contradictory country. Robert D. Kaplan is the latest author to trek the United States in search of its soul.

An accomplished journalist who excels at political travelogues m previous books include Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History and Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan -- Kaplan sees geography and demography as twin engines of destiny. Land formations and resources, population trends and diasporas dictate the future far more than national boundaries and ideologies, he argues. This is true not only for Western Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia but also for the United States.

Whether Kaplan draws the right conclusions from his travels, he certainly reports authoritatively on conditions in far-flung places. He has been everywhere -- amid the picturesque but mordant decay of Freetown, Sierra Leone; the incongruously decorous slums of Istanbul; even the glitzy opulence of Fashion Island Mall in Orange County, Calif., one of his many stops in An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future (Random House, 409 pp).

Kaplan began An Empire Wilderness after finishing The Ends of the Earth, an account of his journey through the Third World. Terrorism will not be the critical problem of the 21st century but an auxiliary one tied to deeper forces "driven by the ability, or inability, of various cultures to manage dwindling resources" Kaplan writes in Ends. The emerging world will be one of ambiguity and perpetual change "akin to the Middle Ages, when the aristocracies of various European kingdoms had more in common with one another than with the peasants of their own lands." Readers should tackle Empire Wilderness and Ends of the Earth together, for Kaplan ties the future of America to the rest of the world.

"Tackle" isn't the best choice of words, perhaps, for Kaplan writes with grace and insight. Most observers of the American scene manage to describe the country well enough, from its neon-lit roadhouses to its painted deserts, and even capture the vernacular of its citizens. Fewer get beneath the surface of the land or the skin of the people to discover something worth saying that hasn't been said before -- usually by Tocqueville.

Certainly, Kaplan makes fresh observations. "It was a day of spectacular monotony," he writes about a drive through Navajo country in Empire Wilderness. "The Arizona desert can be as inspiring and changeless as the Sinai or the alkaline wastes of Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, and Chinese Turkestan." Traveling by bus from Albuquerque to Amarillo, he finds himself among the "Greyhound underclass" a compilation of "ragged haircuts, bad complexions, grimy baseball hats turned backward.... Throughout the Third World and eastern Europe, I had been among even poorer people on buses that were not nearly as well maintained as this one. But, with the exception of some drunken bus passengers in the former Yugoslavia, I had never traveled among a more rootless or unstable crowd."

Kaplan's peripatetic life permits him unique comparisons, but he gathers his information the old-fashioned way, interviewing people who long have observed their communities. Starting from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he travels along two paths: One takes him through the southwest down into Mexico; the other northwest into Canada. Along the way, he chats up the locals -- legislators, entrepreneurs, environmentalists -- who hold forth on America's future. From these conversations, his reading of history and first-hand observations, Kaplan extracts his theme: America is coagulating into "posturban pods" region al hubs, ecozones and city-states -- communities that will steadily shift allegiance from Washington (if not the country itself) to international corporations, foreign trading partners and other global entities.

"As one expert told me, the whole New World -- all of the United States, certainly-has been just one big subdivision," he writes, "... one big, barely regulated Oklahoma land dash." While developers, conservationists, loggers and moguls like Ted Turner compete to exploit or preserve the last large tracts out West, middle-class Americans are exerting proprietary rights over their suburban tracts. It matters little if they live in St. Louis, Orange County or Santa Fe -- those who can have gravitated to gated communities, opting out of the public sphere by sending children to private schools, exercising in private clubs and shopping at upscale malls. (Asians and to a lesser degree Hispanics seem to have integrated themselves into this new American Dream, blacks less so.)

"The real battle here is not ideological but economic and cultural" writes Kaplan. "It has nothing to do with different interpretations of nationalism and everything to do with something more meaningful now that traditional nationalism is receding: the fate of the land itself."

Kaplan uses the phrase "empire wilderness" -- it comes from Hart Crane's epic poem, The Bridge -- to describe this new America, which he likens to James Madison's vision of the country, "an enormous geographical space with governance but without patriotism, in which the federal government would be a mere `umpire' refereeing competing interests." Indeed, Kaplan foresees federal power waning, the Rooseveltian state an aberration in American history. "Somehow, this leaden federal colossus must slowly evolve into a new, light-frame structure of mere imperial oversight -- for the sake of defense, conservation, and the rationing of water and other natural resources ... allowing for a political silver age, if not another golden one."

In many ways, the same forces reshaping the world are reshaping the United States, suggests Kaplan. As national borders dissolve and ethnic groups assert their claims to traditional lands, the global map will more and more resemble that of the 19th century, with vaguely defined regions representing drug fiefdoms, warlord territories and refugee migrations. (A Kurdish buffer zone between Turkey and Iran is a good example -- or a Latino buffer zone between the United States and Mexico.) Similarly, state borders inside America will have less meaning as cities and regions align themselves around multinational corporations and global industries. (The trend is especially apparent, notes Kaplan, in the Pacific Northwest, where economic and cultural ties between Vancouver, Seattle and other "pods" are rendering the U.S.-Canadian border meaningless.)

There are, of course, huge and obvious differences between America and the rest of the world. The United States has not experienced anything like the bloodshed among peoples elsewhere. (The Civil War, as Kaplan points out, served eventually to bind the nation rather than divide it.) And the developed world, at least for the moment, has escaped the overpopulation, famine and plague afflicting the developing world. Still, the parallels Kaplan draws in Ends of the Earth and Empire Wilderness are well worth considering. "High-tech medievalism" and "a wilderness of semi-independent principalities" are phrases well matched for the 21st century.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning