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Politics & government

THE LOOM OF TIME

Robert D. Kaplan

Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China

A sweeping exploration of the Greater Middle East, where lasting stability has often seemed just out of reach and which may hold the key to the shifting world order of the 21st century.

The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China - encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia - sat at the crossroads of empires for millennia. But with their dissolution in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have struggled to maintain stability in the face of power struggles, leadership vacuums, and the arbitrary borders drawn by exiting imperial rulers. In THE LOOM OF TIME, Kaplan explores this broad, fraught space through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance. Kaplan makes the case for realism as an approach to the Greater Middle East. Just as Western attempts at democracy promotion across the Middle East have failed, a new form of economic imperialism is emerging today as China's ambitions fall squarely within the region as the key link between Europe and East Asia. As in the past, the Greater Middle East will be a register of future great power struggles across the globe. And like in the past, thousands of years of imperial rule will continue to cast a long shadow on politics as it is practiced today. To piece together the history of this remarkable place and what it suggests for the future, Kaplan weaves together classic texts, immersive travel writing, and a great variety of voices from every country that all compel the reader to look closely at the realities on the ground and to prioritize these facts over ideals on paper. THE LOOM OF TIME is a challenging, clear-eyed book that promises to reframe our vision of the global twenty-first century. Robert D. Kaplan is the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and was twice named one of the world's "Top 100 Global Thinkers" by Foreign Policy. A reporter with decades of experience working at The Atlantic, he has written nineteen books including, Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia's Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts.

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Book Published 2023-08-22 by Random House

Comments

THE LOOM OF TIME is Robert D. Kaplan's latest sweeping interpretation of human history. It draws on a half century of travel across strategic chunks of Europe, Africa, and Asia to try and make sense of our troubled times. His pages are filled with notables from Alexander the Great in ancient Greece to Ataturk, Turkey's ruthless modernizer, and the brutal Assad dynasty of today's Syria. He taps into the vast expanse of scholarship by others, including controversial ideas and deep rivalries. Kaplan, once again, is provocative. His conclusions in THE LOOM OF TIME are sure to spark deep debate.

Italy: Marsilio ; Korean: Wisdom House ; Netherlands: Het Spectrum ; Romania: Humanitas ; Spanish (World): RBA

Continuing Robert Kaplan's work as the premier American scholar of geopolitics, THE LOOM OF TIME is a book that everyone who wants to understand the real forces that decide war and peace should read. Deploying decades of research, as well as his extensive personal experience of the regions whose history and future prospects he discusses, Kaplan moves freely from Afghanistan to Kurdistan, Central Asia to Ethiopia, to show how twenty first century power and conflict are rooted in the realities of geography in a smaller and more interconnected world. Written in a lucid, engaging prose, this is a book that experts will profit from reading and non-specialist readers won't be able to put down.

In the tradition of his previous 21 books, Bob Kaplan here combines history, geography, culture, ethnology, and a deep understanding of international relations into a lucid and penetrating bundle of insight on the Greater Middle East, that vast subtropical expanse between Europe and China that captivated past empires and serves now as a geopolitical focus in China's quest for global influence. This book couldn't be more timely.

Luminously written and rests on prodigious reading and fifty years of travel to innumerable places in the Greater Middle East, many off the beaten path. The book brims with perceptive, vivid insights encompassing past and present, culture and politics, art and architecture, geography and ecology, empires and post-imperial polities. With his keen eye and deep sense of history, Kaplan guides readers through an expanse extending from Tunisia to Xinjiang as only he can. A masterful account.

The Greater Middle East emerged from the shadow of empires only to find anarchy, despotism and despair. No one captures the complexities and contradictions of this region like Robert D. Kaplan. THE LOOM OF TIME weaves together history, biography, and sharp reporting to tell a story of a region still in search of itself.

Ambitious, learned, sweeping, and thought provoking, Kaplan's book is a fascinating story of a decades-long journey to understand the Middle East's nuances, and it is richly rewarding.

The bestselling author specializing in geopolitics returns to the Middle East to deliver another tour de force. Drawing on 50 years of experience interviewing officials, intellectuals, historians, and fellow journalists and reading seemingly every history and scholarly work from Herodotus to Gibbon to Toynbee... As always, the author offers much food for thought about a variety of geopolitical issues. Little encouraging news but brilliantly delivered.