A collection of Kaplan's essays published in 2000 titled "The Coming Anarchy" aims to jolt America from its peacetime complacency, even as it chronicles Americans' growing passivity. In the book Kaplan strips his arguments and analysis from their strict ties to landscape. This is not travel writing, but sharp, often uncomfortable observations about U.S. foreign policy and trends in American life. In these essays, Kaplan reveals himself to be a brutal realist, critical of many of the ideas of progressive liberal thinking: democracy, genocide prevention, even the idea of progress in human affairs.

"I don't accept the difference between humanism and realism," Kaplan said during our conversation. "Realists understand the slow route is the steadier route. Everything can't be done at once."

"Isolationism goes perfectly with idealism," Kaplan adds. "When things don't work out perfectly according to perfectionist fantasies, idealists have been able to retreat back across the ocean. Now, we cannot withdraw anymore, because technology has defeated distance. So we are always engaged now. Idealism will be replaced by realism."

In "The Coming Anarchy," Kaplan turns progressive liberal thinking on its head. He writes about the liberation of violence. He offers a cautious defense of Henry Kissinger and the bloodbath of Vietnam and Kissinger's decision to delay withdrawing U.S. troops from there as perhaps necessary for the U.S. to show strength before its Cold War adversaries.

In one of the collection's essays, "Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder," Kaplan criticizes the trend he notes in U.S. foreign policy toward a "Holocaust mentality," that seeks to prevent genocide through institutions such as war crimes tribunals. "Such an attempt is both noble and naove," Kaplan writes. "Institutionalizing war crimes tribunals will have as much effect on future war crimes as Geneva Conventions have had on the Iraqi and Serbian militaries." He, who has spent so much time chronicling state collapse and conflict in Africa and elsewhere, writes, "Callously put, the murder of up to a million Tutsis in Rwanda did not affect the United States. Only when moral interests crosshatch with strategic ones will the public tolerate blood in an intervention."

In another essay, "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Kaplan heaps scorn on the United States' fondness for exporting democracy around the globe. Democracy often brings instability and becomes a vehicle for amplifying ethnic and minority tensions, he says, rather than providing the foundations for a middle class, growing prosperity and stability. What people really want, Kaplan writes, is a better life, which benign authoritarianism and hybrid democratic-autocratic regimes may be better able to deliver. "My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept," Kaplan writes, "is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy, and China may be succeeding in part because it is not."

Kaplan then goes further to argue not only that the conditions for successful democracy don't exist in much of the world, but that democracy is slipping away from us at home. One may be offended by some of his ideas. But the picture Kaplan draws of Americans' being steadily lulled into passive voyeurism as corporations and strip malls overtake the landscape, and "Survivor" and multimillion-dollar sporting events fill our TV screens, is disturbingly convincing. As he writes in "The Coming Anarchy":

When voter turnout decreases to around 50 percent at the same time the middle class is spending astounding sums in gambling casinos and state lotteries, joining private health clubs and using large amounts of stimulants and anti-depressants, one can legitimately be concerned about the state of American society. We have become voyeurs and escapists. Many of us don't play sports but love watching great athletes with great physical attributes. It is because people find so little in themselves that they fill their world with celebrities. The masses avoid important national and international news because much of it is tragic, even as they show an unlimited appetite for the details of Princess Diana's death. This willingness to give up self and responsibility is the sine qua non for tyranny.

The link Kaplan draws between the failures of democracy abroad, and the shrinking of democracy at home, gets at what may be the heart of Kaplan's work. In all the places he's traveled all these years, Kaplan has confronted the signs of an unjust, bifurcated world, where the people in the rich comfortable West are seemingly unaffected by those suffering immense poverty, disease and conflict in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Cambodia, even down the street. After watching a girl die of tuberculosis in Cambodia, Kaplan writes in "The Ends of the Earth":

On the plane, I wondered what it all proved -- that girl, my journey from Sierra Leone to Cambodia? I could have watched a homeless person die of TB a few blocks from a pricey restaurant in Manhattan. I didn't have to come to Southeast Asia to see suffering and disparity. Many of the problems I saw around the world -- poverty, the collapse of cities, porous borders, cultural and racial strife, growing economic disparities, weakening nation-states -- are problems for Americans to think about. I thought of America everywhere I looked. We cannot escape from a more populous, interconnected world of crumbling borders.

Kaplan argues in "The Coming Anarchy" that it isn't moralism that should spur U.S. foreign policy regarding the implosion of Sierra Leona, genocide in Rwanda or tuberculosis in Cambodia. We should care because the world's problems are coming to our doorstep. "West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world," Kaplan writes. "As AIDS shows, Africa's climate and poverty beget disease that finds its ways to the wealthiest suburbs. We are the world and the world is us."

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