Good in sections but fails to strongly cohere around a convincing thesis. While revisiting many of the themes (which he acknowledges) from his 1994 eye-opener The Coming Anarchy and incorporating more recent events (Ukraine, the rise of Putin and Xi Jinping, the post-Afghanistan fallout) does not expand meaningfully on the earlier work. Also, it is hard not to read Kaplan on how the chaos of the Weimar Republic and the Russian Army's collapse in World War I created a vacuum that led to Nazism and Communism, which is certainly reasonable, as anything but a defense of aristocracy as some kind of unbreakable societal glue, which is harder to swallow.