"The Coming Anarchy" is Kaplan at his most controversial. He argues that democracy is dangerous, that universal peace is a criminal illusion, that the random violence we fear (such as Littleton) is emerging as a lasting strategic threat. "We are entering a bifurcated world, " Kaplan writes. "Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes' First Man, condemned to a life that is 'poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'" In a devastating condemnation of democracy in the developing world, he writes: "Democracies do not always make societies more civil -- but they do always mercilessly expose the health of the societies in which they operate...My point, hard as it may be for an American to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not."

Ten years ago we had Fukuyama's End of History and The Last Man, a national bestseller that provided an intellectual framework for our understanding of the post cold war world. "The Coming Anarchy" is Kaplan's corrective. He turns Fukuyama on his head and says that war, not peace is the future -- anarchy and random violence, not democracy. Expect a revolution -- he's never been wrong before.