A Prophet of Doom Lightens Up : NONFICTION : THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century,<i> By Robert D. Kaplan (Random House: S27.50; 442 pp.)</i>

Two years ago the Atlantic Monthly ran a now-famous cover article by Robert D. Kaplan that sketched a picture of the next hundred years on Earth. Overpopulation, environmental decay, resource scarcity and disease will dissolve borders, undermine central governments, unleash ethnic conflicts, and subject much of the world’s population to violence and death at the hands of criminal armies under the control of warlords or no one at all. Conventional maps offer a dangerously false comfort. The era of the nation-state is over and so is the century of organized ideological struggle. In “the coming anarchy,” ordinary politics, let alone individual action, will be overwhelmed by forces operating on a scale almost geologic and atmospheric. Democracy might make matters worse.

To his credit, Kaplan was unafraid of being wrong; his article was also overstated, perhaps deliberately. The analysis seemed ruthlessly unsentimental, but there is a romance of apocalypse, too, that might have seduced him out of journalism into grand prophecy: “West Africa’s” future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.” Predictably Kaplan won both attention and opponents, and his new book, his fifth, will likely be read as a detailed global fulfillment of the Atlantic article.

But “The Ends of the Earth” is, if not a repudiation of the article, at least a discursive and indirect backing away--for better and worse. The book is both less exciting and more nuanced. It describes Kaplan’s travels through West Africa, Egypt, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia--a lot of ground to cover, during which even a writer as intoxicated with the big picture as Kaplan was bound to run into local complications and the sheer reality of individual human beings.

Kaplan’s goal at the outset was nothing less than “to find a paradigm for understanding the world in the early decades of the 21st century.” That paradigm, hatched in the Atlantic article and fully armed with statistics and readings, sought to view “humanity in each locale as literally an outgrowth of the terrain and climate in which it was fated to live.” For roughly the first hundred pages of the book--its Africa section--the paradigm holds. This is because in Africa, Kaplan sees just enough to confirm what he already thought. Every landscape, every slum, every breast-feeding mother dissolves in the generalized glare. No African survives for more than a couple of paragraphs without becoming a type.

This has unfortunate narrative consequences, for it’s wearying to travel with a writer who’s determined to prove one thing all along the way. Kaplan doesn’t know how to stay away from his paradigm and his figures long enough to tell a story or evoke a character or paint a scene: “The tide had gone out and I noticed dead rats and an automobile chassis exposed on the mucky beach. By 2020 Guinea’s population would double at current rates.”

In the Atlantic article, which built an argument, coherence and focus weren’t a problem. A book like “The Ends of the Earth” makes very different demands. Kaplan says that “The Ends of the Earth” “folds international studies into a travelogue,” but for long stretches the two work against and almost defeat each other, sustaining neither argument nor narrative. Even if all his points and facts about Africa were correct, for rhetorical purposes these chapters would work better if Kaplan hadn’t left home.

After Africa, though, you feel him relaxing his grip on “the coming anarchy” and beginning to look--really look--around. Then, as he responds to experience, his story comes alive, takes on shape, and themes emerge from particulars.

Iran, Kaplan finds, “did not seem to me a very religious country at all.” Anti-Americanism is a spent force manipulated by the mullahs for political control. “Women in Teheran stare you in the face. Their eyes meet you dead on.” Behind the superficial veil of Islamic purity lies “a pleasure-loving Persian core” of sensuous art and bazaar economics. The Islamic revolution was a small event in Persian history. Iran’s coming conflict will be not with the West but with its ancient enemy, the Turks, spread over Western and Central Asia. And Turkic identity itself turns out to be spectacularly complicated.

The deeper Kaplan travels through the old Soviet Central Asian republics, western China and Pakistan, the more he finds that large and very old competitions for power and trade routes, between Uzbeks and Tajiks, Uighurs and Chinese, Pathans and Punjabis, are stirring, like earth tremors across national borders. His ceaseless effort to find the right metaphor for the world’s new map finally yields a hologram:

“In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of various group identities such as those of language and economic class, atop the two-dimensional color distinctions among city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadows overhead, including the power of drug cartels, mafias and private security agencies that guard the wealthy in failing states and hunt down terrorists. Instead of borders, there would be moving ‘centers’ of power, as in the Middle Ages. These power centers would be both national and financial, reflecting the sovereignty of global corporations. Many of these holistic layers would be in motion.”

This image is less tidy than global anarchy, less dramatically satisfying, more modest and persuasive. It implies a good deal of disorder and conflict but also allows a role for history and culture. “Travel was indeed frustrating,” Kaplan writes, still reluctant to let go of ultimate answers. At times he tries to fit his new notion of ethno-regions into “eco-regions.” He explains one country’s success against another’s failure--Iran’s against Pakistan’s, Thailand’s against Cambodia’s--variously in terms of written language, religious cohesion, location and historical accident. Nevertheless, by Pakistan we find him turning to Keats for insight into “negative capability”--living without certitude.

Kaplan has read widely and obscurely. He knows a lot about a lot of things, and over the course of this book you will learn the history of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the causes of northern Pakistan’s water crisis and the way AIDS has spread in Thailand.

The work as a whole is a rebuke to academic specialization: Kaplan’s appetite to subsume the globe is insatiable, pre-modern. There are going to be mistakes, and expert reviewers will hunt them down. This generalist in passing spotted errors in the location of the murder of Togo’s President Sylvanus Olympio by soldiers in 1963 and the claims that Eritrea is an “eco-region” separate from Ethiopia and that the British poet James Fenton witnessed the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh. These matter much less than the cornucopia of information provided by “The Ends of the Earth.”

What most complicates Kaplan’s “paradigm,” the word he increasingly uses to explain what he sees and hears, is culture. Unfortunately, he never defines it, perhaps because it is a word of last resort. Culture serves when every other account of human difference has failed: If history, ecology, geography and politics can’t explain why public toilets are pristine in one country and filthy in another, culture must. The word may be tautological (these groups are different because of their differences), but it is also indispensable. Enlightened people tend to avoid it because it suggests innateness and invites judgments and therefore racism. But anyone who has traveled the way Kaplan likes to, on the ground, knows that some peoples are succeeding and others failing to achieve human happiness, and that the reasons run deeper than this or that leader, this or that economy--that “differences between cultures are fundamental.”

Because he refuses the market as a universal solution, Kaplan will offend the right. He will offend the left because there’s a large strain of fatalism in his view of culture: He has little faith in political action to improve human life (at several points he proposes Singapore-style authoritarianism as the best the Third World can hope for). Globalization and growing inequality have nothing to do with human decisions and institutions; they happen “like wind current” or continental drift.

He holds out hope only in very modest, very local, efforts, like one in the Rishi Valley of southern India, to carve out an area of decency in a world where ever larger numbers of people live in misery. But at the end, in ravaged Cambodia, not even culture can explain everything. We’re a long way from the Atlantic article and Kaplan’s paradigm.

On the last page he admits: “The more I saw of the world, the less I felt I could fit it into a pattern.” By then even Africa has been retrospectively granted cultures. Narrative problems persist to the end of “The Ends of the Earth,” always driven by Kaplan’s impatience with the person or thing directly before him: After 400 pages there are no really memorable characters. Yet this book becomes a true travelogue despite its author’s grander designs. In tracing the effect of a journey on his mind, it shows the humanization of a political analyst by his own willingness to keep looking.