Kaplan’s Intellectual Honesty

Cunning Realist might appreciate this one:

INTERVIEWER: You write in The Coming Anarchy that, “Africa’s distress will exert a destabilizing influence on the US and that factor and many others will make the US less of a nation than it is today.”

KAPLAN: That was wrong. You write a magazine piece and if it’s relevant for six months you’re happy. If people are arguing about it 12 years later, you’ve kind of achieved your mark. But even in that case in The Coming Anarchy, there are things in there that are just going to be proved dead wrong, and that was one of them. I was a prisoner of the news headlines at the time I was writing, and in this time in mid-1993 there was lots of racial tension for various reasons and no one was owning up to what was about to unfold in many African countries, and I saw a connection where there was none.

From the C-Span interview with Kaplan, 4 April 2005.