"A Writhing Ghost of a Would-Be Nation"

Robert D. Kaplan has a knack for predicting geopolitical upheavals long before they occur, and he sent me an article he wrote for The Atlantic in 1993 where he did it again. This piece, called “Syria: Identity Crisis,” is a must-read.

His 1993 analysis of where Syria is likely heading largely lines up with my own in 2012. He starts by first explaining how Syria got the way it is now.

Syria—whose population, like Lebanon's, is a hodgepodge of feuding Middle Eastern minorities—has always been mor...