The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today’s world as a larger version of Germany’s Weimar Republic, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.”
National disasters like pandemics and recessions spread across a digitally interconnected world beset by urbanization, mass migration and great-power conflict, causing a crisis in one part of the planet to instantaneously become a crisis in all.
In his latest book, Waste Land, he uses history, literature, politics and philosophy to draw parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar period to give us a bracing glimpse of a dangerous world that we’ve already entered into.
How did we get here and where are we going? That’s what we’re talking about today.
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of twenty-four books on foreign affairs and travel, including The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic for three decades, and he was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”
You can read more about him on his website.
We spoke about the immediacy of every crisis, how faltering institutions enable fanatics and ideologues, and why the roots of our permanent twenty-first century crisis continues to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux
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