The World in 2025 with Robert Kaplan: Finding A Way Through Permanent Crisis (Part One)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sarrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event for the Intelligence Squared World in 2025 series, which took place at Conway Hall in London. I'm here with head of programming Connor Boyle. Connor, what can we expect from today's episode? Well thanks, Mia. Um The World of Twenty Twenty Five series, this is our uh our third event of the series. We've had um Neil Ferguson, we've had Peter Frank Apan, and this time we've got Robert Kaplan. I mean, listeners who are keen listeners who listen to us back in the depths of COVID will have heard Robert Kaplan on the podcast uh discussing his previous book, The Revenge of Geography.

He came over to really present the ideas which are in his his latest book, which is called Wasteland A World in Permanent Crisis, where he really draws comparison between today's challenges and what was happening in the Weimar Republic, uh the post-World War One democratic German government. uh that arguably paved the way for Nazism in the 1930s is a really interesting thesis that I think a lot of our listeners will enjoy hearing and kind of puts a lot of the things happening in politics today into perspective. Good evening. Welcome to the Intelligence Squad uh event. U I am Alec Russell from the FT. And as I was walking over here from the FT as all my colleagues were preparing for a long night of covering tariffs, I was thinking, Robert, that there couldn't really be a more appropriate evening yet this year than Trump's Liberation Day to be talking about a world in Crisis. I'm I'm particularly delighted to uh introduce our guest, our speaker tonight, Robert Kaplan, uh because I've been carrying his books around with me uh as a foreign correspondent for

Over thirty years, uh actually, and as I may explain later, uh Robert, there was one time when I carried one of your books around and I thought, he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong and then a few years later I realised He's right. And uh for those of you who haven't yet read his work, Robert is a former foreign correspondent uh acclaimed essayist, commentator, uh, and author. He's written a slew of uh highly regarded books on geopolitics that help to explain the world. They include Bulken Ghosts in the nineties, which was the first of your books that I read, The Coming Anarchy, The Revenge of Geography. I think it's fair to say, Robert, they tend possibly rightly to a bleak view of uh humanity's um role in running the world and uh our ability to mess things up. Is that fair. That's true, but keep in mind that pessimists have killed less people than optimists. You know, in in geopolitics it's a case of worst case scenarioing and engaging in anxious foresight.

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