The World in 2025 with Robert Kaplan: Finding A Way Through Permanent Crisis (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. 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,

Conor, what can we expect from today's episode? Well, thanks, Mia. The World in 2025 series, this is our third event of the series. We've had Neil Ferguson, we've had Peter Frankopan, and this time we've got Robert Kaplan. I mean, keen listeners who listened to us back in the depths of COVID will have heard Robert Kaplan on the podcast earlier.

discussing his previous book, The Revenge of Geography, he came over to really present the ideas which are in 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, the post-World War I democratic German government that arguably paved the way for Nazism in the 1930s. It's a really interesting thesis that I think a lot of our listeners will enjoy hearing and kind of puts a lot of the

the things happening in politics today into perspective. Good evening. Welcome to the Intelligence Squared event. 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 particularly delighted to introduce our guest, our speaker tonight, Robert Caplan, because I've been carrying his books around with me as a foreign correspondent for over 30 years, actually. And as I may explain later, 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 realized,

He's right. And for those of you who haven't yet read his work, Robert is a former foreign correspondent, acclaimed essayist, commentator, and author. He's written a slew of highly regarded books

books on geopolitics that help to explain the world. They include "Bulk and Ghosts" in the 90s, 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 humanity's

role in running the world and our ability to mess things up. Is that fair? That's true, but keep in mind that pessimists have killed less people than optimists. In geopolitics, it's a case of worst-case scenarioing and engaging in anxious foresight because it's the things you actively worry about that tend not to happen.

or don't happen as badly as you had originally thought because you took action to prevent it. So it's towards a good end. Well, we will come to pessimism in due course this evening and indeed how Trump fits into what you've just said. The overarching idea behind this evening is Robert's latest book, A World in Permanent Crisis.

Robert, we'll come to some of the specific arguments, but I think let's start with you setting the stage here. I mean, what do you mean by permanent crisis? I mean, isn't the world always in crisis? What I mean is that the world today is more anxious, more claustrophobic, more anxious

more interconnected than ever before. And interconnectivity is great for financial markets, but in geopolitics it can be a negative because a crisis in one part of the earth can ricochet around and affect a crisis in another part of the earth.

never before. Also people's emotions. People can be emotionally affected by a crisis half a world away because of the advance of technology and they can see it in all its vividness and this stirs their passions and emotions and of course this was always the case but more and more an attrition of the same adds up to bigger

a big change. And that's what we have now. So it's a permanent crisis at a much higher pitch than ever before, because geography has not been defeated by technology, but it has been shrunk by technology. And so that's where we are now.

Your point on the interconnectedness of financial markets might be put to the test in a couple of hours' time and Trump may disagree if the markets take a dim view of his tariff policies.

I take your point on how obviously technology links up crises and political systems much more effectively than in the pre-digital age. But are you also though not implicitly suggesting in your book that the politics of the world

is in greater crisis now than before or is that not the case? Yes, no, no. I am suggesting that. First of all, because of technology, we don't have world government or world governance, but we do have a world system that's emerging. And in that system, one part can influence the other part as never before. So it is a system of sorts. And I think that globalisation...

which everybody cheered vividly in the 1990s, has actually split countries down the middle rather than united them. In the US especially, but also in Britain during Brexit and Hungary and other places, you have a situation where one half, or take any percentage you want, one half of the country has been swept up into a hole

upper middle global wine sipping world so to speak where their friends and colleagues from around the world matter emotionally more to them than the people back at home and the other half have just been left behind for a variety of reasons and i think it's the revenge of globalization that's part of the explanation of the trump phenomenon of of brexit and things like that

Yes, I mean, it brings to mind, was it Theresa May who referred to citizens of nowhere? Which will, I think, strike a chord with people in this audience. But do you really think that globalisation is actually dead or is it just being reformed? I mean, if you speak to, say, people in ASEAN, which is the big political grouping in Southeast Asia, they're just...

quite calmly some of the trade ministers and leading political figures, they are preparing to be hit by tariffs, by more tariffs, and thinking they'll have to reconfigure their trading system, trade more with Latin America, and that global trade will continue. It'll just be different. I think globalization is ultimately inexorable.

that it has to continue because the technology is driving it. And the technology has linked people emotionally together and politically together in a way that will have its ups and downs and reverses. And we may be in a reverse period now, but we'll ultimately get deeper and deeper.

Can I take you to Trump? Because he is the driving force behind what is happening in the world right now. Your book was actually written

before Trump was elected, let alone... It was finished before... I finished the book before I had a clue who would win the election. Yeah, because it was so close, I couldn't risk the book on a prediction, so to speak. So, actually, the book itself reads as if you did predict who was going to win the election because it paints a picture of a pretty dystopian world, or rather, to be fair, a dystopian world order, a world order that is crumbling

crumbling and fracturing. And that is very much what has been happening in the 10 weeks since Trump took office.

Have you been surprised at the speed with which his administration has set about dismantling what became known as the liberal post-95, post-45? Not that surprised because he himself saw his first term as a wasted opportunity because he did not expect

to beat Hillary Clinton, he had no staff, he had no idea what being president entailed logistically, bureaucratically, et cetera. He was much better prepared this time. And with big staff, you can do anything.

In other words, because he's not doing all these things every day, these new pronouncements and all, and arresting this college student in Columbia at the same time he's deporting people. His staff and satellite entities of his staff are coming up with all these ideas and doing it all because they know what the man wants. He's made it explicitly clear. So it has the effect

of a non-stop burst of energy.

But is he better prepared or was it just that his staff are better prepared? His staff is much better prepared this time. You know, they had, you know, the Heritage Foundation, a whole think tank was doing nothing but writing up what Trump should do the first week, the second week, the first month, the second month. And it shows, the preparation shows. And that's why we've all been shocked. Because, I mean, one of the big questions that

that we face in my newspaper news organization is trying to work out to what extent there is a plan. And there is a school of thought that yes, absolutely, members of his staff have a plan, but there is no overarching plan. And this is why, for example, this evening is all, yeah, in the US it will be late afternoon, the pronouncements are causing such consternation around the world.

No one has any idea what Trump is going to unveil. So this is not just an issue of him failing to prepare his allies, because normally an American president before an announcement of this magnitude would have allowed members of his staff or her staff to trail an element of the policies so the markets would be calm, allies would be reassured and so on. There's absolutely... There's been no trailing at all. And one of the reasons seems to be that no one really knows

on his staff this is, what he's going to say. No, the United States has not had a president like this in the modern era, you know, in the 20th, early 21st century. There was three, two great German Jewish philosophers in the United States in the mid-20th century, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss.

and also the young Henry Kissinger shared this view. They had lived through the Weimar Republic. They had seen firsthand democracy destroying itself, in other words, because Hitler was elected democratically or put in power democratically. So they always had a caution about American democracy.

And their caution was the same as the founding fathers, who understood, like the Renaissance philosophers too, that you can devise the best system of government in the world, but it ultimately depends on virtue. On the minimum level of virtue of people elected, people in power. Because if there is no virtue, no system will save you.

I want to come back to the state of the American system and how imperiled it is in a sec, but let's stick with Weimar because this is the overarching analogy for the first third of Robert's book. Indeed, the title of the first third is "Weimar Goes Global". I'm just going to read a tiny extract.

Doom is the word that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the Weimar Republic. Weimar is a candy-coated horror tale, a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. It signifies an artistically and intellectually vibrant period, and you go on to cite a number of the great writers and poets and architects.

A period replete with so much social and cultural experimentation, yet packed with nasty racial and religious tensions to say nothing of inflation, depression, all leading without skipping a beat to Hitler.

And then you say, will we be any the wiser? I wonder whether, did you hesitate before using the Weimar analogy, given that people do immediately, when they think of the Weimar Republic, they jump straight to Hitler? Well, I did not hesitate once I had researched the Weimar period, because Weimar

could have had many different outcomes. It did not necessarily have to lead to Hitler. It was not vast impersonal forces, it was contingencies. It was, had this politician done something different at this time? Had Heinrich Brüning, one of the last prime ministers, had been more of a better politician and not just a technocrat?

There were all these things that were accidental, in other words. So that's why I go on to say in the book that our world will be different. It will not lead to another Hitler. But I also say that what Weimar teaches ultimately is that literally anything can happen to us.

and that literally anything can happen to us, and therefore we have to be humble. We have to be cautious.

In that context then, how worried are you about the democratic fabric of your country, of America? How worried are you that the impact of the Trump administration on institutions will be impossible to reverse? Well...

In part of the book, I make the argument that all three great powers are in decline: the United States, China, and Russia. But all for different reasons, and all very gradually, and decline itself can be overrated because it can take place over centuries and decades.

But I do think that the United States is in decline. I don't say this in an alarmist way. And I have a specific reason for it. It's that the center has been lost.

That's what the Trump phenomenon shows. In the print and typewriter age, when the media was in the center, had knowledgeable fact-checked articles, and that provided the information for the populace,

You had a center-right Republican Party and a center-left Democratic Party with the presidential candidates chosen by the party bosses who would never ever agree on a candidate who is unorthodox.

so to speak. So you got centrist government and mass democracies flourish in the center, at least the American democracy did. But what's been completely lost is the center. There's no center-right Republican Party now. It's a hard far-right party. There's no center-left Democratic Party. It's become a progressive leftist party.

In Congress, there's no middle ground. So elections become existential. You know, winner takes all, tyranny of the majority. And what this leads to is bad laws being passed.

And I think one of the reasons for it, we can debate all night what the reasons are, but one reason I highlight in the book is that the media has changed because of technology. Now we have social media, which rewards passion and simplistic solutions. And passion and simplistic solutions are the enemy of analysis and good government.

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does seem at the very least in peril right now is the order that America has presided over. I'm not just thinking of the state of the Western military alliance of NATO, but that whole sort of multilateral system that yes, was sometimes hypocritically deployed by America and its allies, but it was an order, it was a system.

On reading this book, I was quite struck. I think you were...

You've always been a bit of a, shall we say, a sort of a skeptic of those, and I guess I include myself among them, who got very excited about the unipolar moment and the post-1990 decade and a bit more when it seems that the world was all moving towards the free market and liberal democracy. And yet you felt, I think, that this was a chimera. - It couldn't last because it was ahistorical.

because peace is really the interregnum between wars. That's what history teaches, in other words. And when you think about it, you know, talking about the disruption of the Western alliance and world order, 80 years, because it's 80 years since the end of World War II and since the formation of the Transatlantic Alliance,

80 years is a long time in history. It is really, really long. I mean, there's a whole class of Roman emperors who ruled for 80 years and Gibbon devotes, I think, 100 pages to it. And Rome had no technological development. We've changed beyond recognition. So people should not be surprised. They should have been prepared for this.

And I think that... And therefore, we're living in... The world as a system is living in a more historical time now than in 80 years. You know, there's...

There's a cliche, it's ascribed to Lenin, I don't think Lenin actually said it, and it's become a cliche that decades can march on and nothing happens. And then days and weeks and months go on and decades happen. That's us now, do you think? I think that's where we are now. We're in days and weeks and months when decades happen.

essentially, certainly since Trump was inaugurated, but it started even before. I mean, in Ukraine it started in 2022, three years ago. In the Middle East it started in 2023. The Middle East was quiescent, relatively speaking, for quite a number of years, and then boom, decades started to happen.

So in the context of history, then, Trump is one of the most consequential American presidents of the last more than 100 years. I would call him... This is not a compliment, it's a description. He's a world historical figure. I think that... Let yourself go a bit more, Robert. What? Let yourself go a bit more. All right, yeah. All right. You know, Clinton, Obama...

They energized us. We had opinions about them. We argued about them. But they will go down in history as basically inconsequential presidents, I believe. It doesn't mean they were bad. Because inconsequential times can be happy times for the average person. But they were basically inconsequential figures.

George W. Bush was very consequential in a bad way because of the Iraq War. Trump is a world historical figure. He has changed America, he has changed history, he has done something that hasn't been done in modern times or even before. He's challenged the American constitutional order.

And the Constitution in America is a set of laws. And Americans always like to say we're a country of laws, not of men. Because there are rules. But when you arrest people because of their opinions and deport them even though they have permanent residency status, or you insult judges simply because you didn't, and threaten them even because you don't like the opinions they rendered,

And you take away security staff, security protection from former presidents and high officials. All right, that itself is not in the Constitution, but it is effectively in the constitutional spirit of modern times. When you do that, you're really changing America, and you're changing the world as well.

So one of his aides from his first term, who is now an émigré, really, so this is someone who worked with Trump in the White House for a period in his first term in office and now very publicly split from him, voted against him in the last election, came to see us this week at the FT. And he has no good words to say about the president. But what he did say was this. He said that...

Amidst all the kind of despair amongst America's allies and so on, bear in mind that the sands are already starting to run through the hourglass of Trump's second term and

This person's theory was, "Well, look, it's really quite soon that you'll be something of a lame duck." Hard as it may be to imagine right now, where every day we wake up here in Britain to the latest pronouncement, often seemingly contradicting the previous announcement, but usually with massive consequences. But actually,

in two years' time will be the midterm elections, that Republican congressmen will be looking to see what happens, and that we should just wait him out, and that the system will endure, and that the courts will, by and large, do their best to hold him to account. Now, is that just too optimistic, do you think? It's a good bet. It's a good argument. It has one note of optimism that I question.

And that is that the system endured well in what I call the print and typewriter age, which basically existed from the American Revolution to the late 20th century. Now we're in the digital video era, where people's minds are different, they're wired differently.

All kinds of conspiracy theories can float around. That was never the case before. You can create digital mobs, and the American body politic may be more damaged than it was previously. That's the one thing that worries me. And also,

Trump's vice president is a young man who's in his mid-40s. He believes everything and more that Trump believes, and he's much better organized and all of that. And Trump has people around him who think exactly like he thinks. So it's more than one man. We're dealing with a movement. And who do you think he listens to?

That's a good question. I don't think, I don't, my instinct is that he doesn't really listen to his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, because to him, Marco Rubio is like a hired hand. The people he might listen to are the billionaires around him.

Because Trump respects that. You know, you're worth $20 billion, you can get his time, he'll take advice from you. Whereas civil servants, foreign service officers, ambassadors in complex, troubled countries like Colombia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Trump has no time for.

I mean, this same former aide of his said when we asked him, I asked him the very same question I've just asked you, and the reply came back very quickly. He listens to two people. He listens to Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his envoy, who now seems to be conducting the talks with Putin, the Middle Eastern talks, having effectively sidelined, as you say. And who's a billionaire. And who's a billionaire. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The second section of your book, Robert, takes on, I was about to say the two great autocracies, but it's possibly slightly wrong to put Russia and China in the same category, but they are the two most dominant autocratic figures.

figures of our age. And I was very struck by the argument you were making, which is that they are at their most dangerous now because their systems are practically the weakest they've been in recent years. I wonder if you could elaborate. Their system is what? The systems are weakening. Yeah. And there's

the most dangerous time for an autocracy is when power is starting to fracture. Well, I take the long view in this book. And my long view on Russia and China is the following.

that World War I tragically changed the 20th century because it went on for four long years. And had it ended in 1915 or 1916, Hitler never would have come to power. The Habsburgs might still be the constitutional monarchs of Austria. A lot would have been different.

The Ukraine war has gone on for three long years. It's killed tens of thousands of men, destroyed thousands of battle tanks, and because there's no new novelty value in it, it's drifted off the front pages. But it's every bit as ferocious as it was on day one.

in that sense. And as a result, Russia has been losing the wherewithal to affect events and to manage places of the former Soviet Union that constitute their empire, like the Caucasus, former Soviet Central Asia, Siberia, the former Russian Far East. And I think that Russia as a whole will be so weakened after this war or as the war goes on

And remember, Russia is not like China. China invented bureaucracy 5,000 years ago. China is deeply institutionalized. If Xi Jinping got sick tomorrow, the standing committee would elect a new leader with probably far-reaching consequences, but it would elect a new leader.

But if Putin were to get sick or to be assassinated or to just get senile gradually or sooner than expected, Russia doesn't have a system. Russia could become like a low-calorie version of the former Yugoslavia in a way. So that's what worries me about Russia.

A lot of what drives Putin is the knowledge that it is demographically weakening and in other respects weakening. Regarding China,

I'm aware of all the technological AI gizmos that China is developing. But nevertheless, billions of dollars have fled China. China has a number of cases, hardcore Leninist autocrats making financial decisions, making consequential financial decisions, which cannot end well. And I think that...

There's been a different China for each man. We had revolutionary anarchy under Mao. We had a mandarinade under Xi Jinping, under Deng Xiaoping, excuse me. And now we have a Leninist autocracy under Xi Jinping. Xi may constitute the last phase of communism in China before there is a new dynasty.

And Chinese dynasties tend to end with war and dissolution and instability. So I'm not sold on the fact that China is rising. Because it's such an autocracy, a lot of its problems are opaque. They're beneath the surface. But they're there nevertheless.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Connor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Don't forget, Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers can listen to the event in full and ad-free. Just head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple for a free trial. And if you'd like to come along to any of our other live events, you can see our full program on intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend to see what we have coming up.