We are entering a new era of global instability. The world is facing an era of war, climate change, great power rivalry and unprecedented technological advancement. In April 2025, geopolitical expert and bestselling author Robert Kaplan came to Intelligence Squared to analyse where the world is heading in 2025 and beyond. Drawing from the themes of his new book Waste Land, he argued that history can help guide us through a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace.

Kaplan drew comparisons between today’s challenges and the Weimar Republic, the post-World War I democratic German government that arguably paved the way for Nazism in the 1930s. Just as in Weimar, which faced crises inextricably bound up with global systems, the singular dilemmas of the twenty-first century—pandemic disease, recession, mass migration, the destabilizing effects of large-scale democracy and great power conflicts, and the intimate bonds created by technology—mean that every national disaster has the potential to become a global crisis, too. According to Kaplan, solutions lie in prioritising order in governing systems, and he will argue that stability and historic liberalism rather than mass democracy will save global populations from a chaotic future.

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