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The World in 2025 with Robert Kaplan: Finding A Way Through Permanent Crisis

Politics &
Economics

The geopolitical expert and bestselling author on a bracing but hopeful glimpse into a future

‘Waste Land solidifies Robert Kaplan’s reputation as one of the truly masterful observers and thinkers of our time.’ — General David Petraeus, US Army (Ret.), former Commander of US Central Command, and Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, and former Director of the CIA

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. 

Speakers for the motion

  • Robert D. Kaplan

    Bestselling author on geopolitics. His forthcoming title is Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

Chair

  • Alec Russell

    Foreign editor for the FT

Speakers are subject to change.

Speakers

Speaker

Robert D. Kaplan

Bestselling author on geopolitics. His forthcoming title is Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

Bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron and the forthcoming title Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. 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.”
Host

Alec Russell

Foreign editor for the FT

Foreign editor for the FT. He was the editor of FT Weekend from 2016-2023. A long-time former foreign correspondent, he has reported from Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Washington, winning a number of awards. He has written three books. The latest is After Mandela: the battle for the soul of South Africa.