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.”

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.

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.

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