First published 2025
The world stands at a crossroads of converging disasters. War spreads across continents while climate change reshapes entire regions. Great powers clash as new technologies accelerate beyond human control. Robert D. Kaplan surveys this landscape of crisis and finds disturbing parallels with Germany's Weimar Republic between the world wars. Just as Weimar faced overlapping emergencies that eventually consumed the globe, today's interconnected world amplifies every local catastrophe into a planetary threat. Pandemics cross borders in hours. Economic collapse spreads through digital networks. Mass migration destabilizes democracies while authoritarian powers exploit the chaos. Kaplan argues that traditional liberalism and institutional stability, rather than pure democratic populism, may offer the only path away from complete breakdown. Drawing from history, literature, and political philosophy, he traces how we arrived at this moment and maps the narrow routes toward survival. The question remains whether global leaders will act before the spiral becomes irreversible.
Genres: history, political-science, non-fiction, 21st-century, current-affairs, academic
Vibes: suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: crisis, dystopia
Setting: Germany
Period: Between the World Wars
224 pages · Hardcover · Random House