Robert Kaplan is a Washington-based journalist whom you don’t read first thing in the morning if you want to enjoy the rest of the day. He is a conservative — absolutely not the MAGA kind — who has advised government officials and gets read by lots of important people.
He is now a doomsayer. "We have to be able to consider,” he writes in a new book titled "Waste Land: A World In Permanent Crisis," "that literally anything can happen to us.” Kaplan’s message is that our only hope as human beings in a chaotic and dangerous world moving at breathtaking speed is to act with moderation and restraint.
These aren’t, unfortunately, qualities that command much enthusiasm from voters in the Western democracies, to judge by the sort of leaders some have chosen for themselves lately. My eye was caught by one passage in Kaplan’s latest, in which he compares our world to Weimar Germany, as it was in the 1920s between the two World Wars, on the brink of Hitler’s ascent to power.
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