2025-04-07
33 分钟Good evening.
Welcome to the Intelligent Squared event.
I am Alec Russell from the FT,
and as I was walking over here from the FT,
as all my colleagues were preparing for a long night of covering tariffs,
I was thinking, Robert,
that there couldn't really be a more appropriate evening yet this year
than Trump's Liberation Day to be talking about a world in crisis.
I'm particularly delighted to introduce our guest, our speaker tonight, Robert Kaplan,
because I've been carrying his books around with me as a foreign correspondent for over 30 years,
actually, and as I may explain later,
Robert, there was one time when I carried one of your books around, and I thought, he's wrong,
he's wrong, he's wrong, and then a few years later I realized he's right.
And for those of you who haven't yet read his work,
Robert is a former foreign correspondent, a claimed essayist, commentator, and author.
He's written a slew of highly regarded books on geopolitics that help to explain the world.
They include Bulkin Ghosts in the 90s, which was the first of your books that I read,
The Coming Anarchy, The Revenge of Geography.
I think it's fair to say, Robert, they tend, possibly rightly,
to a bleak view of humanity's role in running the world and our ability to mess things up.