Our Global Crisis Is Reminiscent of Weimar Germany


Today, China, Russia, and the United States, to say nothing of the mid-level and smaller powers, are all running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic: that weak and wobbly political organism that governed Germany for 15 years from the ashes of World War I to the ascension of Adolf Hitler.



the book cover for Waste Land by Robert D. Kaplan

This article is adapted from Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 224 pp., $31, January 2025).

America’s Weimar syndrome may be obvious with the reelection of the institution-destroyer Donald Trump as president. But the entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves globally in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.

I see no Hitler in our midst, or even a totalitarian world state. But don’t assume that the next phase of history will provide any relief to the present one. It is in the spirit of caution that I raise the subject of Weimar.

Analogies can be futile, I know, since no thing is exactly like another. Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain. While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world. It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the depth of our global crisis. We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.



A crowd of soldiers fills the scene with the columned edifice of the Brandenburg Gate ahead of them.
A crowd of soldiers fills the scene with the columned edifice of the Brandenburg Gate ahead of them.

Front-line troops return from the World War I through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Nov. 12, 1918.Walter Gircke/ullstein bild via Getty Images

What, exactly, was Weimar? The great German historian Golo Mann called Weimar a sprawling and unwieldy “empire without an emperor.” World War I—which lasted four long years, and which ordinary Germans thought originally would be a triumph—ended in defeat, 1.75 million German military deaths, and almost a half-million German civilian deaths. The country was shattered, the royal imperial governing structure had collapsed, and Germany was on the verge of social chaos. It was in that context that leading German politicians and lawyers, meeting in the Thuringian town of Weimar, devised a new constitutional arrangement that sought to avoid the autocratic tendencies of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Otto von Bismarck before him.

But the new arrangement was just too weak to withstand the pressures of what was to come. There was no night watchman to keep the peace between its constituent parts. The federal states (Länder) legislated through the Reichsrat (upper house of parliament), retaining all rights not explicitly transferred to the central government. The nation as a whole elected the head of state, or Reich president. The president then appointed the chancellor, who with his cabinet ran the government at the behest of the Reichstag, the lower house, which was elected by the people. Two-thirds of Germany was still called Prussia, and was governed under different rules than the Länder. As for Bavaria—which, like Prussia, was a state within a state—there was constant talk of separation from the Reich.

If all this seems like a far more complicated version of the U.S. Constitution with its separation of powers and 50 states, it was—and it was made more unwieldy by economic and social anarchy. There was catastrophic inflation during the early Weimar years and catastrophic depression toward the end: a result of a very difficult postwar economy, made worse by reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles and by world economic dislocations.

Germany during the Weimar period from 1918 to 1933 was a vast and barely united world unto itself, where the rules of order scarcely applied. It was less a government than a system of belligerent and far-flung competing parts, given the regional differences of a sprawling and, in historical terms, recently united Germany. Weimar’s “normal state was crisis,” writes the late historian Gordon A. Craig.

In that sense, Weimar was like our planet today: intimately connected, so as to have crises that cut across oceans, whether it be COVID-19, a global recession, great-power conflicts, Middle East wars, or unprecedented climate change. To recall Weimar is to emphasize and admit the growing interdependencies of our own world, and to accept moral responsibility for it. Like Weimar’s interrelated German states, all countries are now connected in ways in which a crisis for one can be a crisis for all. The Weimar phenomenon, therefore, becomes one of scale.

Weimar was one long cabinet crisis where everything always seemed to be at stake. Central authority exhausted itself just trying to preserve order, and in the final Weimar years, all anyone could talk about in Germany was daily politics. It was truly a permanent crisis, with one breathless series of headlines following another. The public and politicians both were caught up in the moment, in all of its intensity, unable to concentrate on what might come next because the present was so overwhelming.

Mann writes: “Divided and alienated from itself, led by weak or reluctant politicians, the nation was confronted by problems the hopeless confusion of which would have daunted a Bismarck.”


A man leans over a table in an ornate room with other men sitting at tables around him observing the treaty signing.
A man leans over a table in an ornate room with other men sitting at tables around him observing the treaty signing.

German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann signs the Locarno pact between Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy in 1925. Imagno/Getty Images

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. The years of the mid- and late 1920s that were associated with Gustav Stresemann—a liberal realist politician, by all accounts brilliant, who served as both a chancellor and foreign minister—constituted a time of economic growth, cultural blossoming, and political compromises and reconciliations. There was a distinct sense for a while that things were getting better and that Germany was finally emerging out of postwar chaos. Stresemann’s diplomacy virtually removed the restrictions placed upon German sovereignty by the Versailles peace treaty after Germany’s defeat in World War I, except for the question of armaments. There was another bout of optimism, at least momentarily, when the fiscal conservative Heinrich Brüning emerged in early 1930 to lead a fairly nonpartisan cabinet of national emergency.

However, Brüning’s gifts as a technocrat were not matched by his political instincts: He lacked the ability to compromise and maneuver at a time when he was trying to force tough economic choices and hardships, including wage cuts and a tightening of credit, upon the population and the political parties. “Had Brüning been a Bismarck, he might, despite the daunting … circumstances, have been able to pull this off,” Craig writes. But Brüning’s government struggled on until it collapsed in 1932.

Audio adapted with permission of Random House Audio from Waste Land by Robert D. Kaplan, read by Robert Petkoff.

 Brüning’s cabinet of technocrats had been eaten away by extremist forces in the streets, both Nazis and communists. It may have been the last real chance the Weimar Republic had to right itself. History is Shakespearean as well as geopolitical, a matter of contingencies, and if Brüning had not had the personal limitations that he did, the history of the 20th century might have been vastly different.

The more abject the disorder, often the more extreme the tyranny to follow, and that brings us to Weimar’s last chapter.

Weimar’s house of cards culminated in 1932 with its next-to-last chancellor, Franz von Papen, a rightist authoritarian and amateur horseman without a political base, a man whom Mann describes as “vain,” “irresponsible,” and “pitifully superficial.” Von Papen’s government just couldn’t get anything done and didn’t last the year. Indeed, at this point there was endless cabinet jockeying but no real governance. Yet even after von Papen left office, he remained a close advisor to President Paul von Hindenburg.

When asked why Hindenburg, bowing to the advice of von Papen and a few others, had named Hitler as chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, von Papen replied, “We have (only) hired him.” “We have framed him in,” added one of von Papen’s friends, believing that Hitler could easily be controlled in that role. Mann asks what the meaning of human existence is when “such a lightweight” as von Papen could “determine the course of world history.” Again, there are large, overwhelming forces of geography, culture, and economics, and there are also contingencies based on pivotal personalities. History blends the two.



Adolf Hitler in uniform with his face stern marches forward with other men in similar garb behind him. A bench and building are seen at left with trees in the background.
Adolf Hitler in uniform with his face stern marches forward with other men in similar garb behind him. A bench and building are seen at left with trees in the background.

Adolf Hitler marches to the Reichstag in Berlin on Jan. 30, 1933, the day he took his seat as chancellor of the Reich.General Photographic Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Weimar constituted a vacuum eventually filled by Nazi totalitarianism. But our world today must have a different destiny. Like Weimar, it is an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules. But world geography is still a factor. The Earth is vast enough that no individual political force can really replicate what happened to Germany at the end of Weimar, a loose-limbed republic that covered only the geographical center of Europe. So rather than risk the rise of another Hitler, we are forced to wallow in one emergency or another without pause, as crises seep and ricochet across the globe.

Weimar is now a permanent condition for us, as we are connected enough by globalization and technology to affect each other intimately without having the possibility of true global governance. And that is not the worst outcome—since, had Hitler not arrived, Weimar might ultimately have righted itself. There are quite a few Weimar democracies in the developing world—such as Lebanon, Nigeria, and Bangladesh—and quite a few of them may yet succeed. The key is to make constructive use of our fears about Weimar, so as to be wary about the future without giving in to fate.

Geography is not disappearing. But it is shrinking. Because of digital communications, cyber technology, intercontinental missiles, jet travel, space satellites, and so much else, different parts of the globe now affect each other as intimately as different parts of Germany did in the 1920s and early 1930s, with all of its factions and power centers.

The smaller the world becomes because of technology, the more that every place in it matters. Every river and mountain range becomes strategic. A coup in Niger, like what happened there in 2023, that undermines anti-terrorism activities across a vast region of Africa, exposes the fragility of our world as much as an economic crisis in China. Think of an old wristwatch: so small, but once you start to take it apart, it suddenly becomes vast and complicated. Such is our globe today and in the coming decades.

Will this new global Weimar have the cataclysmic fate of the old German one? Or will it find a measure of stability like in 1920s Germany during the Stresemann years? For that interregnum might have continued indefinitely were it not for the Great Depression that afflicted the entire developed world and sent Weimar spiraling downward. COVID-19 and climate change, despite all the trouble they have caused, have not yet had the very targeted and cataclysmic effect on the globe that the Great Depression had on Germany, which brought Hitler to power. But give it all time. Climate change and pandemics are relentless—and this is to say nothing of wars and great-power fractures.


At the beginning of the 20th century, the British geographer Halford Mackinder electrified much of the intellectual world with his now famous “pivot” theory, which stated that since the Eurasian supercontinent was soon to be connected by railways, the “heartland,” or vast center of Eurasia, held the key to world power, as it was equidistant from all the strategic points in any direction. In building to that conclusion, Mackinder fathomed that the great European imperial powers, by expanding their political control into the most distant corners of Africa and Asia, had essentially mapped out the entire earth. There was no more room left to expand, meaning that their energies could no longer be expended in faraway conquests of jungles and deserts, and so the great powers would increasingly turn on each other.

According to Mackinder’s theory, wars would become worldwide in scale, as every place could be contested. Thus did Mackinder vaguely intuit two world wars and the Cold War decades before they happened.

“Every explosion of social forces,” Mackinder wrote in 1904, “instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will (henceforth) be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements” in between “will be shattered in consequence.” Almost everywhere there will be consequential and connected human habitation, thus every place will become of critical importance. There will be no place to escape to. The great powers will be trapped together on a finite planet.

World War I may have represented the first time in such stark terms that the great powers of Europe and North America were all bound up in one system. But attrition of the same phenomenon—a tightening and shrinking Earth on account of technology—adds up to big change. Indeed, World War II saw all the major continents of the temperate zone—Europe, North America, and Asia—integrated into the same destructive conflict system: a world system that was only deepened and intensified during the almost half-century-long Cold War. And since then, into the 2020s, there has been a steady advance of high-tech military acquisitions that has made the world and its conflicts increasingly claustrophobic. Because every place is strategic, the possibilities of conflict become more numerous than ever. And yet no global government has ever been on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the great Eurasian land powers of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are locked in a conflict against a constellation of forces including the United States, its western Pacific allies, Ukraine, Israel, and moderate Sunni Arab states. A high-end arms race is underway in the Indo-Pacific region with a focal point of Taiwan and the South China Sea. A breakout of military hostilities there between the world’s largest and second-largest economies could be an extinction-level event for world financial markets, as well as for supply chains.

Truly, we are all trapped with each other. Isolationism, a concept that originated when it took a week to get to Europe by steamship, is not an option; neither is muscular interventionism, since it would be unsustainable given all the accelerating crises and the possibility of being periodically caught in a quagmire. As in Weimar, the need for wise global leadership and effective, rapid-fire decision-making increases by the day, just as it seems to recede before us. A tightening international crisis demands increased cooperation among states, even as globalization—which is a shallow vehicle compared to the naked territorial interests of these same states—is not nearly advanced enough to sustain it. The first half of the 21st century may be as frightening and revealing as the first half of the 20th.



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