Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is, a world in permanent crisis.

With me to discuss how an increasingly connected world is likely to generate crises that spilled across borders and regions is Robert Kaplan. Bob is a journalist and author with 23

books on foreign affairs and international relations to his name. He currently holds the Robert

Strauss-Houpe chair in geopolitics

at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Foreign policy is twice named Bob one of the world's top

100 global thinkers. His latest book is Wasteland, A World in Permanent Crisis. This episode of the

President's inbox is the sixth in my series on U.S. Grand Strategy.

Bob, thank you for joining me on the President's Inbox.

It's my pleasure to be here.

Now, Bob, I usually start off when I talk to authors by talking about the title of their book,

but I want to begin with your subtitle, a world in permanent crisis. What do you mean by

that? What I mean is we'll always have something to worry about. There will always be some

tumultuous event going on somewhere in the world that captures our imagination, causes us to

have discussion. It will be permanent.

There's always a crisis.

And the reason I chose that as a subtitle is because we're more interconnected than we've

ever been.

Geography has been shrunk by technology.

Hasn't been defeated by technology, just made smaller.

So the world is more anxious, more claustrophobic, more interconnected than ever before.

A crisis in the Far East can affect a crisis in the Middle East or in the United States to a degree greater than before.

We're all trapped with each other, in other words.

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