My Readings

December 20, 2025

Luis Rubio

In turbulent times, books that try to explain the nature of the problem and its implications tend to proliferate. Some start from the premise that the status quo is unsustainable, while others focus on proposing the need to change what exists. The broader environment—and the uncertainty it produces—encourages extreme positions, but also deep and visionary studies. This year, Hal Brands published The Eurasian Century, an interesting book in which the author diagnoses the geopolitics of the world’s largest region. In addition to explaining how the two great powers of that part of the world interact, the author offers a brilliant lesson on the principal geopolitical thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman.

The moment we are living through reminded me of George Friedman’s argument in a book that came out during the pandemic titled The Storm Before the Calm, whose thesis is that the world undergoes fundamental change every fifty years and that this decade would experience major disruptions before entering a new era of growth and development. His reading is that the United States has experienced similar periods every half-century since its founding and that Reagan in the 1980s constituted a comparable stage after the Great Depression of the 1930s. In light of what we have seen this year, Friedman would say, Trump represents a disruptive factor largely because he had no alternative, but one that foreshadows a positive period of reconfiguration.

This year I read a book that reminded me of my formative years. It is Ancient Identities, the Modern State: Episodes in Mexican History, a posthumous book by my great teacher Margarita Carbó. It is a collection of essays on fundamental themes in Mexican history, especially Cardenismo, but it also includes episodes from the first century of independence and one on the French Revolution. Professor Carbó had a very distinctive way of teaching her subject, pushing students to understand and think about historical processes and their social and political implications. Each of the essays in this volume shares that same quality: it compels the reader to reflect on history and to understand it without unnecessary adjectives. In this era of official historical fiction coming from the former president, books like Professor Carbó’s stand out for their seriousness and lasting significance.

Claudio Lomnitz, a brilliant anthropologist, has dedicated himself to exposing some of the worst scourges that mark the country in this era of violence, extortion, and illegality. He has published several of his essays in Nexos and has just released a book, Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico, which gathers his lectures at El Colegio Nacional. It is an essential publication because it gives coherence to our dilemmas—particularly the division of the country into two worlds that, although they coexist geographically, are radically different: one living under the rules established by the USMCA, implying high wages and growing productivity; and the other living under the reign of violence, informality, and extortion. What is most relevant is that these two realities coexist in the same places across the national territory.

Josef Brami and Matthew Burrows argue in World to Come: The Return of Trump and the End of the Old Order that a multipolar world—if it is to survive in peace—will require far greater interaction, negotiation, and cooperation among the major powers in order to solve complex problems (such as climate) and, above all, to avoid military conflagrations. “Globalization has broken into value-based trading networks; nationalism is growing everywhere, and major state-on-state war has returned while the shift from West to East, along with a dizzying number of untested technologies, is accelerating.”

Robert Kaplan has just published perhaps the most pessimistic text about the future of humanity and the challenges it faces that I have ever read from him. In Wasteland, the sharp observer of political evolution argues that we are living through the equivalent of a second Weimar Republic—a world in which cultural and political change is brutally fast and where every notion of authority has eroded or disappeared. His concern is not, as in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, a return to autocracies—if not worse, to chaos.

Timothy W. Ryback, in Takeover, writes about how Hitler rose to power and transformed Germany without having the votes or the mandate of the citizenry. It is a harrowing book that describes, step by step, how a democracy—one that possessed all the elements associated with a consolidated democratic system: freedom of expression, due process, civil rights, referendums—is dismantled. The book reinforces Kaplan’s argument about the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic.