Articles & Multimedia
Showing 21-40 of 77 Publications
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Trump's disastrous foreign policy in Asia is the worst since Vietnam
The withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may have been the greatest self-inflicted American foreign policy blunder in Asia since the Vietnam War. Asia is all ab...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Review: ‘The Road Not Taken’ in Vietnam
Edward Lansdale (1908-87) was one of America’s most important military thinkers and practitioners, and yet he is barely known to the wider world. In “The Road Not Taken,” Max ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Oil and Gas Sector Is Changing — and So Is Geopolitics
WINDFALLHow the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens American PowerBy Meghan L. O’Sullivan479 pp. Simon & Schuster. $29. Geopolitics is power played...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Quiet Rivalry Between China and Russia
China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an economic expansion plan that follows the trade routes of the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties across Eurasia, is overly ambitious b...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Remembering War
Claudio Magris, Blameless, trans. Anne Milano Appel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 368 pp., $26.00. CLAUDIO MAGRIS is an academic from Trieste, the quintessential C...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Problem with 'the Best of Intentions' Foreign Policy
The nineteenth-century Germans focused so much on philosophy partly in order not to compete with the protean genius of Goethe, who had dominated all the other literary genres ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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America's Darwinian Nationalism
THE UNITED STATES, Russia and China are all losing, or have lost, their ideological and spiritual purpose. This is clear in the case of the Russian and Chinese regimes, which ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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An Unsung Foreign Service Hero
Jerry Weaver died in May 2016, at age 77. I only learned about his passing through an old friend the other day. I learned as well that there wasn’t even a public funeral servi...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Necessary Empire
Elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany this year have brought much drama to the old Carolingian core, where Charlemagne founded his empire in the ninth century. This...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Tragic Sensibility
The great classicist Edith Hamilton, writing in 1930, explained that tragedy is the beauty of intolerable truths, and that real tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good bu...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Hungary’s Challenge to Trump
A shoe has dropped in Europe. A small shoe, but one with a loud bang on a marble floor. The government of pro-Russian populist Viktor Orban in Hungary has introduced legislati...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How to Spread Our Values
American elites flatter themselves in their belief that they understand the world, with its countless geographical, cultural and political cleavages. They theorize abstractly ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How to Take Back Patriotism
President Donald Trump, in dependable jingoistic fashion, has declared Jan. 20, the date of his inauguration, an official day to venerate patriotism. America has always been a...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why Trump Can’t Disengage America From the World
Debates about the extent to which the United States should use its power to lead and shape events in the world, and when and how it should intervene, are eternal in our histor...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Donald Trump and the Foreign Policy Pendulum
Every new administration sets out initially to distinguish itself from the previous one. This is especially true when the same party reoccupies the White House precisely becau...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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On foreign policy, Donald Trump is no realist
In the Washington Post, senior fellow Robert D Kaplan writes an op-ed on Donald Trump's categorization as a realist in foreign policy...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Real War of Ideas
In A Provincial’s Story, published in 1896, Chekhov has a particularly devastating portrait of the muzhiks, the Russian peasants, that in its own way demonstrates all the intr...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Is Primacy Overrated?
Power can be both absolute and relative. A state's absolute power can increase while its relative power declines; or its absolute power can diminish while its relative power i...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How to Crash Putin’s Brexit Party
For decades, NATO and the European Union have silently worked in unison. The former required a foundation of European unity, and the EU to a significant extent provided that, ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How Islam Created Europe
Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now. For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or ...
By Robert D. Kaplan