Articles & Multimedia
Showing 61-77 of 77 Publications
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Warming to Iran
Foreign policy is about necessity, not desire. And multiple necessities have been driving the United States and Iran toward a détente of sorts. Indeed, the American-Iranian es...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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America Is Fated to Lead
THE SLEEP of any president, prime minister or statesman is haunted by what ifs. What if I had only fired that defense secretary sooner, or replaced that general in Iraq with t...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why War Is Good
Some of the most terrifying moments of my life have been in the midst of conflict: with American marines in Fallujah in 2004 and with armed bands in Sierra Leone in 1993. I st...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why Failure Helps
"Man's real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years," writes the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in his 194...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Terrorism as Theater
The beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq was much more than an altogether gruesome and tragic affair: rather, it was a very soph...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Hard Hand of the Middle East
Reality can be harsh. In order for the United States to weaken and eventually defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, it could use help from both the Iranian regime and th...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Obama's Foreign Policy Record: TBD
The establishment media has declared U.S. President Barack Obama a failure in foreign policy. He is worse than George W. Bush, say some journalists; he is worse than Jimmy Car...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Is There a Place for Imperialism in U.S. Foreign Policy?
In November 1991 in Prague, in a conversation between the Polish historian and intellectual, Adam Michnik, and the late Czech president and playwright, Vaclav Havel, Michnik r...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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East Africa Rising
The Greater Indian Ocean is the maritime organizing principle of geopolitics, uniting the entire arc of Islam (including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), East Africa, the In...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why Moldova Urgently Matters
"NATO's Article 5 offers little protection against Vladimir Putin's Russia," Iulian Fota, Romania's presidential national security adviser, told me on a recent visit to Buchar...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Eurasia's Ongoing Crackup
Eurasia -- from Iberia to the Korean Peninsula -- faces the prospect of epochal change. These disruptions are not always in the headlines, and they obscure vast areas of stabi...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Europe's Deep Right-Wing Logic
It is undeniable that the right wing is ascendant in Europe. While leftist parties did well here and there in recent elections to the European Parliament, the story over recen...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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China's Budding Ocean Empire
I am flattered by Nilanthi Samaranayake’s lengthy and respectful treatment of my March 2009 Foreign Affairs cover story about the importance of the Indian Ocean, on the articl...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why East Asia Alienates Intellectuals
East Asia is arguably the most important part of the world. It is the geographic organizing principle of the global economy. It has an array of strong, consequential nations a...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The 9/11 Decade
In the CNAS Commentary The 9/11 Decade, Senior Fellow Robert Kaplan states that when 9/11 occurred, the world had already become multiploar in a diplomatic and economic sense....
By Robert D. Kaplan
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America Primed
The past century has seen a multi-polar world through the end of World War II, a bipolar world through the end of the Cold War and a dissipating unipolar world since. Economic...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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One Small Revolution
The West stands captivated by Tunisia, where a month of peaceful protests by secular working- and middle-class Arabs has toppled a dictator, raising hopes that this North Afri...
By Robert D. Kaplan