Articles & Multimedia

Showing 1-20 of 79 Publications

• Video
  • April 30, 2018
  Robert D. Kaplan Says America Has to Support Free Trade

  Robert D. Kaplan, senior fellow at Center for A New American Security, discusses his new book and the importance of free trade for the U.S. He speaks with Tom Keene and Franci...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Commentary
  • The American Interest
  • April 2, 2018
  The Decline of the American Brand

  What is the United States in functional, geopolitical terms? In the words of the great British geographer of a century ago, Halford Mackinder, the temperate zone of North Amer...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Commentary
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • March 26, 2018
  How Russia and China Could Come Unhinged

  We have moved from a world of ideological struggles in the 20th century to a world of geopolitical struggles in the 21st—or so goes the conventional wisdom. But technology is ...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Commentary
  • March 14, 2018
  Robert Kaplan: Grand Strategy and the Return of Marco Polo's World

  The following is a transcript of Robert D. Kaplan's speech at the Michael J. Zak Grand Strategy Lecture on March 7th, 2018. KAPLAN: It is a great privilege and honor for me to...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Video
  • January 29, 2018
  Kaplan: Trump withdrawal from TPP “biggest self-inflicted error” in Asia

  At a Jan. 24 Davos panel, Robert Kaplan of the Center for a New American Security said President Trump’s shift away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership had a “corrosive effect”...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Commentary
  • The Hill
  • January 26, 2018
  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

• Video
  • January 24, 2018
  New and Old Empires: Robert Kaplan presents at the World Economic Forum

  Geography is not destiny, but it may be the best starting point for understanding world politics. In a world of shifting alliances and divides, how are geography and the histo...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Commentary
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • January 5, 2018
  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

• Commentary
  • New York Times
  • December 28, 2017
  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

• Commentary
  • The New York Times
  • November 3, 2017
  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

• Commentary
  • The National Interest
  • October 19, 2017
  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

• Commentary
  • The National Interest
  • September 25, 2017
  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

• • Commentary
  • The National Interest
  • August 13, 2017
  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

• Video
  • June 28, 2017
  CNAS 2017: The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response

  As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres. The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict as the Westphalian system of states weakens and olde...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• • Commentary
  • The American Interest
  • June 26, 2017
  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

• Commentary
  • The New York Times
  • May 5, 2017
  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

• • Commentary
  • The New Criterion
  • May 1, 2017
  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

• • Commentary
  • The American Interest
  • April 4, 2017
  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

• Video
  • February 21, 2017
  Who Is National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster?

  U.S. President Donald Trump selected Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser, choosing a military intellectual known for question...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• Video
  • February 15, 2017
  Video: Book Launch: Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World

  CNAS hosted a book launch for Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan, CNAS Senior Fellow, on Wednesday, February 15, from 5:...

  By Robert D. Kaplan