Articles & Multimedia

Showing 1-20 of 65 Publications

• • 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

• • Commentary
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • February 6, 2017
  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

• • Commentary
  • Foreign Policy
  • February 2, 2017
  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

• • Commentary
  • The New York Times
  • January 9, 2017
  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

• • Commentary
  • The National Interest
  • December 27, 2016
  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

• • Commentary
  • Washington Post
  • November 21, 2016
  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

• • Commentary
  • The National Interest
  • September 15, 2016
  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

• • Commentary
  • The National Interest
  • August 7, 2016
  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

• • Commentary
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • June 30, 2016
  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

• • Commentary
  • May 5, 2016
  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

• • Commentary
  • May 4, 2016
  Notable & Quotable: Anarchy in the 21st Century

  From foreign-affairs analyst Robert D. Kaplan's "The Post-Imperial Moment: Vulgar, populist anarchy will define the twenty-first century" in the May-June issue of the National...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• • Commentary
  • April 4, 2016
  Freedom for Me—But Not for Thee

  When historians in future decades ponder America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the name of Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired Army colonel and professor emeritus...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• • Commentary
  • March 5, 2016
  Obama Is No George H. W. Bush

  President Barack Obama is known to be a great admirer of President George H. W. Bush, who Obama recently said is "one of the more underrated presidents we have ever had." Obam...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• • Commentary
  • February 26, 2016
  A blunt defense of interrogations, targeted killings and domestic spying

  People living in a democracy in an age of electronic communications can be altogether fickle. After a mass casualty attack, they demand total vengeance on the killers and thei...

  By Robert D. Kaplan

• • Commentary
  • February 15, 2016
  Eurasia's Coming Anarchy

  As China asserts itself in its nearby seas and Russia wages war in Syria and Ukraine, it is easy to assume that Eurasia’s two great land powers are showing signs of newfound s...

  By Robert D. Kaplan