Articles & Multimedia
Showing 1-20 of 67 Publications
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A New Cold War Has Begun
Commentary
In June 2005, I published a cover story in the Atlantic, “How We Would Fight China.” I wrote that, “The American military contest with China … will define the twenty-first cen...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Time to Get Out of Afghanistan
Commentary
The decision by President Trump to withdraw 7,000 of the roughly 14,000 American troops left in Afghanistan, possibly by summer, has raised new concerns about his impulsive be...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Anarchy That Came
Commentary
What I said was provocative, or at least deemed to be, by complacent champions of globalization. Yet evolution is inexorable. Technology in particular is not so much defeating...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How President Trump is helping Beijing win in the South China Sea
Commentary
For years now, China has been at war against the United States in the South China Sea — only Washington didn’t notice until the process was well underway. The Chinese way of w...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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5 forgotten books about geography and place to read now
Commentary
Robert Kaplan said he knew the mixing of genres in “Earning the Rockies” ran the risk of alienating some readers. Parts of the book read like a travelogue, while others delve ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why China Is Brutally Suppressing Muslims
Commentary
The repression of the Turkic Uighur Muslim community in western China—including the reported internment of up to a million people in secret camps—is a key part of Beijing’s ne...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Write ‘what is absolutely true in your eyes,’ says best-selling author Robert Kaplan
Commentary
Our September pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This,” is “Earning the Rockies” by Robert D. Kaplan. Become a member of the book club by joining ou...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Decline of the American Brand
Commentary
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
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How Russia and China Could Come Unhinged
Commentary
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
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Robert Kaplan: Grand Strategy and the Return of Marco Polo's World
Commentary
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
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Trump's disastrous foreign policy in Asia is the worst since Vietnam
Commentary
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
Commentary
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
Commentary
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
Commentary
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
Commentary
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
Commentary
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
Commentary
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
