Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Robert D. Kaplan (born June 23, 1952) is an American journalist, geopolitical analyst, and author of many influential books on foreign affairs and travel. Explore his life, his major works (such as Balkan Ghosts, The Revenge of Geography, The Coming Anarchy), his worldview, and memorable quotes.

Introduction

Robert David Kaplan is a prominent American journalist and writer celebrated for combining on-the-ground travel reportage with deep geopolitical insight. Over several decades, he has navigated some of the world’s most fraught regions and framed compelling arguments about the role of geography, historical culture, and power in shaping global affairs. His essays and books have provoked debate across foreign-policy, academic, and public spheres. In a changing world of shifting alliances, rising tension, and contested order, Kaplan’s voice remains relevant for those who wish to see beneath the surface of states and struggle.

Early Life and Family

Robert D. Kaplan was born on June 23, 1952, in New York City.
He grew up in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens in a Jewish family.
His father, Philip Alexander Kaplan, worked as a truck driver for the New York Daily News; his mother was Phyllis Quasha.
From a young age, he developed a fascination with history and world affairs—traits his father encouraged.

Kaplan attended the University of Connecticut on a swimming scholarship, and graduated in 1973 with a B.A. in English.
During his time there, he worked as a features editor of the campus newspaper (the Connecticut Daily Campus).

In 1983, Kaplan married Maria Cabral, a government official.
They have one son, Michael, who works in finance.
They live in western Massachusetts.

Youth, Early Career & Formative Travels

After completing his degree, Kaplan attempted to break into large urban newsrooms but was not initially successful.
He took a reporting job with the Rutland Daily Herald in Vermont (1974–1975).

Around that time, Kaplan chose a less conventional path: he bought a one-way ticket to Tunisia and began traveling in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
He later lived in Israel, where he even served for a time in the Israeli Defense Forces.
He also spent years living in Greece and Portugal, immersing himself in local settings and cultures.

These early travels gave Kaplan firsthand exposure to conflict zones, cultural fault lines, and the complexity of geopolitics—setting the stage for his later approach: combining traveler’s observation with policy insight.

Career and Major Works

Kaplan’s career straddles journalism, geopolitical analysis, and consulting for security and policy institutions.

Journalism & Influence

• For over three decades, Kaplan’s essays and reportage have appeared in major outlets such as The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, and The Wall Street Journal.

• He is a national correspondent for The Atlantic.

• Over time, his essays have merged reporting, geography, history, and strategic argument.

Kaplan has also served in several policy or advisory roles:

• He was a member of the Defense Policy Board (advisory to the U.S. Department of Defense).

• He held the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).

• He has given lectures at military war colleges, agencies like the CIA, NSA, and institutions like the Pentagon and FBI.

• At times, he has acted as a consultant to U.S. Army Special Forces, U.S. Marines, and U.S. Air Force.

• He was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor (a private global intelligence and forecasting firm).

Signature Books & Themes

Kaplan has written numerous influential books. Several stand out for their impact and recurring themes:

• Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine (1988) — explores how policy, conflict, and political structures exacerbate famine in East Africa.

• Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan (1990) — recounts his experiences among Afghan resistance fighters during the Soviet war.

• Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1993) — perhaps his most famous work, tracing deep historical tensions in the Balkans and arguing the persistence of culture and memory in politics.

• The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1993) — on the cadre of U.S. diplomats and analysts specialized in the Arab world.

• The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (1996) — wide-ranging travel and geopolitical reflections from remote regions.

• An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (1998) — turning the lens inward, analyzing trends within the U.S. itself.

• The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War (2000) — one of his most influential essays, identifying emerging fault lines in fragile states and warning of diffuse disorder.

• Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (2000) — extends his travel and strategic observations across contested borderlands.

• Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2002) — argues for realism in leadership and caution in projecting idealistic moral frameworks.

• Mediterranean Winter (2004) — a blend of travel, history, climate, culture across Mediterranean lands.

• Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (2005) — documenting U.S. military deployments, especially in counterinsurgency and irregular contexts.

• Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (2007) — extending his analysis of U.S. military force posture.

• Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (2010) — focusing on the Indian Ocean’s strategic significance.

• The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (2012) — underscores how geography constrains political choices.

• In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016) — a more regionally focused work on Eastern Europe.

• The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China (recent) — exploring grand historical time, cycles, empires, and constraints.

Throughout these works, recurring themes include:

• Geography as determiner — maps, terrain, climate, and spatial constraints matter deeply in shaping state behavior and possibilities.

• Historical continuity and cultural roots — past grievances, traditions, and memory often shape present conflict more than ideologies.

• Fragile states and disorder — Kaplan warns that weak governance, resource stress, population pressures, and corruption breed instability. The Coming Anarchy is a key example.

• Limits of idealism and liberal interventionism — he is critical of exporting democracy blindly and emphasizing political realism in foreign policy.

• Military, power, and force in practice — his writings on U.S. military deployments reflect how power is applied on the ground, its challenges and paradoxes.

Kaplan’s work is distinctive in bridging travel writing, policy reflection, and deep strategic thinking.

Historical Milestones & Context

Robert Kaplan rose to influence during the post–Cold War era, a time when the intellectual consensus was optimistic about liberal democracy. His critiques often ran counter to prevailing trends:

• His essay “The Coming Anarchy” (1994, The Atlantic) gained wide attention by predicting new forms of disorder in the ungoverned edges of states, pointing to environmental stress, criminality, and demographic pressure.

• Balkan Ghosts became politically salient during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s; it was reported that President Bill Clinton carried a copy, and the book influenced some thinking about U.S. intervention in Bosnia.

• Kaplan’s arguments challenged the dominant liberal interventionist approach in U.S. foreign policy, often pushing back against idealism and advocating for realism and restraint.

• In a changing global order—with the rise of China, resurgent Russia, climate stress, and renewed regional tension—Kaplan’s emphasis on geography, resilience, and realpolitik has regained resonance.

He occupies a middle ground: not strictly pessimistic, but cautionary, urging attention to structural constraints and sobering realities rather than utopian designs.

Legacy and Influence

The impact of Kaplan’s work spans several arenas:

1. Public intellectual influence
   His books are read not only by scholars and policymakers, but by general audiences interested in travel, strategy, and global change.

2. Shaping foreign-policy discourse
   Kaplan’s realism, geographic emphasis, and skepticism of interventionism inform debates in think tanks, diplomatic circles, and military institutions.

3. Bridging journalism and geopolitics
   He demonstrates how reportage from remote sites can refine theory—encouraging analysts to ground abstractions in lived landscapes.

4. Critical engagement
   Critics challenge Kaplan’s occasional determinism (i.e. giving too much weight to geography), his sometimes sweeping generalizations, or his stance on moral restraint in policy. But those critiques only attest to the provocative power of his lens.

5. Enduring relevance
   In an era of contested borders, climate migration, power vacuums, and renewed great-power competition, the questions Kaplan raised remain vital.

Personality, Style & Strengths

Kaplan is often described as:

• A curious traveler and adventurer, willing to penetrate remote regions, borderlands, and zones of conflict

• A storyteller scholar — weaving narrative, memory, terrain, personal encounters, and strategic insight

• Skeptical yet engaged: he rarely dismisses states or actors out of hand, but he asks uncomfortable questions

• Methodologically eclectic — combining political geography, history, cultural insight, and strategic thinking

• Ambitious in scale — not content with narrow issues, he seeks to articulate broad patterns in world order

His style is direct, descriptive, and metaphor-rich. Through landscapes, ruins, and border crossings, he often illustrates abstract strategic truths.

Famous Quotes by Robert D. Kaplan

Below are several memorable quotes that reflect Kaplan’s sensibility toward power, geography, and human condition.

“Geography, a stubborn fact, repeatedly intervenes in human designs.”
“Nations fight not because they hate one another—but because they can’t stop fighting.”
“Turns out that not every culture has the same relationship to time, as if you can cut it into discrete seconds or hours. Much more is going on beneath the calendar.”
“We live in a world in which power is shifting—and a world in which geography is coming back with a vengeance.”
“You cannot imagine the world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries without the reference point of geography.”
“The great mistake of many strategists is to overestimate how much choice states have.”

(Note: These quotations are paraphrases or extracted from Kaplan’s body of work and interviews; precise sourcing may vary across editions.)

Lessons from Robert D. Kaplan

1. Respect constraints
   Kaplan teaches that geography, climate, and spatial structure often limit what states can or cannot do. Recognizing constraints helps refine policy and avoid overreach.

2. Ground theory in lived terrain
   Strategic reflection divorced from terrain, culture, or travel loses vitality. Kaplan’s example suggests that theory must heed real places and human stories.

3. Skepticism of idealism
   While normative values have their place, Kaplan warns that projecting Western ideals without regard for context often leads to backlash or unintended consequences.

4. Long view, not just the immediate
   He encourages seeing history’s weight, continuity, memory, and patterns—not succumbing to the illusion of purely novel rupture.

5. Interdisciplinary thinking
   Kaplan illustrates the value of mixing history, geography, sociology, and political science. Complex global challenges often need such cross-disciplinary lenses.

6. Policy humility
   In an age of ambition, Kaplan suggests that a measure of restraint, realism, and modesty about what can be controlled is prudent.

Conclusion

Robert D. Kaplan is a thinker who refuses simple binaries. He resists unchecked optimism and portrays a textured world in which geography, memory, power, and unpredictability intertwine. His journey—from young traveler to influential geopolitical writer—shows how curiosity, courage, and critical reflection can help us rethink global assumptions.