Robert D. Kaplan Quotes

The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.

It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might.

The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa,

And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist.

As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans - the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia's navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world's annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2

Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.

Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

The fact is, and there's no denying it, realism... is supposed to make one uneasy.

For anything with a name(and zero had so many) surely existed......Yet how could what doesn't exist, exist?

We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.

One marker, which I would read a bit later on, tells the familiar story of Narcissa Whitman, "trail-blazer and martyred missionary," who followed the north side of the Platte in 1836 on horseback, "becoming the first white women to cross the American continent," and who, along with her husband, Marcus, was "massacred by Cayuse Indians" at their Protestant mission in 1847 in Walla Walla, Washington. (The Indians there were justifiably enraged at the whites for spreading measles to them.)

Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us.

Indeed, in Central Europe, communism claimed to be the cure for the economic inequalities and other cruelties wrought by bourgeois industrial development, a radical liberal populism of a sort, while in the former Byzantine-Ottoman empire, where there had never been such modern development, communism was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion.

That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,

Just as the rag doll wanted to be an eagle, the donkey a lion and the monkey a queen, the zero put on airs and pretended to be a digit.

Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia's partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia

When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kemalism.

Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.

It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease ..

- In Defense of Henry Kissinger, The Atlantic 2013 May

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/p...

Those wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was "the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.

Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.

Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.

it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.

So far we have seen the weakening and collapse of small and medium-sized states in Africa and the Middle East. But quasi-anarchy in larger states like Russia and China, on which the territorial organization of Eurasia hinges, could be next - tied to structural economic causes linked, in turn, to slow growth world-wide.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

The United States is not overdeployed or overextended with deployments in 150 countries on any given year. On any given week we have about 65 deployments.

An idea is only an idea if it causes unease, debate and reflection. By that standard, Thomas Homer-Dixon's concept of an 'ingenuity gap' is truly a new idea. I can think of no other new concept that so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization than the 'ingenuity gap'. Homer-Dixon has found a way to unite all of our concerns about economics, war, population growth, complexity, etc. under a single heading. He is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience.

You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.

Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).

state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.

What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past:

Here is America Now: smoke, greasy fumes, the friction of tire rubber, the memory of terrifying refineries with their rubbery rotten-egg smells.

liberalism and democracy, with all of their limitations, are what remains after every utopia and extremist scheme based on blood and territory has been exposed and shattered by reality.

There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.

In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population.

While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Surely,

The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

If you travel around America you see different sections of highways donated by this or that person, and that's a slow beginning of what may end up being a situation common in the Third World: some sections of highways in wealthy areas are beautifully maintained and other parts are just dirt-strewn potholes.

And so this is where the post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves.

Since the security benefits of hegemony are enormous" in an anarchic system in which there is no world hegemon, "powerful states will invariably be tempted to emulate the United States and try to dominate their region of the world."15

Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland!

Europe's era of internal cohesion may already be past.

Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,

of ocean, around the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken

True, they (numbers) are our invention and we have free will: but only to act compatibly with the world we've made.

What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran...or the help Iran gave to the US-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the Spring of 2003.

Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.

Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.

Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.

In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus.

The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty.

The revolution was a gift from God to the Romanian people. The Romanian people must now repay this gift by opening their hearts to people of all faiths, especially to those who suffered here in the past.

Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.