Robert D. Kaplan Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 87 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert D. Kaplan.
Famous Quotes By Robert D. Kaplan
Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate? — Robert D. Kaplan
Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Here is America Now: smoke, greasy fumes, the friction of tire rubber, the memory of terrifying refineries with their rubbery rotten-egg smells. — Robert D. Kaplan
What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen. — Robert D. Kaplan
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 — Robert D. Kaplan
Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead. — Robert D. Kaplan
Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense. — Robert D. Kaplan
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: — Robert D. Kaplan
It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might. — Robert D. Kaplan
China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks - "which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide 'smart bombs' and more" - as its "Achilles' heel. — Robert D. Kaplan
You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are. — Robert D. Kaplan
And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist. — Robert D. Kaplan
Europe's era of internal cohesion may already be past. — Robert D. Kaplan
A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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.) — Robert D. Kaplan
of ocean, around the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken — Robert D. Kaplan
Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands. — Robert D. Kaplan
Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources. — Robert D. Kaplan
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 — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. — Robert D. Kaplan
Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123). — Robert D. Kaplan
The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears. — Robert D. Kaplan
democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Prostitution, black marketeering, and informing on ones neighbors and friends all had such a deep-rooted tradition in Romania that there was a charming naturalness and innocence about it. — Robert D. Kaplan
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 — Robert D. Kaplan
Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us. — Robert D. Kaplan
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, — Robert D. Kaplan
The closer one gets to either the eastern or the southern fringe of the German-speaking world-the closer one gets, in other words, to the threatening and more numerous Slavs-the more insecure and dangerous nationalism becomes. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
When you talk about aiding this country against that country or about fighting terrorism, when you actually take that decision and strip it down, it always comes down to one person in the field giving specialized training to somebody else in the field. — Robert D. Kaplan
Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism. — Robert D. Kaplan
As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy — Robert D. Kaplan
A better age would have to follow. — Robert D. Kaplan
The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees, — Robert D. Kaplan
That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy, — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed. — Robert D. Kaplan
China is able to feed 23 percent of the world's population from 7 percent of the arable land - "by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and flood plains," as Fairbank points out. — Robert D. Kaplan
It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism. — Robert D. Kaplan
It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning. — Robert D. Kaplan
Books that have been owned by someone for many years for a specific purpose carry not just memories, (that is obvious), they also reveal their owner's true values; for the books we own may indicate something about us very different from what we think. — Robert D. Kaplan
For two thousand years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of modern-day Tunis) the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millennia ago, tribal identity based on nomadism - which the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun said disrupted political stability - is correspondingly weak. Indeed, after the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilized territory. The fossa regia remains relevant to the current Middle East crisis. Still visible in places, it runs from Tabarka on Tunisia's northwestern coast southward, and turns directly eastward to Sfax, another Mediterranean port. The — Robert D. Kaplan
It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France. — Robert D. Kaplan
The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power. — Robert D. Kaplan
If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Indeed, Chicago seems to have literally sucked the air out of Springfield: another case of American becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands. It is in the merging with the rest of the world and global civilization that the forces of division come to the fore at home. Springfield: another small city that should inspire but doesn't. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite credibility in their nuclear threats. — Robert D. Kaplan
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, — Robert D. Kaplan
The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Media organizations are global. They may be based in the U.S., but they're essentially global. — Robert D. Kaplan
It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century. — Robert D. Kaplan
The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be. — Robert D. Kaplan
Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. — Robert D. Kaplan
The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland! — Robert D. Kaplan
Given the level of anti-Americanism in the world, given the level of frustration with the United States throughout the Muslim world, you've got a homegrown attack or you have a nuclear explosion in the air that is not a test somewhere. Those are still the biggest threats out there. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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. — Robert D. Kaplan
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, — Robert D. Kaplan
state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even. — Robert D. Kaplan