Robert D Kaplan Quotes

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

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

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

Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.

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

The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees,

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

Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.

Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.

Related lessons: Don’t go hunting ghosts, and don’t get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help.

Maps, in other words, can be dangerous tools. And yet they are crucial to any understanding of world politics.

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.

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.

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.

national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces.

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,

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.

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.

Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.)

The debacle of the early years 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.

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 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.

Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.

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,

A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs.

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.

With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius’s army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.

America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.

The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions.

the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the distance from Europe to India, undermining the importance of Muscat and other Omani harbors as Indian Ocean transshipment points.

And yet these same oceans, by separating America by thousands of miles from other continents, have given America a virulent strain of isolationism that has persisted to this day.

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

Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.

Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources.

I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.

There is nothing like a sea voyage to restore one’s sense of optimism, a sense of being cleansed of your own past. This may be the real reason people buy sailboats.

Thus, while the Orthodox world claims universality as the original “true belief” about God, in practice it has become associated with ethnic nations and regimes, good and bad.

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

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

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

Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline—for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still.

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.

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.

In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.

Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.

Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.

But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy.

The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media’s distorting mirror.

As the Arab proverb says, “People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.

For it is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography.

People need to discover their ethnic roots as an anchor in the face of a more cosmopolitan world.

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

Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.

those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.

the two world wars were about whether or not Germany would dominate the Heartland of Eurasia that lay to its east, while the Cold War centered on the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe

The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.

whereas the Catholic Church is unified under a pope, the Orthodox world is more an assemblage of “independent local Churches” that are “highly flexible” and “easily adapted to changing conditions.

This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography. 29

idea of Central Europe has a “fatal geographical flaw.” Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the “crush zone” that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its “oceanic interests,

Mongol-Turkic invasions were arguably the most significant event in world history in the second millennium of the common era, and it was mainly because of the use of certain animals tied to geography.

The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States—something that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned.

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

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.

Historically, both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their efforts to remake societies after Soviet and Western models, have tragically underestimated these traditional loyal ties existing below the level of the state.

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.

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.

Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world “is the result of forces inherent in human nature.” And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear ( phobos ), self-interest ( kerdos ), and honor ( doxa ).

Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty

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

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.

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...

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.

the boundary zone that divides the East from West Germany … is one of the oldest in history,” the one which separated Frankish and Slavonic tribes in the Middle Ages. In other words, there was little artificial about the frontier between West and East Germany.

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.

Check the list of the world’s most feeble economies and note the high proportion that are landlocked. 20 Note how tropical countries (those located between 23.45 degrees north and south latitudes) are generally poor, even as most high-income countries are in the middle and high latitudes.

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,

Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving birth to independent states dominated by ethnic majorities, such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Turkey.

Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter’s conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

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.

As we seek perfection in our officials through an increasingly intense legal scrutiny, and reap an increasingly sallow form of mediocrity instead, there will come times - perhaps dangerous and violent times - when we will be more forgiving toward those who were supremely imperfect in their character yet unafraid to challenge the public mood.

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.

In fact, the fear of another Munich was not altogether new. It had been an underlying element in the decision to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s aggression in 1991. If we didn’t stop Saddam in Kuwait, he would have next invaded Saudi Arabia, thereby controlling the world’s oil supply and taking human rights in the region to an unutterable level of darkness.

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous. “All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law,” he goes on, “is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another.

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.

From Zagreb to Rijeka now takes ninety minutes, to Senj two hours, and so forth. Because of the collapse of distance effected by civil engineering—to say nothing of the explosion of global tourism along the Dalmatian seaboard—Croatia has changed both economically and, to an extent, psychologically. Croatia has begun to move away from a more ethnically obsessed Balkan orientation in the direction of a more cosmopolitan Mediterranean one.

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

Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7

it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West did nothing; nor did the West do much against the ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus because there, too, was a Russian sphere of influence. In the Western Pacific in the coming decades, morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make at least some room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands? (And barring a social-economic collapse internally, China’s military will keep on expanding.) For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom. That also will be a lesson of the South China Sea in the twenty-first century—one more that humanists do not want to hear.

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy

It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.