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2022
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Robert David Kaplan (born June 23, 1952) is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in
The Atlantic,
The Washington Post,
The New York Times,
The New Republic,
The National Interest,
Foreign Affairs and
The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
One of Kaplan's most influential articles is "
The Coming Anarchy", published in The
Atlantic Monthly in 1994. His article posits that
population increase, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world and represent a
threat to the developed world. The article was hotly debated and widely translated. Kaplan published the article and other essays in a book with the same title in 2000, which also included the controversial article '"Was Democracy Just a Moment?" His travels through the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle East at the turn of the millennium were recorded in Eastward to Tartary. Writing in
The New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein noted that Kaplan "conveys a historically informed tragic sense in recognizing humankind's tendency toward a kind of slipshod, gooey, utopian and ultimately dangerous optimism."
Critics of "The Coming Anarchy" have compared it to Huntington's
Clash of Civilizations thesis, since
Kaplan presents conflicts in the contemporary world as the struggle between primitivism and civilizations. Another frequent theme in Kaplan's work is the
reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the
Cold War.
From 2008 to 2012, Kaplan was a Senior Fellow at the
Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC; he rejoined the organization in 2015. Between 2012 and 2014, he was chief geopolitical analyst at
Stratfor, a private
global forecasting firm. In 2009,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the
Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the
United States Department of Defense.
In addition to his journalism, Kaplan has been a consultant to the
U.S. Army's Special Forces, the
United States Marines, and the
United States Air Force. He has lectured at military war colleges, the
FBI, the
National Security Agency, the
Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, major universities, the
CIA, and business forums, and has appeared on
PBS,
NPR,
C-SPAN, and
Fox News. He is a senior fellow at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute. In 2001, he briefed
President Bush. He is the recipient of the 2001
Greenway-Winship Award for Excellence in international reporting. In 2002, he was awarded the
United States State Department Distinguished Public Service Award. Kaplan is the recipient of the International Award for 2016 from the Sociedad Geografica Espanola in Madrid, presented by Queen Sofia of Spain.
In 2006–08, Kaplan was a visiting professor at the
United States Naval Academy,
Annapolis, where he taught a course entitled, "Future Global Security Challenges". As of 2008 he is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
In 2011, and 2012,
Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers". In 2017, Kaplan joined
Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, as a senior advisor. In 2020, he was named to the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
Although Kaplan expresses sympathy for the many white
blue collar voters who chose U.S. UNpresident
DJT in the
2016 election, in the book
Earning the Rockies, Kaplan has also been critical of DJT on foreign policy and national security. Kaplan has argued that DJT's defense and foreign policy rely too heavily on military spending, calling it "American Caesarism". Kaplan has drawn parallels between DJT's focus on a
militaristic image and large reductions to
"soft" non-military foreign policy efforts with the gradual decline of the
Roman Empire as a result of similar excess. Kaplan sees DJT's spending plans for national security and foreign policy as the first stage of a "tragic decline" for the United States. On foreign policy more broadly, Kaplan has called DJT "a terrible messenger for realism" who "appears to have no sense of history".
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (2010) is about the
Indian Ocean region and the
future of energy supplies and maritime trade routes in the 21st century. He claimed that the Indian Ocean has been a center of power for a long time and that the shift to the Atlantic can be seen as an anomaly which will be set straight in future years. For the United States to maintain its power, it would have to link its goals with those of the people of the developing world, he concluded.
The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (2012) describes how countries' respective political and social histories have been shaped by factors like
relationship to the ocean and to terrain features that act as natural borders. The book also focuses on how
demographic shifts in countries will affect them in the future.
Asia's Cauldron (2014) describes the modern (from the colonial era to the present) cultural and political history of the various countries of Southeast Asia (such as
Singapore,
Vietnam and the
Philippines) and the region's geopolitical significance to China, as well as those states' resultant
anxiety over Chinese maritime territorial claims in the region.
In Europe's Shadow (2016) is one of Kaplan's most personal examinations of the influence of geography and civilization on politics and history. Informed by his travels to the Balkans since the 1970s, Kaplan links Romania's contemporary political and social reality to its complex identity and history. While the book echoes many of Kaplan's earlier historical travelogues, it looks ahead to the challenges Europe will face by examining Romania as a microcosm of Europe's coming geopolitical crises.
The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century (2018) is a collection of Kaplan's post-2000 essays on the evolving system in Eurasia. Commissioned by the Pentagon's
Office of Net Assessment, the book's lead essay draws parallels between Eurasia's contemporary emergence as a single "battlespace" to its 13th century geopolitics, when China last constructed a land bridge to Europe. The book's other essays, published over the years in a range of analytical and journalistic sources, delve into themes such as
technology, globalization, and the
misguided application of military power. Together, they
paint a portrait of American influence and European cohesion on the decline in the face of a rapidly emergent new order in Eurasia.
