Top 90 Robert D. Kaplan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone, or else we will hunt you down wherever you are.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

3. “As Napoleon said, to know a nation’s geography is to know its foreign policy.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

4. “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

5. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

6. “In the interest of thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy, policy makers need to worry about how not to provoke more anarchy than the world has already seen.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

9. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

12. “As we learned to our horror at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, as well as in the 1960s in Vietnam, and again in the last decade in Iraq, to invade is to govern. Once you decide to send in ground forces in significant numbers, it becomes your job to administer the territory you’ve just conquered – or to identify someone immediately who can.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

13. “America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

14. “Lincoln had risen to this pinnacle through migration, self-education, and hard work.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

15. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

25. “What Americans cant 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

26. “We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back more extreme elements. They are bold, but not crazy. The idea that more liberal regimes might replace them is an illusion.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

28. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

33. “Europe’s era of internal cohesion may already be past.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

34. “Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

35. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

36. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

38. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

39. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

42. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

45. “Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

46. “The United States, like any nation – but especially because it is a great power – simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

49. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan