Top 90 Robert D. Kaplan Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Maps, in other words, can be dangerous tools. And yet they are crucial to any understanding of world politics.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

52. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

54. “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

55. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

62. “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

63. “The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes – slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

64. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

66. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

67. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

68. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “The middle class for a long time now has been slowly dissolving into a working class precariously on the verge of slipping into outright poverty, and also in the other direction into a smaller, upper-middle, global elite.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

73. “The fact is, and there’s no denying it, realism... is supposed to make one uneasy.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

78. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

79. “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

80. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

81. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

83. “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

84. “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

85. “The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

86. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

87. “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

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

89. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

95. “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.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan

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

— Robert D. Kaplan