Articles & Multimedia
Showing 21-40 of 64 Publications
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How to Take Back Patriotism
President Donald Trump, in dependable jingoistic fashion, has declared Jan. 20, the date of his inauguration, an official day to venerate patriotism. America has always been a...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why Trump Can’t Disengage America From the World
Debates about the extent to which the United States should use its power to lead and shape events in the world, and when and how it should intervene, are eternal in our histor...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Donald Trump and the Foreign Policy Pendulum
Every new administration sets out initially to distinguish itself from the previous one. This is especially true when the same party reoccupies the White House precisely becau...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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On foreign policy, Donald Trump is no realist
In the Washington Post, senior fellow Robert D Kaplan writes an op-ed on Donald Trump's categorization as a realist in foreign policy...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Real War of Ideas
In A Provincial’s Story, published in 1896, Chekhov has a particularly devastating portrait of the muzhiks, the Russian peasants, that in its own way demonstrates all the intr...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Is Primacy Overrated?
Power can be both absolute and relative. A state's absolute power can increase while its relative power declines; or its absolute power can diminish while its relative power i...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How to Crash Putin’s Brexit Party
For decades, NATO and the European Union have silently worked in unison. The former required a foundation of European unity, and the EU to a significant extent provided that, ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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How Islam Created Europe
Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now. For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Notable & Quotable: Anarchy in the 21st Century
From foreign-affairs analyst Robert D. Kaplan's "The Post-Imperial Moment: Vulgar, populist anarchy will define the twenty-first century" in the May-June issue of the National...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Freedom for Me—But Not for Thee
When historians in future decades ponder America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the name of Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired Army colonel and professor emeritus...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Obama Is No George H. W. Bush
President Barack Obama is known to be a great admirer of President George H. W. Bush, who Obama recently said is "one of the more underrated presidents we have ever had." Obam...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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A blunt defense of interrogations, targeted killings and domestic spying
People living in a democracy in an age of electronic communications can be altogether fickle. After a mass casualty attack, they demand total vengeance on the killers and thei...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Eurasia's Coming Anarchy
As China asserts itself in its nearby seas and Russia wages war in Syria and Ukraine, it is easy to assume that Eurasia’s two great land powers are showing signs of newfound s...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Europe’s New Medieval Map
Look at any map of Europe from the Middle Ages or the early modern era, before the Industrial Revolution, and you will be overwhelmed by its dizzying incoherence—all of those ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Time to Act on Ukraine
The Ukraine crisis, though temporarily out of the headlines, is at a critical stage. There is no better opportunity than now through the next several months to forge a deal wi...
By Elizabeth Rosenberg & Robert D. Kaplan
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ISIS and the Logic of Anarchy
The terrorist attacks in Paris, beyond their obvious horror, recalled to me the words of the late Bernard Fall, a French-American historian and war correspondent in Vietnam. I...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Great Danger of a New Utopianism
What is our worst existential fear, worse than any cyber, biological, environmental, or even nuclear threat? It is the threat of a utopian ideology in the hands of a formidabl...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Europe Discovers a New Geography
A vast crumbling can be heard across Europe, coupled with an ennui that is the ironic upshot of being stunned by too many disparate crises. The Mediterranean, it turns out, is...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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From 1987: Robert D. Kaplan on Robert Conquest
At the height of the famine emergency in 1985, a few journalists sat around a restaurant table in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, considering analogies for the food cris...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Greek Crisis Is About More Than Money
Geopolitics can be more important than economics. Just look at Greece. On purely economic grounds, Greece should never have been admitted to the European Union in 1981 and mig...
By Robert D. Kaplan