Articles & Multimedia
Showing 41-60 of 64 Publications
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The Ruins of Empire in the Middle East
Editors’ note: The original headline of Robert Kaplan’s article, chosen by the editors, generated some controversy and was subsequently changed to better reflect the argument ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Geopolitics of the Iran Nuclear Deal
As the United States and Iran near an historic nuclear agreement there is an intense debate about whether a deal represents capitulation to Iranian interests in the Middle Eas...
By Ilan Goldenberg & Robert D. Kaplan
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America will lose patience with European appeasement
Appeasement is an age-old tactic of diplomacy. It can be a defensible one, but not as a frame of mind for an entire continent. Yet no word captures the general mood of Europe ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Iran's Great Cultural Advantage
Throughout all the vicissitudes of dealing with Iran, an obvious fact has been insufficiently addressed: The external behavior of Iran's regime is simply more dynamic and more...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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If the Iran Nuke Talks Fail...
What if the nuclear talks with Iran completely break down at some point, as quite a few people in Congress and the Washington policy community seem to want? We believe the res...
By Ilan Goldenberg & Robert D. Kaplan
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Countering Putin’s Grand Strategy
The heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine this week isn’t the only reason to be skeptical about the prospects for the peace summit that began Wednesday in Minsk, Belarus. Even if ...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Asia’s Rise Is Rooted in Confucian Values
One of the striking elements of “The Governance of China,” a book published this past fall in several languages (including English) by Chinese President Xi Jinping , was his r...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Postmodern Autocrat's Handbook
The concept of dictatorship is badly in need of revision. The old model of remote tyrants inflicting arbitrary, often eccentric, edicts on their cowed or indoctrinated subject...
By Dafna Rand & Robert D. Kaplan
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Warming to Iran
Foreign policy is about necessity, not desire. And multiple necessities have been driving the United States and Iran toward a détente of sorts. Indeed, the American-Iranian es...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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America Is Fated to Lead
THE SLEEP of any president, prime minister or statesman is haunted by what ifs. What if I had only fired that defense secretary sooner, or replaced that general in Iraq with t...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why War Is Good
Some of the most terrifying moments of my life have been in the midst of conflict: with American marines in Fallujah in 2004 and with armed bands in Sierra Leone in 1993. I st...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why Failure Helps
"Man's real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years," writes the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in his 194...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Terrorism as Theater
The beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq was much more than an altogether gruesome and tragic affair: rather, it was a very soph...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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The Hard Hand of the Middle East
Reality can be harsh. In order for the United States to weaken and eventually defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, it could use help from both the Iranian regime and th...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Obama's Foreign Policy Record: TBD
The establishment media has declared U.S. President Barack Obama a failure in foreign policy. He is worse than George W. Bush, say some journalists; he is worse than Jimmy Car...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Is There a Place for Imperialism in U.S. Foreign Policy?
In November 1991 in Prague, in a conversation between the Polish historian and intellectual, Adam Michnik, and the late Czech president and playwright, Vaclav Havel, Michnik r...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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East Africa Rising
The Greater Indian Ocean is the maritime organizing principle of geopolitics, uniting the entire arc of Islam (including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), East Africa, the In...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Why Moldova Urgently Matters
"NATO's Article 5 offers little protection against Vladimir Putin's Russia," Iulian Fota, Romania's presidential national security adviser, told me on a recent visit to Buchar...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Eurasia's Ongoing Crackup
Eurasia -- from Iberia to the Korean Peninsula -- faces the prospect of epochal change. These disruptions are not always in the headlines, and they obscure vast areas of stabi...
By Robert D. Kaplan
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Europe's Deep Right-Wing Logic
It is undeniable that the right wing is ascendant in Europe. While leftist parties did well here and there in recent elections to the European Parliament, the story over recen...
By Robert D. Kaplan