Robert D. Kaplan

Robert David Kaplan (born 23 June 1952 in New York, New York) is an American journalist, currently a National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His writings have also been featured in 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, and his more controversial essays about the nature of US power have spurred debate in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. A frequent theme in his work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War. Kaplan was one of the most prominent pundits advocating in support of the Iraq War.

As of March 2008, Kaplan is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. 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 2011, Foreign Policy magazine names Kaplan one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers."

Biography

Kaplan grew up in Far Rockaway with a Jewish family, son of the late Philip Alexander Kaplan and Phyllis Quasha. Kaplan's father, a truck driver for the New York Daily News, instilled in him a love of history from an early age. He attended the University of Connecticut on a swimming scholarship and earned a B.A. in English (1973).

After graduating Kaplan applied unsuccessfully to several big-city newsrooms. He was a reporter for the Rutland Herald in Vermont before buying a one-way plane ticket to Tunisia. Over the next several years, he lived in Israel, where he joined the Israeli army, traveled and reported on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, lived for some time in Portugal and eventually settled down in Athens, Greece, where he met his wife. He lives with his wife in Massachusetts.

Kaplan is not related to journalist Fred Kaplan, with whom he is occasionally confused. He is also sometimes confused with neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan.

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. From 2006 to 2008, Kaplan was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis. As of 2008 he is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Foreign correspondent career

He traveled to Iraq to cover the Iran–Iraq War (1984). He first worked as a freelance foreign correspondent reporting on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but slowly expanded his coverage to all regions ignored in the popular press. His first book, Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind The Famine (1988) contended the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s was more complex than just drought and Cold War US foreign policy, pointing the blame instead to the collectivization carried out by the Mengistu regime.

Kaplan then went to Afghanistan to write about the guerrilla war against the Soviet Union for Reader's Digest. Two years after writing Surrender or Starve, he wrote and published Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan (1990) in which he recounted his experiences during the Soviet-Afghan War.

Balkan Ghosts and The Arabists

Neither of these books sold very well, and Kaplan's third book, Balkan Ghosts, was rejected by several editors before being published in 1993. At first, it did not sell very well. But when the Yugoslav Wars broke out, President Bill Clinton was seen with Kaplan's book tucked under his arm, and White House insiders and aides said that the book convinced the President against intervention in Bosnia. Kaplan's book contended that the conflicts in the Balkans were based on ancient hatreds beyond any outside control. Kaplan criticized the administration for using the book to justify non-intervention, but his popularity skyrocketed shortly thereafter along with demand for his reporting. That same year, he also published The Arabists.

Kaplan had not set out to influence U.S. foreign policy, but his work began to find a wide readership in high levels of government. Many felt that his reporting, as well as his frequently-invoked historical perspective, strengthened his arguments. In 1994 and 1995, he set out to travel from West Africa to Turkey, Central Asia to Iran, and India to Southeast Asia and published a travelogue about his journey in The Ends of the Earth. He then traveled across his home country and North America and wrote An Empire Wilderness, published in 1998.

"The Coming Anarchy"

His article "The Coming Anarchy" published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1994 about how population increase, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world and represent a threat to the developed world was hotly debated and widely translated. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Kaplan one of the "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War era, along with Francis Fukuyama, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington, and Yale Professor Paul Kennedy. 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. Also written in 2000 was another controversial essay, entitled "the Dangers of Peace," in which he described an America falling under peacetime's "numbing and corrosive illusion."

Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein notes that Kaplan "conveys a historically informed tragic sense in recognizing humankind's tendency toward a kind of slipshod, gooey, utopian and ultimately dangerous optimism."

After 9/11

Demand for Kaplan's unorthodox analysis became more popular after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. In his book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, published shortly after 9/11, Kaplan offered the opinion that political and business leaders should discard Christian/Jewish morality in public decision-making in favor of a pagan morality focused on the morality of the result rather than the morality of the means. He also published a pure travel book titled Mediterranean Winter.

Iraq War

Kaplan has been described, along with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, as "two of the country's most enthusiastic pundit-advocates for invading Iraq." Kaplan participated in a secret meeting convened by then deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, at which he helped drafted an internal government document advocating the invasion of Iraq. He later concluded that the war had been a mistake and expressed deep remorse for supporting it.

Imperial Grunts

Kaplan's book Imperial Grunts: The American Military On The Ground, was published in October 2005. In it, Kaplan tells of US Special Forces on the ground across the globe in Colombia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Iraq. Kaplan predicts that the age of mass infantry warfare is probably over and has said that the conflict in Iraq caught the US Army in between being a "dinosaur" and a "light and lethal force of the future." Kaplan sees large parts of the world where the US military is operating in "injun country" which must be civilized by the same methods used to subdue the American Frontier in the 1800s.

He also praises the revival of Confederate military virtue in the US armed forces. Kaplan was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and wrote an often-cited report for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Five Days in Fallujah" about the spring 2004 campaign. In June 2005, he wrote the cover story for the Atlantic Monthly titled "How We Would Fight China", which suggests the inevitability of a Cold War-type situation between the US and China. In October 2006, he wrote "When North Korea Falls" for the same magazine in which he examines the prospect of North Korea's collapse and the effect on the balance of power in Asia in favor of China.

Hog Pilots

Kaplan's book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, published in September 2007 by Random House, reflects his continuing interest in the US Armed Forces.

Monsoon

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (2010) is about the Indian Ocean region and the future of energy supplies and national security in the 21st century.

Bibliography

• Carta's Guide to Israel and Jordan. Jerusalem, Israel: Carta. 1980. ISBN 9652200239. (pbk.)
• Robert D. Kaplan (2003-11-11). Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea. Vintage. ISBN 1400034523., published September 1988, reprinted November 2003
• Robert D. Kaplan (2001-11). Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Vintage. ISBN 1400030250. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (also titled Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan), published February 1990, reprinted November 2001
• Robert D. Kaplan (2005-05-01). Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Picador. ISBN 0312424930., published February 1993, reprinted March 1994
• Robert D. Kaplan (1995-07-01). Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite. Free Press. ISBN 0028740238., published September 1993
• Robert D. Kaplan (2001-06). The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia--A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. Peter Smith Pub Inc. ISBN 084467124X. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help), published February 1996, republished January 2000
• Robert D. Kaplan (1999-09-07). An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future. Vintage. ISBN 0679776877., published August 1998
• Robert D. Kaplan (2001-02-13). The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. Vintage. ISBN 037570759X., published January 2000
• Robert D. Kaplan (2001-10). Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Vintage. ISBN 0375705767. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help), published November 2000
• Robert D. Kaplan (2003-01-07). Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. Vintage. ISBN 0375726276., published December 2001
• Robert D. Kaplan (Spring 2003). "America and the Tragic Limits of Imperialism" (PDF). The Hedgehog Review. Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia. pp. 56–76. Retrieved 2009-04-14. The war on terrorism will be very much like the Cold War, or like fighting a disease pandemic. In a disease pandemic, you almost never eradicate the disease; you simply suppress it to such a level that it doesn't really interfere with daily life in any given geographical space. We are not going to eliminate entirely all terrorist incidents and that should not be the measure of whether the war on terrorism is a success or not. If we can reduce these incidents substantially so that spectacular incidents are few and far between, the body politic in the United States and Europe and elsewhere will be able to move on.
• Robert D. Kaplan (2004-02-03). Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece. Random House. ISBN 037550804X., published February 2004
• Robert D. Kaplan (2006-09-12). Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond. Vintage. ISBN 1400034574., published September 2005
• Robert D. Kaplan (2007-09-04). Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground. Random House. ISBN 1400061334., published September 2007
• Robert D. Kaplan (2010-10-19). Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and The Future of American Power. Random House. ISBN 1400067464., published October 2010

Contributions to Other Editions

• Gafni, Shlomo S. (1980). Yael Lotan (ed.). The glory of the Holy Land. Robert D. Kaplan (research). Jerusalem: Steimatzky’s Agency : Jerusalem Publishing House. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |origmonth=, |month=, |chapterurl=, and |origdate= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Joseph Conrad (2000-04-18). Lord Jim & Nostromo (Modern Library). Modern Library. ISBN 037575489X., published April 2000 (Introduction, Modern Library 1400061334Edition)
• Travelers Tales Turkey: True Stories. Travelers' Tales. 2002-09-17. ISBN 1885211821., published September 2002 (Contributor)
• Nikolai Gogol (2003-12-30). Taras Bulba (Modern Library Classics). Modern Library. ISBN 0812971191., published April 2003 (Introduction, Modern Library Edition)

External links

• Official Site
• Robert Kaplan interview, The American Enterprise, January/February 2006.
• Booknotes interview with Kaplan on The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, April 21, 1996.
• "Robert Kaplan: Empire Without Apologies" by Andrew J. Bacevich, The Nation Magazine, September 26, 2005
• Besant, Alexander (2008). "Contemporary Issues of American National Security" (PDF). Yale Journal of International Affairs. Archived from the original on Mar 06, 2008. Retrieved 2009-04-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |archivedate= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• "Video: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground". FPRI BookTalk. Foreign Policy Research Institute.
• "Robert D. Kaplan (Class of 1960 National Security Chair) - Faculty BIO". United States Naval Academy. Retrieved 2009-04-14. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
• Kaplan, Robert (2007-10-01). "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground". Book TV. C-Span. Retrieved 2009-04-14. C-span interview