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You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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And so this is where the post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion."
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefi..
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morality
machiavelli
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Books that have been owned by someone for many years for a specific purpose carry not just memories, (that is obvious), they also reveal their owner's true values; for the books we own may indicate something about us very different from what we think.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,"
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs."
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women
humor
lithuania
soldiers
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a9d2db8
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The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa,
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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For two thousand years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of modern-day Tunis) the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millennia ago, tribal identity based on nomadism--which the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun said disrupted political stability--is correspondingly weak. Indeed, after the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa reg..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation--and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that--with political order and stability.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.)
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.... If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will ... probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the nor..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease ..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran...or the help Iran gave to the US-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghd..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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This is to be a landscape meditation about America's place in the world.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Europe's era of internal cohesion may already be past.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinven..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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panacea. This created a plethora of anomalies. The Syr
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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 ..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline--for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West d..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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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."
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Robert D. Kaplan |