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bc9afbc
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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4054577
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Yet now that we inhabit Mackinder's "closed political system," which, as Bracken notes, has closed much further in the course of the twentieth century, the map is also subject to the law of entropy, meaning a state of equilibrium will eventually set in, with each human habitation on the relief map--not just the megacities--looking increasingly like one another, and be subject to similar passions. The result, according to Ohio State Universi..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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6573b46
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The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media's distorting mirror.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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b035d4c
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James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan (New York: Routledge, 2008); Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, "Command of the Sea with Chinese Characteristics," Orbis, Fall 2005; Gabriel B. Collins et al., eds., China's Energy Strategy: The Impact on Beijing's Maritime Policies (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008); and Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins, "Beijing's Energy Security St..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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33d4fb5
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A better age would have to follow.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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666e566
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China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks--"which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide 'smart bombs' and more"--as its "Achilles' heel."
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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897e8b2
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One marker, which I would read a bit later on, tells the familiar story of Narcissa Whitman, "trail-blazer and martyred missionary," who followed the north side of the Platte in 1836 on horseback, "becoming the first white women to cross the American continent," and who, along with her husband, Marcus, was "massacred by Cayuse Indians" at their Protestant mission in 1847 in Walla Walla, Washington. (The Indians there were justifiably enrage..
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measles
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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40634dd
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liberalism and democracy, with all of their limitations, are what remains after every utopia and extremist scheme based on blood and territory has been exposed and shattered by reality.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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38a3f05
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Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past:
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a477750
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Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe ..
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united-states-of-america
frontier
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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115a2c0
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Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources.
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grand-strategy
international-relations
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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92260a2
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Any act of intolerance, of ideological intransigence, or of proselytism exposes the beastly core of all enthusiasm....One can never stay far enough from the clutches of a prophet.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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54beec1
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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.
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springfield
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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5505723
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Carol I must not be confused with his nephew's son, Carol II. Whereas the latter was undisciplined and sensual, the former was an anal-retentive Prussian of the family of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who, in the course of a forty-eight-year rule (1866-1914), essentially built modern Romania, complete with nascent institutions, from an assemblage of regions and two weak principalities. Following 1989, he had become the default symbol of legitim..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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d3967f0
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It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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956f389
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Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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aee1b98
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Since the security benefits of hegemony are enormous" in an anarchic system in which there is no world hegemon, "powerful states will invariably be tempted to emulate the United States and try to dominate their region of the world."15"
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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8ccdaff
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That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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fc076aa
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of ocean, around the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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81163be
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Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland!
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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b31dd3a
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When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kemalism.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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3284f77
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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29495b0
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the boundary zone that divides the East from West Germany ... is one of the oldest in history," the one which separated Frankish and Slavonic tribes in the Middle Ages. In other words, there was little artificial about the frontier between West and East Germany."
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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eae1530
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There were just so many cafes now--bearing conceited names such as Charme, Rembrandt, La Muse--with their chairs and tables made of wicker, zinc, velvet, blond wood, and black metal, each establishment desperately trying to evoke Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, or New York. Even the ashtrays bore edgy designer patterns evocative of Art Deco and the Belle Epoque. And yet it has to be said that these new cafes of Bucharest lack the enfoldin..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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6675324
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As Berlin writes, in his reproach to the historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, "nations" and "civilizations," while they exist, are not as "concrete" as the individuals who embody them.6 Individuals not only count morally to a greater extent than groups, but the very existence of the former is not inherently problematic like that of the latter. Groups, civilizations, and other mass human assemblages are either artificially constructe..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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7e4ba7d
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Leave us alone and we'll leave you alone, or else we will hunt you down wherever you are.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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7ed2b7c
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Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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872069c
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In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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dbe0427
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Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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c788fdf
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state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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dabdd3d
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ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else," explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: "The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regar..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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8e08d0f
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Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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17e5741
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The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was "the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location."
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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6db682e
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The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees,
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a15fa86
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While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Surely,
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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d203bb4
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The relative obscurity of Day's autobiography and other books like it about Vietnam constitute a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren't. They aren't so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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d59f831
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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f611d34
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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fdacf48
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While our land forces are for unpredictable contingencies, our sea and air forces secure the global commons. The navy is our away team: its operations tempo around the world is the same, whether in peacetime or wartime. So crucial is our navy that were just one of America's eleven aircraft carriers sunk or disabled by an enemy combatant, it would constitute a national disaster in strategic and reputational terms as devastating as 9/11. Mani..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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0340cc7
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it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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9cf6b2e
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The revolution was a gift from God to the Romanian people. The Romanian people must now repay this gift by opening their hearts to people of all faiths, especially to those who suffered here in the past.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a7aa0ab
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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.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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743f116
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And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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3eb5345
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What destroyed the Indian was not primarily political greed, land hunger, or military power, not the white man's germs or the white man's rum. What destroyed him was the manufactured products of a culture, iron and steel, guns, needles, woolen cloth, things that once possessed could not be done without."19"
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Robert D. Kaplan |