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2dde1b4
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Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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f68db99
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Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.
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wheeling
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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85f071e
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The debacle of the early years in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history, and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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9a268e1
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The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes--slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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1605d5a
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Check the list of the world's most feeble economies and note the high proportion that are landlocked. 20 Note how tropical countries (those located between 23.45 degrees north and south latitudes) are generally poor, even as most high-income countries are in the middle and high latitudes.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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985c00d
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And yet these same oceans, by separating America by thousands of miles from other continents, have given America a virulent strain of isolationism that has persisted to this day.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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98032c1
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This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography. 29
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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0cdb1ee
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keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin's admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title "Historical Inevitability," in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics."
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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b7f6efb
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America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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e51e9fd
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This is an older history being taught here, not the one often taught in schools and universities now, in which the story of the West is reduced to atrocity and little more. It is true that historical research is necessary to defeat jingoistic nationalism. The more history we know, the more complex the story of our past becomes and the more realistic we can be about it. But without some kind of usable past, there is no possibility of affecti..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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91f9915
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I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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43f6986
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the Oikoumene is where the Eurasian and African landmasses converge, with many outlets to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, making it ultra-strategic, as well as a stew of migration patterns and consequently clashing ethnic and sectarian groups.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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e08344e
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The ancient world was "settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man,"
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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2985c8a
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If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding--and consequently defending ourselves against--religious movements that reverse the Enlightenment and affect today's geopolitics.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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b43de81
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vast and pivotal expanse of Central Asia and its Mongol-Turkic hordes. These four marginal regions, as he informs us, correspond not coincidentally to the four great numerical religions: for faith, too, in Mackinder's judgment, is a function of geography. There are the "monsoon lands," one in the east facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal regi..
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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deaeaa6
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another case of America becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a8349d8
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Lincoln had risen to this pinnacle through migration, self-education, and hard work.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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768713a
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The United States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of Mexican demography.)
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a35dc12
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Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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c69fd45
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idea of Central Europe has a "fatal geographical flaw." Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the "crush zone" that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its "oceanic interests,"
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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2b999af
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the two world wars were about whether or not Germany would dominate the Heartland of Eurasia that lay to its east, while the Cold War centered on the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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bb1ebd5
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Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world "is the result of forces inherent in human nature." And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear ( phobos ), self-interest ( kerdos ), and honor ( doxa )."
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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f22bbf3
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Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter's conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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99c0b22
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those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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1dfe27e
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Mongol-Turkic invasions were arguably the most significant event in world history in the second millennium of the common era, and it was mainly because of the use of certain animals tied to geography.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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362fef9
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There is still the EU, but also individual states, regions, and city-states, with liberalism barely holding off the forces of populist nationalism. To say that this does not undermine the strength of NATO is to be in denial,
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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aeedf51
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while our position has been eroding, the internal positions of Eurasia's two principal hinge states, Russia and China, have been eroding further. They have ethnic, political, and economic challenges of a fundamental, structural kind compared to which ours pale in significance. Their very future stability and existence as unitary states can be questioned, whereas ours cannot.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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be0bb78
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Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics--to the extent that it can be shaped--in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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dc331db
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We must move away from domain control to domain denial, since our only motive to be on the ground in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia is for smackdown or disruption purposes. (In retrospect, that is how we should have handled Afghanistan after 9/11.)
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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cac7399
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As we learned to our horror at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, as well as in the 1960s in Vietnam, and again in the last decade in Iraq, to invade is to govern. Once you decide to send in ground forces in significant numbers, it becomes your job to administer the territory you've just conquered--or to identify someone immediately who can.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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0610035
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both Russia and China are dictatorships, not democracies. Therefore, losing face for them would be much more catastrophic than it would be for an American president. Politically speaking, they may be unable to give up the fight. And so we, too, might have to fight on, until there is some form of a regime change, or a substantial reduction in Moscow's or Beijing's military capacity
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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d733bd6
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We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back more extreme elements. They are bold, but not crazy. The idea that more liberal regimes might replace them is an illusion.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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dc3ce04
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In the interest of thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy, policy makers need to worry about how not to provoke more anarchy than the world has already seen.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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068233e
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Related lessons: Don't go hunting ghosts, and don't get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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4e0534a
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With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius's army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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ccc8eac
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America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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85e98ee
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the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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f3ed91f
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If the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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11e5e54
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The United States, like any nation--but especially because it is a great power--simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a7dbfce
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The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States--something that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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a674852
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Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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8efb4c1
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the "sum of virtue," Hobbes writes, "is to be sociable with them that will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not."1" --
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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3faada0
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despite the threats of Russian and Chinese expansionism, particularly in the Baltic, Black, and South China seas, the more important underlying dynamic will be the crises of central control inside Russia and China themselves as their authoritarian systems degenerate
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Robert D. Kaplan |
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285844c
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The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty."
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Robert D. Kaplan |