Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan

Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.

What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

If you travel around America you see different sections of highways donated by this or that person, and that's a slow beginning of what may end up being a situation common in the Third World: some sections of highways in wealthy areas are beautifully maintained and other parts are just dirt-strewn potholes.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.

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

It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might.

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 .. - In Defense of Henry Kissinger, The Atlantic 2013 May http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/p...

The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia's navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world's annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2

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.

The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees

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.

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.

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.

As we seek perfection in our officials through an increasingly intense legal scrutiny, and reap an increasingly sallow form of mediocrity instead, there will come times - perhaps dangerous and violent times - when we will be more forgiving toward those who were supremely imperfect in their character yet unafraid to challenge the public mood.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline—for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still.

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.

The fact is, and there's no denying it, realism... is supposed to make one uneasy.

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.

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.