Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan

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.

America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

whereas the Catholic Church is unified under a pope, the Orthodox world is more an assemblage of "independent local Churches" that are "highly flexible" and "easily adapted to changing conditions.

Thus, while the Orthodox world claims universality as the original "true belief" about God, in practice it has become associated with ethnic nations and regimes, good and bad.

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

People need to discover their ethnic roots as an anchor in the face of a more cosmopolitan world.

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.

The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty.

That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy

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.

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

For it is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography.

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.

I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.

Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.

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.

the boundary zone that divides the East from West Germany Ã¢â'¬Â¦ 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.

Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources.

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