Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan

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.

state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.

Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.

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

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

Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.

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

The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.

Europe's era of internal cohesion may already be past.

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 ).

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous. "All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law," he goes on, "is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another.

But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy.

As the Arab proverb says, "People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.

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.

the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the distance from Europe to India, undermining the importance of Muscat and other Omani harbors as Indian Ocean transshipment points.

Geography, climate, population determine communications, economy, political organization.

It was trade routes, not the projection of military power, that emblemized the "Pax Mongolica."[

The forces of culture and geography are likely to prevail at some point. A man-made border that does not match a natural frontier zone is particularly vulnerable.

Geography, from a Greek word that means essentially a description of the earth

So many transformations!

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.

After all, good intentions have little to do with positive outcomes

the "sum of virtue," Hobbes writes, "is to be sociable with them that will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not."1

simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship.