Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous

Croatia and Serbia will always seek to advance the interests of their ethnic compatriots in Bosnia, at the expense of each other and of the Bosnian Muslims, no matter who is in charge, democrat or autocrat. But

Human nature - the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor - makes for a world of incessant conflict and coercion.

It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France.

Realism is alien to the American tradition

A better age would have to follow.

The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically

Beyond Cina and the Athenaeum stretched Pia?a Revolu?iei, the vast square holding the former royal palace and Communist Party headquarters, where tanks had rolled and the streets had run with blood during the uprising against Ceau?escu in December 1989, the singular event which terminated the Cold War in Europe.

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

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 enraged at the whites for spreading measles to them.)

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.

many of the young people who are, in fact, progressive have been emigrating en masse for jobs and new lives abroad, leaving the reactionary ones behind.

Russia's interest in Montenegro is also wrought by Russia's considerable history of cultural and linguistic ties to Serbian-speaking territories, to its economic investments here, and to the fact that this beautiful Adriatic resort has become a playground for Russian organized crime.

used to take many long and uncomfortable hours in a bus, car, or train to journey between the deep interior of Croatia and the coast. But the building of several massive, graded, and multi-laned superhighways from Zagreb down the mountains to Rijeka, to Senj, to Zadar, and to Split along the Adriatic coast has cut the distance dramatically

The history of the area is overwhelming: Hitler, Mussolini, Tito, and Miloševi?, for example.

From Zagreb to Rijeka now takes ninety minutes, to Senj two hours, and so forth. Because of the collapse of distance effected by civil engineering—to say nothing of the explosion of global tourism along the Dalmatian seaboard—Croatia has changed both economically and, to an extent, psychologically. Croatia has begun to move away from a more ethnically obsessed Balkan orientation in the direction of a more cosmopolitan Mediterranean one.

It is an old story: a frontier church hard up against the borders of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, feeling too insecure to shed its prejudices against—as it now happens—Jews and Muslims.

Yet, at the café tables in the morning, young mothers with designer sunglasses rock their babies in strollers with one hand and and sip morning coffee with the other. Normality is the most beautiful of all things, especially considering such a past.

Bus travel is easy in Dalmatia. It is a decidedly middle-class affair over good roads and with dependable schedules

With one change of buses I am in Split in under two and a half hours

of ocean, around the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken

Geography informs, rather than determines. Geography, therefore, is not synonymous with fatalism.

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:

Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland!