121 Quotes by Robert D. Kaplan

Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.

Maps, in other words, can be dangerous tools. And yet they are crucial to any understanding of world politics.

Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society.

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

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

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.

Given the level of anti-Americanism in the world, given the level of frustration with the United States throughout the Muslim world, you’ve got a homegrown attack or you have a nuclear explosion in the air that is not a test somewhere. Those are still the biggest threats out there.

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.

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