121 Quotes by Robert D. Kaplan

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don’t even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they’re so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it’s the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic ‘newsworthy’ events.

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.

As Napoleon said, to know a nation’s geography is to know its foreign policy.

Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone, or else we will hunt you down wherever you are.

Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.

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.

Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics – to the extent that it can be shaped – in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.

Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.