Middle East

Until recently, America's middle east policy was a peripheral part of its global strategy, which focused on preventing the Soviet Union from intimidating US allies in western Europe and east Asia. Britain was the dominant western power in the middle east until the 1960s, and US influence was countered in much of the region by the Soviet Union until the end of the cold war. The indifference of much of the national security elite and the public to the region,… more

America's war on terrorism may shock the political structure of the Middle East to a degree unseen since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the collapse of European colonial rule after World War II. But those who believe the region can be remade in America's democratic image are seeing not the Middle East itself, but the Middle East as an extension of our own domestic obsessions and unique historical experience.

From Morocco on the Atlantic --… more

Late last week in Turkey, the stock market declined by 18 percent and the lira lost a third of its value. Interest rates have soared to several thousand … more

Israelis will continue to disagree in the coming election campaign over the different approaches to the Palestinians advocated by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Likud Party leader … more

Robert Kaplan's books on travel and foreign affairs have carried his readers to some of the world's least likely tourist destinations -- Bosnia, the horn of Africa, Afghanistan -- and illuminated the fault lines reshaping world affairs. Now he turns his attention to the lands of Central Asia, a region all but ignored in American strategic thinking, but simmering with ethnic antagonisms and marked by a dangerous maldistribution of natural resources. In writing marked by clarity, eloquence, and startling insight,… more

Selected reviews of Eastward to Tartary are featured below:

Friday, December 15, 2000 President-elect George W. Bush could do a lot worse in preparing for the foreign affairs part of his job than to read "Eastward to Tartary" by Robert D. Kaplan, a scholarly and adventurous journalist who roams the less-traveled regions of the globe and writes about them knowledgeably and with sophistication. Mr. Kaplan is the author, among other books, of "Balkan Ghosts," which achieved… more