Robert Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the bestselling author of seven previous books on travel and foreign affairs, translated into many languages, including Balkan Ghosts, The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth, and The Coming Anarchy.

Selected reviews of Warrior Politics are featured below:

Tuesday, January 15, 2002 Years of reporting from combat zones in Bosnia, Uganda, the Sudan, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea have convinced Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, The Coming Anarchy) that Thucydides and Sun-Tzu are still right on the money when they wrote that war is not an aberration and that civilization can repress barbarism but cannot eradicate it.

Reminding readers that "The greater the disregard of history, the greater… more

The most memorable review that Samuel Phillips Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, ever got was a bad one. "Imagine," Huntington recalled recently, sitting in his home on Boston's Beacon Hill. "The first review of my first book, and the reviewer compares me unfavorably to Mussolini." He blinked and squinted shyly through his eyeglasses. Huntington, seventy-four, speaks in a serene and nasal voice, the East Bronx modified by high Boston. He described how the reviewer, Matthew… more

Abdul Haq, a leading Pushtun commander against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was executed last month by the Taliban. He would have figured prominently in any post-Taliban government in Kabul and was among the most interesting political-cultural figures to emerge in the greater Middle East in many years. He combined a deep religiosity with a rich tribal tradition, a startling analytical mind and an expert knowledge of the West. Whereas the philosophy of the Taliban is the conception… more

Toppling the Taliban will be easy. The Kremlin overthrew four Afghan governments in the 1970s, as a result of which it became embroiled in a decade-long war in Afghanistan that helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. That the Soviets failed to subdue Afghanistan doesn't mean that the United States will fail there, too. Ending Afghanistan's support of terrorism does not require the occupation of large tracts of its territory, the goal of the Soviets. Still, there are… more

Terrorism is a disease variant of modern, total war that had its debut in 1864 and 1865 when President Abraham Lincoln and his generals reluctantly targeted the farms, homes and factories of Southern civilians in an effort to bring a swift end to the Civil War. Whereas the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was an aristocratic duel between two armies that affected few civilians, the wars on European soil in the 20th century devastated large numbers of noncombatants. Modernity means killing… 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

In March 2000, former President Clinton visited Pakistan and declined to shake hands publicly with its military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, because Musharraf had overthrown a democratically elected government. A day later, Pakistanis were shocked to see Clinton on television again, this time in Geneva, clasping the hands of the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, whose regime, they knew, was far more repressive than that of any Pakistani military ruler since the founding of their state in 1947.

The democratically elected… more

President George W. Bush saw the big change needed in America's foreign policy long before the intellectuals and the media did. Bush's campaign rhetoric and subsequent foreign affairs strategy -- in which he has sought to clear the decks of nonessential overseas involvements in order to concentrate on security threats for a new military and technological age -- while wrong in some specifics, have been proven tragically prescient in their overall conception. It is not that Bush foresaw specifically the… more

The unraveling of Macedonia is a humanitarian crisis with great strategic and historical significance. What happens in the squalid, grimy streets of Macedonian villages now directly affects the … more