Robert D. Kaplan

Robert David Kaplan (born June 23, 1952) is an American author.

His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel.

His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

He attended the University of Connecticut on a swimming scholarship, taking newswriting classes with Evan Hill, and earned a BA in English in 1973.

He has one sibling, an older brother, Stephen Kaplan.

After graduating, Kaplan applied unsuccessfully to several big-city newsrooms.

He was a reporter for the Rutland Herald in Vermont before buying a one-way plane ticket to Tunisia.

Over the next several years, he lived in Israel, where he joined the Israeli army, traveled and reported on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, lived for some time in Portugal and eventually settled down in Athens, Greece, where he met his wife.

He lives with his wife in Massachusetts.

Kaplan is not related to journalist Lawrence Kaplan, with whom he is occasionally confused.

He is also sometimes confused with neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan.

In addition to his journalism, Kaplan has been a consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces, the United States Marines, and the United States Air Force.

He has lectured at military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, major universities, the CIA, and business forums, and has appeared on PBS, NPR, C-SPAN, and Fox News.

He is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Kaplan traveled to Iraq to cover the Iran–Iraq War in 1984.

He first worked as a freelance foreign correspondent reporting on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but slowly expanded his coverage to all regions ignored in the popular press.

His first book, Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind The Famine (1988), contended the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s was more complex than just drought, blaming instead the collectivization carried out by the Mengistu regime.

Kaplan then went to Afghanistan to write about the guerrilla war against the Soviet Union for Reader's Digest.

Two years after writing Surrender or Starve, he wrote and published Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan (1990), in which he recounted his experiences during the Soviet–Afghan War.

Kaplan's third book, Balkan Ghosts, was rejected by several editors before being published in 1993.

At first, it did not sell well.

After the Yugoslav Wars broke out, President Bill Clinton was seen with Kaplan's book tucked under his arm, and White House insiders and aides said that the book convinced Clinton not to intervene in Bosnia.

Kaplan's book contended that the conflicts in the Balkans were based on ancient hatreds beyond any outside control.

One of Kaplan's most influential articles is "The Coming Anarchy", published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1994.

Critics of the article have compared it to Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis, since Kaplan presents conflicts in the contemporary world as the struggle between primitivism and civilizations.

Another frequent theme in Kaplan's work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War.

In 2001, he briefed President Bush.

He is the recipient of the 2001 Greenway-Winship Award for Excellence in international reporting.

In 2002, he was awarded the United States State Department Distinguished Public Service Award.

In 2006–08, Kaplan was a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, where he taught a course called "Future Global Security Challenges".

As of 2023 he is the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at FPRI.

From 2008 to 2012, Kaplan was a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC; he rejoined the organization in 2015.

In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the United States Department of Defense.

In 2011 and 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers".

Between 2012 and 2014, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a private global forecasting firm.

Kaplan is the recipient of the International Award for 2016 from the Sociedad Geografica Espanola in Madrid, presented by Queen Sofia of Spain.

In 2017, Kaplan joined Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, as a senior advisor.

In 2020, he was named the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Kaplan grew up in Far Rockaway in a Jewish family, son of Philip Alexander Kaplan and Phyllis Quasha.

Kaplan's father, a truck driver for the New York Daily News, instilled in him an interest in history from an early age.