Robert D. Kaplan

About Robert D. Kaplan

Named twice by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers”, Robert D. Kaplan has advised governments, militaries, and corporations at the highest level. He served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel, was Chief Geopolitical Analyst at Stratfor, Senior Adviser at Eurasia Group, and Visiting Professor at the United States Naval Academy. In 2025, he delivered the annual American Lecture as the climax of the Oxford University Literary Festival.

Kaplan’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. His essay “The Coming Anarchy” (1994) and his cover story “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” (1997) sparked global debate and influenced U.S. foreign policy, with President Clinton commissioning an interagency study that agreed with Kaplan’s conclusions. He has delivered lectures at leading military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA, as well as at top universities and international business forums.

In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first American writer to warn in print of a coming war in the Balkans. His landmark book Balkan Ghosts was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1993. Several of his other works — The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth, An Empire Wilderness, Eastward to Tartary, and Warrior Politics — were all named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. An Empire Wilderness was also chosen by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times as one of the *best books of 1998. The Wall Street Journal ranked The Arabists among the five best books ever written on America’s historical role in the Middle East, while The Financial Times named Asia’s Cauldron one of the ten best political books of 2014.

Widely recognised for his contributions, Kaplan has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Connecticut, the Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award, the International Prize of the Spanish Geographical Society (presented by Queen Sofia of Spain), and the Dutch Independence Award. His work continues to shape international discourse, bridging rigorous analysis with vivid storytelling drawn from a lifetime of field reporting.

If you stop learning, you can no longer teach. And learning also means never forgetting your own mistakes: the things you failed to predict or got wrong. You learn the most from that.