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.

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.

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.Robert Kaplan , profile at CNAS website Between 2012 and 2014, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a private global forecasting firm. 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". 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. In 2026, he was named Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin.

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

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.

Foreign correspondent career 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.

Balkan Ghosts and The Arabists 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 criticized the administration for using the book to justify non-intervention, but his popularity skyrocketed shortly thereafter, along with demand for his reporting. That same year, he also published The Arabists.

In 1994 and 1995, he set out to travel from West Africa to Turkey, Central Asia to Iran, and India to Southeast Asia, and published a travelogue about his journey in The Ends of the Earth. He then traveled across his home country and North America and wrote An Empire Wilderness, published in 1998.

"The Coming Anarchy"

His article "The Coming Anarchy", published in The Atlantic in February 1994, was about how population increase, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world and represent a threat to the developed world. It was hotly debated and widely translated. In 2000, Kaplan published the article and other essays in a book with the same title, which also included the controversial article "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" His travels through the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle East at the turn of the millennium were recorded in Eastward to Tartary.

For The New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein wrote that Kaplan "conveys a historically informed tragic sense in recognizing humankind's tendency toward a kind of slipshod, gooey, utopian and ultimately dangerous optimism."

After 9/11

Demand for Kaplan's unorthodox analysis became more acute after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. In his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, published shortly after 9/11, Kaplan argues that political and business leaders should discard Christian/Jewish morality in public decision-making in favor of a pagan morality focused on the result rather than the means. He also published a pure travel book, Mediterranean Winter.

Support for the Iraq War Kaplan, along with Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, has been described by American pundit Glenn Greenwald as one of many prominent journalists advocating support for the Iraq War.

Kaplan participated in a secret meeting convened by the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, at which he helped draft an internal government document advocating the invasion of Iraq.Bosman, Julie (October 9, 2006) "Secret Iraq Meeting Included Journalists" The New York Times He later concluded that the war had been a mistake and expressed deep remorse for supporting it.

In his 2023 book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, Kaplan writes that he suffered from clinical depression due to the loss of American and Iraqi lives he believed his support for the Iraq War indirectly caused. Similarly, he expresses difficulty grappling with the impact of his book Balkan Ghosts, which he believes led the Clinton administration to neglect the genocide in southeastern Europe.

Criticism of Donald Trump Although Kaplan expresses sympathy for the many white blue collar voters who chose U.S. President Donald Trump in the 2016 election, in the book Earning the Rockies, he is critical of Trump on foreign policy and national security. Kaplan has argued that Trump's defense and foreign policy rely too heavily on military spending, calling it "American Caesarism". He has drawn parallels between Trump's focus on a militaristic image and large reductions to "soft" non-military foreign policy efforts with the gradual decline of the Roman Empire as a result of similar excess. Kaplan sees Trump's spending plans for national security and foreign policy as the first stage of a "tragic decline" for the United States. On foreign policy more broadly, Kaplan has called Trump "a terrible messenger for realism" who "appears to have no sense of history".

Criticism of neoconservatives In The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, Kaplan expresses disillusionment with neoconservative foreign policy, in particular the idea of democracy promotion through military force. He argues that this policy is based on uninformed optimism that ignores the tragic nature of reality. Kaplan contrasts neoconservative policy with the less ideologically motivated paradigm of realism. He argues that politicians can benefit from a humanistic understanding of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy to prevent neoconservatism and ideological foreign policy from causing significant loss of life or resources.

Imperial Grunts

Kaplan's book Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground was published in 2005. In it, he tells of US Special Forces on the ground across the globe in Colombia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Iraq. Kaplan predicts that the age of mass infantry warfare is probably over and writes that the conflict in Iraq caught the United States Army between being a "dinosaur" and a "light and lethal force of the future." He reports that many soldiers view certain parts of the world where they are operating as "Injun Country," which must be civilized by the same methods used to subdue the American Frontier in the 1800s.

He also analyzes the revival of Confederate military virtue in the US armed forces. Kaplan was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and wrote an often-cited report for The Atlantic titled "Five Days in Fallujah" about the spring 2004 campaign. In June 2005, he wrote the cover story for The Atlantic titled "How We Would Fight China", which suggests the inevitability of a Cold War-type situation between the US and China. In October 2006, he wrote "When North Korea Falls" for the same magazine; in it, he examines the prospect of North Korea's collapse and its effect on the balance of power in Asia in favor of China.

Hog Pilots

Kaplan's book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, published in 2007 by Random House, reflects his continuing interest in the US Armed Forces.

Monsoon

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (2010) is about the Indian Ocean region and the future of energy supplies and maritime trade routes in the 21st century. Kaplan writes that the Indian Ocean has been a center of power for a long time and that the shift to the Atlantic can be seen as an anomaly that will be set straight in future years. For the United States to maintain its power, it will have to link its goals with those of the people of the developing world, he concludes.

The Revenge of Geography

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (2012) The Book describes how a country's social relations (including government and other institutions) and culture are a product of the geographical characteristic in which they develop. For example, society's relation with the ocean or river and other geographical phenomena like climate. Moreover, he acknowledges the geographical boundaries like oceans and mountains as established or "natural" limits between nations which help to bring peace. Pointing out one of the reasons that the Middle East is a conflictive region.