Robert D. Kaplan Quote
As we learned to our horror at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, as well as in the 1960s in Vietnam, and again in the last decade in Iraq, to invade is to govern. Once you decide to send in ground forces in significant numbers, it becomes your job to administer the territory you’ve just conquered—or to identify someone immediately who can.
Robert D. Kaplan
As we learned to our horror at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, as well as in the 1960s in Vietnam, and again in the last decade in Iraq, to invade is to govern. Once you decide to send in ground forces in significant numbers, it becomes your job to administer the territory you’ve just conquered—or to identify someone immediately who can.
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About Robert D. Kaplan
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. 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.