Kaplan, Robert D. 1952–

PERSONAL:

Born June 23, 1952, in New York, NY; son of Philip Alexander (a truck driver) and Phyllis Kaplan; married Maria Cabral (a government official); children: Michael Anthony. Education: University of Connecticut, B.A., 1973. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Political Science Department, United States Naval Academy, 589 McNair Rd., Annapolis, MD 21402-5030.

CAREER:

Atlantic Monthly, national correspondent; United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security. Consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces Regiment, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Marines. Lecturer at military war colleges, the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Pentagon, and universities, and for business groups.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best books of 1993 and by Amazon.com as one of the best travel books of all time; The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, and Warrior Politics, were all chosen by the New York Times as notable books of the year; Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future was named a best book of 1998 by both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

WRITINGS:

Carta's Guide to Israel and Jordan, Carta (Jerusalem, Israel), 1980.

Surrender or Starve: The Wars behind the Famine, Westview (Boulder, CO), 1988, Vintage (New York, NY), 2003.

Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1990.

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1993.

The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, Free Press (New York, NY), 1993.

The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, Random House (New York, NY), 1998.

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, Random House (New York, NY), 2000.

Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, Random House (New York, NY), 2000.

Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, Random House (New York, NY), 2002.

Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece, Random House (New York, NY), 2004.

Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, Random House (New York, NY), 2005.

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

Researcher for The Glory of the Holy Land, by Shlomo S. Gafni, edited by Yael Lotan, Jerusalem Publishing House (Jerusalem, Israel), 1980; author of introduction, Taras Bulba, by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Peter Constantine, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2003; contributor to periodicals, including New Republic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Reader's Digest.

SIDELIGHTS:

As a contributor to Atlantic Monthly magazine and an author of books based on his global travels, Robert D. Kaplan has become an influential commentator on world affairs. Kaplan has made a point of visiting some of the most economically depressed, environmentally degraded, and overpopulated nations, and from his experiences of these places he has formulated scenarios of the future that are anything but optimistic. New York Times Book Review correspondent Michael Ignatieff called Kaplan "an American master of a newish genre that might be called travel writing from hell." Ignatieff noted that the author "specializes in exploring the San Andreas faults of the modern geopolitical system." In the New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote that Kaplan "is a knowledgeable and forceful polemicist who mixes the attributes of journalist and visionary." Also in the New York Times Book Review, Adam Garfinkle described Kaplan as "one of America's most engaging writers on contemporary international affairs." Garfinkle further noted that the publication of a Kaplan book "ranks as not only a literary event but as one bound to jostle the broad community of policy intellectuals as well."

Beginning in the early 1980s, Kaplan provided dispatches from global focal points. His first book, Surrender or Starve: The Wars behind the Famine, discusses the political aspects of Africa's famines during the mid-1980s. Unfortunately for Kaplan, the book was little reviewed, resulting in poor sales. After the publication of Surrender or Starve, Kaplan was enlisted by Reader's Digest to provide coverage of Afghanistan's guerilla war with the military forces of the Soviet Union. His experiences in the war-torn region resulted in Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan. That book, unfortunately, shared the same fate as Surrender or Starve. James Rupert provided a positive appraisal in the Washington Post, where he deemed Soldiers of God to be "an insightful, personal portrait" and "a readable personal impression of some of the people in this war and what makes them tick."

During the years when he produced both Surrender or Starve and Soldiers of God, Kaplan longed to write about the turbulent political climate in Eastern Europe. While fellow writers reported on more sensational changes in Berlin and the Soviet Union, Kaplan stayed in Yugoslavia, as the country violently splintered into warring factions. The result, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, was described by Paul Elie in Publishers Weekly as "a serendipitous book, a rare confluence of talent, logistics, and events." In Balkan Ghosts, Elie declared, Kaplan "makes palpable the extent to which the past bears down on the present in a region that has been called ‘history's cauldron.’" The book offers a historical perspective on the ethnic conflicts between Serbs, Croats, and Albanians, explaining that the newest outbreak of violence in the region was a result of ancient ill will of epic proportions. Published as it was at the outset of a serious war event in the former Yugoslavia, Balkan Ghosts proved far more influential than its author might have expected. According to Garfinkle, "Balkan Ghosts, fallen into the hands of a certain novice denizen of the Oval Office, contributed much to a sharp if temporary aversion to involving the United States in a cauldron of ‘ancient hatreds.’"

Kaplan had not set out to influence U.S. foreign policy in Bosnia, but Balkan Ghosts and his subsequent magazine pieces and book-length works have indeed found a wide readership in high levels of government. Many critics feel that the vigor of his reportage strengthens his arguments. Suzannah Lessard wrote in Washington Monthly that Kaplan "thinks on his feet, often invoking historical perspective, but never staying still, always voraciously searching for the outlines of the furor in his restless travelogues, as he calls his works." In Insight on the News, Rex Roberts commented: "Whether Kaplan draws the right conclusions from his travels, he certainly reports authoritatively on conditions in far-flung places. He has been everywhere. … Certainly, Kaplan makes fresh observations."

The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite is Kaplan's history of people who, beginning in the nineteenth century, chose to live and work in the Middle East. These expatriates have included missionaries, diplomats, military attaches, and adventurers who were drawn to the exotic culture of the region. Kaplan charges that some Arabists have their own views of contemporary Middle Eastern issues, including those involving Israel. Mary Carroll called The Arabists in Booklist "a thoughtful, reflective analysis of a subject painfully immersed in controversy."

For The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century, Kaplan undertook the daunting task of traveling through Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. In countries as diverse as Egypt and Cambodia, Sierra Leone and India, he witnessed alarming rates of poverty and overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, and the breakdown of nations into smaller, often conflicting units based on ethnic relationships. "Kaplan focuses his sights on the underbelly … of these countries," noted Nader Mousavizadeh in the New Republic. "He has certainly seen much, and some of what he reports about these societies is acute and incisive." Mousavizadeh felt, however, that Kaplan was selective in his coverage, seeking only those locales that bolstered his arguments. "This is not analysis," the critic maintained. "This is tourism—the tourist's naivete, the tourist's recoil from the unsightliness of the Third World, the tourist's ignorance about the places in which he finds himself." Conversely, Commentary essayist Francis Fukuyama wrote: "As a piece of travel literature alone, The Ends of the Earth succeeds in providing a tangible sense of the sweaty, smelly reality of many exotic points on the map, with glimpses of their cruelty but also, occasionally, of beauty and human kindness. As a piece of analysis, it is deeply thought-provoking." Fukuyama found Kaplan to be "an intrepid and unfailingly clear-eyed chronicler, and The Ends of the Earth to be a thoroughly engaging book." Ignatieff suggested that the questions Kaplan poses in his book are "essential to global survival." Ignatieff concluded: "Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument—that our future is being shaped far away ‘at the ends of the earth’—makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading."

An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future finds Kaplan turning his traveler's eye to North America, again drawing pessimistic conclusions about the future. One of Kaplan's more controversial books, An Empire Wilderness argues that as the economy becomes global, America is disintegrating into regional "pods," or city-states, where the wealthy isolate themselves from an increasingly desperate and disadvantaged underclass. According to Peter Schrag in Nation, Kaplan's travels, "through parts of Mexico, a sliver of Canada and a dozen Western and Midwestern states … are reported with a fine and often sympathetic journalist's eye. But that same vividness also makes for a sobering and often gloomy panorama spanning places as disparate as St. Louis and Tucson, Omaha and Los Angeles. Each of those places, as Kaplan sees them, is increasingly segregated between the winners in the global economy in their high-rise offices and their privately policed, gated residential developments and a sort of lumpen-proletariat, much of it black or Hispanic, stuck in rotting neighborhoods and seedy trailer parks." Kaplan proposes that this national direction will lead to a decay of community and a surrender of state and federal government to the demands of global corporate interests.

Again the critics were divided on the value of An Empire Wilderness. In Commentary David Brooks observed: "It may be worth remembering that the country Kaplan is describing is America in the late 1990's—a country with low unemployment, low inflation, declining crime rates, high consumer confidence, manifold opportunities, and general satisfaction…. His description of America is so skewed that it is often difficult to make the leap from the America he describes to the country that really exists." Thurston Clarke offered a different opinion in the New York Times Book Review. An Empire Wilderness, the critic concluded, "is not written as a call to arms, but its vision is so frightening and powerful it could have that effect. Maybe Kaplan's alarming predictions have brought closer the day when we finally tear down the gates, put the automobile in its place and walk out our front doors to rediscover our families and neighbors, revive our communities and save ourselves from his bleak future." A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated: "As dystopian as it is soberly prescient, Kaplan's vision of 21st-century America will command the attention of readers from all corners of our increasingly decentralized continent."

Kaplan's 2000 title, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, began as an essay first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1994. In fact, the title essay was almost as influential as Kaplan's book on Bosnia. It used personal observations as well as illustrations from authors such as Hobbes, Malthus, and Gibbons to posit the grim future of a world polarized between the ultra-rich multinational corporate elite on one end and lawless, poverty-stricken communities of ethnic gangs on the other. New Republic reviewer Robert Kagan, referring to the magazine article, wrote: "It was probably Kaplan's portrait of a ‘bifurcated’ world that most readers found interesting, persuasive, and even predictive. His split picture of the post-Cold War world was a significant notion in the early 1990s, and it was soon adopted as something of a new orthodoxy. It became the core of debates, still fervent, over whether ‘globalization’ was a universal phenomenon or a parochial one, and over whether the effects of globalization might increase rather than decrease the gap between the developed and the developing worlds."

Kagan characterized The Coming Anarchy as "a jeremiad aimed at the West" that illustrates Kaplan's "deep cynicism about democracy, both abroad and at home." The critic also declared: "One may detect a certain egoism in Kaplan's recurrent claim that ‘the real news’ is being made wherever Kaplan happens to be." In the New York Times, Bernstein suggested: "The dire conclusion about coming anarchy seems overdrawn. … Still, Mr. Kaplan's bold assertions do concentrate the mind. The Coming Anarchy is informed by a rock-solid, unwavering realism and an utter absence of sentimentality." In his New York Times Book Review piece on The Coming Anarchy, Garfinkle declared: "This remarkable man has found himself a large and sometimes powerful audience, and he is determined to convey some very practical, big-picture warnings to the more efficacious members of that audience before they get us all into terrible trouble. We should pay close attention, and hope for a reduced accident rate."

Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus is Kaplan's account of his travels as a British diplomat. He writes of the people he met and places he visited, making comparisons of many. "He writes beautifully," wrote Michael R. Hickok in Aerospace Power Journal, "having a gift for clear prose and a journalist's eye for exact detail—clothing, smells, tastes, and colors—to make the exotic feel familiar to the reader."

In reviewing Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos in the National Review, Brian C. Anderson wrote that Kaplan "argues that America's political leaders, confronted with the stark realities of 21st-century global politics, and entrusted with the safety of those who have elected them, have the moral responsibility to free themselves from what he sees as Judeo-Christian niceties and instead seek guidance from the tough-minded historians and philosophers of pagan antiquity, and those writers and statesmen inspired by them. Kaplan's ‘warrior’ heroes are Homer, Thucydides, Livy, Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus, America's Founders, and Churchill."

Kaplan reflects on how wars should and should not be waged, mirroring the views of American patriots like James Madison, who had a cautious view of human nature and particularly of those in power, as well as contemporary leaders like Winston Churchill. Kaplan draws parallels between a complacent Rome and a contemporary United States.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that the book is "a timely brave-new-world primer almost impossibly rich in quotable maxims" and described Warrior Politics as being an "empowering instant classic."

Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece is an account of Kaplan's trips to the Mediterranean region from the 1970s to the 1990s, as well as a regional history.

In Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, Kaplan provides maps of the regions he studies, which include Mongolia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, El Salvador, Columbia, the Balkans, and the Philippines. The places tend to be hotspots unspoiled by development and tourism, but which have an American military presence. The members of the U.S. military who serve there are advisors who are involved with nation building on a very small scale, but who make a real impact on the citizens of these countries. Their goals include thwarting anti-American sentiment, corruption, and radicalism.

Kaplan profiles unsung heroes, mid-level U.S. military officers who have chosen to assist countries and peoples in ways that are not necessarily standard procedure. One such man is Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Parker Wilhelm, an army officer who turned down a Pentagon job in 2001 to work as an attaché in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. There he guided that country's military to guard against terrorism, improve response to natural disasters, and train peacekeepers. Another officer, retired Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Robert B. Adolph, Jr., who worked for the United Nations in Yemen as a security officer, improved the lot of women by recommending that funds be given to them to buy sewing machines with which they could create start-up businesses, rather than to men, who tended to spend such monies on consumer items. Adolph gave Kaplan advice on what he should and should not do if he was taken captive.

"Skillfully written, engaging, and thought-provoking, Imperial Grunts is strengthened by carefully researched historical preambles," noted Andrew M. Roe in Military Review. "From America's involvement in the Banana Wars to Great Britain's approach to the northwest frontier of India, the book provides historical context to a contemporary challenge faced by a combatant command."

In a review of the book, National Review contributor Victor Davis Hanson said of Kaplan that "the country is lucky to have him. As Imperial Grunts proves, it is time that we acknowledge that Kaplan has evolved into a mixture of the best of William Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, and Ernie Pyle: an American classic who, I pray, will keep safe, as he continues on his lone, dangerous odyssey through the outback of the so-called American empire."

Kaplan continues his study of the contemporary military with Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground. Military Review contributor Prisco R. Hernandez wrote: "Kaplan's new book and his ongoing reporting work well at many levels. Perhaps most importantly, they honestly explain military culture to a general public that is increasingly becoming alienated from its own military forces and those who serve in them."

Kaplan writes of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that the continued presence there is diminishing American capabilities, especially critical in view of the fact that they may be needed in other regions of the world, such as Asia, Africa, and South America, that may become strategically more important. He also notes the ever-increasing role of military contractors and the stresses experienced by U.S. Air Force pilots who remotely fly combat missions with unmanned aircraft. Kaplan reports on the time he spent at sea with units who were charged with protecting sea lanes and transporting supplies in humanitarian efforts.

Kaplan pays tribute to the various types of military units, each with a culture of its own. Most are elite, all-male units and include young marines, eager to fight and protect their country, and skilled sailors with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering, who spend weeks at a time below the surface of the oceans. He writes that they are united by their cause and their belief that they are doing the right thing.

"Kaplan's picture contains a great deal of truth," commented Phillip Carter in the New York Times Book Review. "Fewer than one percent of Americans serve in uniform today. The military's officer and senior enlisted ranks make up a self-selecting, self-reproducing warrior caste that increasingly is socially, geographically and politically insulated from the nation it serves."

A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded: "A relentlessly admiring portrait of our armed services, but without the traditional overlay of patriotic homilies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Aerospace Power Journal, summer, 2001, Michael R. Hickok, review of Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, p. 114.

Armor, September-October, 2006, Timothy S. Smyth, review of Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, p. 51.

Booklist, October 15, 1993, Mary Carroll, review of The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, p. 399; December 1, 2001, Vanessa Bush, review of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, p. 612; December 15, 2003, Gilbert Taylor, review of Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece, p. 723; August, 2005, Roland Green, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 1987.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September, 2001, Colin Woodward, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 64.

Business Week, October 31, 2005, Stan Crock, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 112.

Commentary, February, 1994, Martin Kramer, review of The Arabists, p. 53; April, 1996, Francis Fukuyama, review of The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century, p. 70; November, 1998, David Brooks, review of An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, p. 65; November, 2005, Gabriel Schoenfeld, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 89.

Economist, February 23, 2002, Salvator Mundi, review of Warrior Politics; October 1, 2005, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 79.

First Things, June-July, 2002, John J. Reilly, review of Warrior Politics, p. 66.

Foreign Affairs, November-December, 1993, William B. Quandt, review of The Arabists, p. 175.

Historian, summer, 1994, Peter A. Han, review of The Arabists, p. 752.

Insight on the News, October 19, 1998, Rex Roberts, review of An Empire Wilderness, p. 36.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2000, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 1167; November 1, 2001, review of Warrior Politics, p. 1532; November 1, 2003, review of Mediterranean Winter, p. 1300; June 15, 2005, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 672; July 15, 2007, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground.

Library Journal, October 1, 2000, Zachary T. Irwin, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 124; June 1, 2001, Barbara Hoffert, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 57; February 1, 2002, Thomas A. Karel, review of Warrior Politics, p. 117; February 15, 2004, Sheila Kasperek, review of Mediterranean Winter, p. 150.

Military Review, July-August, 2006, Andrew M. Roe, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 118; May-June, 2008, Prisco R. Hernandez, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, p. 117.

Nation, November 16, 1998, Peter Schrag, review of An Empire Wilderness, p. 42; December 18, 2000, Akash Kapur, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 25.

National Interest, spring, 2001, Thomas Goltz, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 116; spring, 2002, Mark Blitz, review of Warrior Politics, p. 126.

National Review, February 25, 2002, Brian C. Anderson, review of Warrior Politics, p. 46; September 26, 2005, Victor Davis Hanson, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 59.

Naval War College Review, summer, 2006, Zygmunt F. Dembek, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 151.

New Republic, April 15, 1996, Nader Mousavizadeh, review of The Ends of the Earth, p. 32; April 10, 2000, Robert Kagan, review of The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, p. 32.

New Yorker, October 3, 2005, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 101.

New York Review of Books, September 19, 1996, Paul Kennedy, review of The Ends of the Earth, p. 20.

New York Times, February 23, 2000, Richard Bernstein, review of The Ends of the Earth.

New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1996, Michael Ignatieff, review of The Ends of the Earth, p. 7; September 6, 1998, Thurston Clarke, review of An Empire Wilderness, p. 4; March 19, 2000, Adam Garfinkle, review of The Coming Anarchy, p. 27; February 3, 2002, Donald Kagan, review of Warrior Politics, p. 22; September 30, 2007, Phillip Carter, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, p. 23.

Parameters, summer, 2006, Robert M. Cassidy, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 159.

People, June 3, 1996, Thomas Curwen, review of The Ends of the Earth, p. 30.

Policy Review, April, 2002, Steven Menashi, review of Warrior Politics, p. 90.

Publishers Weekly, March 29, 1993, Paul Elie, review of Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History and "PW Interviews: Robert D. Kaplan: This Political Journalist Has a Passion for Adventure," pp. 30-31; August 16, 1993, review of The Arabists, p. 92; August 24, 1998, review of An Empire Wilderness, p. 39; December 20, 1999, review of The Coming Anarchy, p. 63; October 23, 2000, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 65; November 26, 2001, review of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos., p. 50; October 27, 2003, review of Mediterranean Winter, p. 50; June 20, 2005, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 70; July 16, 2007, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, p. 158; May 28, 2008, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 65.

San Bernardino Sun, March 11, 2001, Ophelia Georgiev Roop, review of Eastward to Tartary.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2005, Julie Foster, review of Imperial Grunts, p. M4.

Security Management, January, 2007, Ralph "R.C." Miles, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 94.

Special Warfare, April, 2005, Jeffrey L. Hasler, review of Warrior Politics, p. 43; March-April, 2006, Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., review of Imperial Grunts, p. 26.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 2006, Tom Bissell, "Euphorias of Perrier: The Case against Robert D. Kaplan."

Washington Monthly, October, 1993, Charles William Maynes, review of The Arabists, p. 58; May, 1996, Geraldine Brooks, review of The Ends of the Earth, p. 49; January, 1999, Suzannah Lessard, review of An Empire Wilderness, p. 50; November, 2000, Jacob Heilbrunn, review of Eastward to Tartary, p. 49; September, 2005, Christian Caryl, review of Imperial Grunts, p. 45.

Washington Post, February 26, 1990, James Rupert, review of Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan.

World and I, May, 2002, Paul Hollander, review of Warrior Politics, p. 218.

ONLINE

American Enterprise Online, http://www.taemag.com/ (June 22, 2008), "Live with TAE: Robert Kaplan," interview.

American Morning Web site,http://www.cnn.com/ (February 25, 2004), Soledad O'Brien, interview.

Atlantic Online,http://www.theatlantic.com/ (September 16, 1998), interview; (November 2, 2001), Katie Bacon, "The View from Inside," interview; (June 18, 2003), Elizabeth Shelburne, "The Hard Edge of American Values," interview.

Boston Globe Online, November 6, 2007, Chuck Leddy, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts.

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs Web site,http://www.cceia.org/ (September 17, 2007), Joanne J. Myers, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, Kaplan interview/presentation.

Center for Defense Information Web site, http://www.cdi.org/ (June 22, 2008), Joe Scottile, interview.

Curled Up with a Good Book,http://www.curledup.com/ (June 22, 2008), Dave Roy, review of Imperial Grunts.

Hinton News Online,http://www.hintonnews.net/ (October 17, 2007), David M. Kinchen, review of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts.

Politic Online,http://thepolitic.org/ (February, 17, 2008), David Wheelock, "Flexing Military Muscle: An Interview with Robert Kaplan."

Tales from a Small Planet,http://www.talesmag.com/ (June 22, 2008), Richard B. Parker, review of The Arabists, originally published in the Journal of Palestine Studies.

United States Naval Academy Web site,http://www.usna.edu/ (June 22, 2008), profile.

Washington Post Online,http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 8, 2000), "The Coming Anarchy with Robert Kaplan," forum.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs,http://www.wrmea.com/ (June 22, 2008), Arthur L. Lowrie, review of The Arabists.