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Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

Robert D. Kaplan

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Robert D. Kaplan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 23
Geopolitician
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Robert David Kaplan
States
Petri
Weakening
Dish
Turmoil
Fertile
Dishes
Wherever
Terrorism

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It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.
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What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.
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Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.
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Given the level of anti-Americanism in the world, given the level of frustration with the United States throughout the Muslim world, you've got a homegrown attack or you have a nuclear explosion in the air that is not a test somewhere. Those are still the biggest threats out there.
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If you travel around America you see different sections of highways donated by this or that person, and that's a slow beginning of what may end up being a situation common in the Third World: some sections of highways in wealthy areas are beautifully maintained and other parts are just dirt-strewn potholes.
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A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.
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Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.
Robert D. Kaplan
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It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.
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It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.
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What Americans cant face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.
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We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.
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What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?
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The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.
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When you talk about aiding this country against that country or about fighting terrorism, when you actually take that decision and strip it down, it always comes down to one person in the field giving specialized training to somebody else in the field.
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Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.
Robert D. Kaplan
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The closer one gets to either the eastern or the southern fringe of the German-speaking world-the closer one gets, in other words, to the threatening and more numerous Slavs-the more insecure and dangerous nationalism becomes.
Robert D. Kaplan
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If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.
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Prostitution, black marketeering, and informing on ones neighbors and friends all had such a deep-rooted tradition in Romania that there was a charming naturalness and innocence about it.
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