Events Calendar

On Tuesday, September 10, from 5:30 – 7:00 pm, the Strauss Center for International Security and Law will join the Clements Center for National Security in hosting Robert D. Kaplan. Not since the end of the Cold War has the world faced such danger. War rages in Europe and the Middle East. The U.S. and a rising China face off across the Taiwan Strait. American policy has struggled to deter or manage these conflicts and struggles to grasp the tumultuous internal dynamics of societies in the Mideast and “Global South.”

On September 10, Robert D. Kaplan, bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign policy, will discuss how our leaders can come to grips with a world seemingly in disarray. Kaplan’s most recent book, The Loom of Time, examines the history and geopolitics of the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia. With the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have endeavored to maintain stability in the face of power struggles and arbitrary borders drawn by departing imperial rulers. In The Loom of Time, Kaplan makes the case for historically informed foreign-policy as an approach to the Greater Middle East.

Light refreshments will be provided. Paid visitor parking is available at the Manor Garage, Brazos Garage, and the San Jacinto Garage. Email Susan Crane at scrane@austin.utexas.edu with questions.

Biography: Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty-two books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, Adriatic, The Good American, The Coming Anarchy, Balkan Ghosts, Asia’s Cauldron, and The Revenge of Geography. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic.

A senior adviser at Eurasia Group, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of both the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has called Kaplan among the four “most widely read” authors defining the post-Cold War (along with Stanford Professor Francis Fukuyama, Yale Professor Paul Kennedy, and the late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington). Kaplan’s article, “The Coming Anarchy,” published in the February, 1994 Atlantic Monthly, about how population rise, ethnic and sectarian strife, disease, urbanization, and resource depletion is undermining the political fabric of the planet, was hotly debated in foreign-language translations around the world. So was his December, 1997 Atlantic cover story, “Was Democracy Just A Moment?” That piece argued that the democracy now spreading around the world would not necessarily lead to more stability. According to U. S. News & World Report, “President Clinton was so impressed with Kaplan, he ordered an interagency study of these issues, and it agreed with Kaplan’s conclusions.”

In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first American writer to warn in print about a future war in the Balkans. Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of t