Robert D. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm. He is the author of 14 books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, the most recent of which is The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for over a quarter-century. In 2011 and 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named him among the world's "100 Top Global Thinkers."

Since 2008, he has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC. From 2009 to 2011, he served under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls Kaplan one of the four "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War along with Johns Hopkins professor Francis Fukuyama, the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, and Yale professor Paul Kennedy. 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 the "best books" of 1993. The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth, An Empire Wilderness, Eastward to Tartary, and Warrior Politics were all chosen by The New York Times as notable books of the year. An Empire Wilderness was chosen by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1998. The Wall Street Journal named The Arabists one of the best five books written about America's historical involvement in the Middle East.

A provocative essayist, Kaplan wrote about how increases in population, urbanization, and resource depletion were undermining governments in his hotly debated February 1994 Atlantic Monthly article "The Coming Anarchy." His December 1997 Atlantic cover story "Was Democracy Just a Moment?", which argued that the democracy now spreading around the world would not necessarily lead to more stability, also sparked international debate. According to US 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."

Besides The Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan's essays have appeared on the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, as well as in all the major foreign affairs journals. He has been a consultant to the US Army's Special Forces Regiment, the US Air Force, and the US Marines. He has lectured at military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, major universities, and global business forums. Kaplan has delivered the Secretary of State's Open Forum Lecture at the US State Department and has reported from over 100 countries. Two of his earlier books, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, have been reissued, so that all this books are in print.

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