The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

Description

In the major lead essay, recently released by the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, Robert D. Kaplan lays out a blueprint of the world's changing power politics that recalls Marco Polo's decades-long trek from Venice to China in the late thirteenth century. As Europe fractures from changes in culture and migration, Eurasia coheres into a single conflict system. China is constructing a land bridge to Europe. Iran and India are trying to link the oil fields of Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. America's ability to influence the power balance in Eurasia is declining. This is Kaplan's first collection of essays since his classic The Coming Anarchy was published in 2000. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience as a foreign correspondent and military embed for The Atlantic, as well as encounters with preeminent realist thinkers, Kaplan outlines the timeless principles that should shape America's role in a turbulent world- a respect for the limits of Western-style democracy; a delineation between American interests and American values; an awareness of the psychological toll of warfare; a projection of power via a

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of seventeen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a senior advisor at Eurasia Group, and a member of the U.S. Navy's Executive Panel. For three decades his work has appeared in The Atlantic. He held the national security chair at the United States Naval Academy and was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world's "Top 100 Global Thinkers.

"An eclectic collection of elegant and humane essays . . . Above all there is his fascination with the decisive impact of geography on the calculations, ambitions and illusions of statesmen and societies. . . . [A] prophecy from an observer with a depressingly accurate record of predictions. When it comes to curbing our enthusiasms, Kaplan's achievement is to throw so much shade with so much verve."--Bret Stephens, The New York Times Book Review "Thoughtful, unsettling, but not apocalyptic analyses of world affairs flow steadily off the presses, and this is a superior example. . . . Presented with enough verve and insight to tempt readers to set it aside to reread in a few years."--Kirkus Review (starred review) "Kaplan is a kind of expeditionary foreign-policy intellectual who does not allow his sympathies to cloud his judgment. . . . It is a sign of how very unusual a journalist Robert Kaplan is that after more than three decades covering civil wars and collapsing states and American interventions he has emerged not only as an eloquent defender of foreign-policy realism but as a grand strategist to whom the Pentagon turns for a tour d'horizon. . . . Whether or not one embraces it, tragic realism offers one lesson that Americans, and above all the idealistically inclined, need to learn, and to re-learn: humility."--The Wall Street Journal "An astute, powerfully stated, and bracing presentation."--Booklist "This volume compiles sixteen major essays on America's foreign policy from national security commentator Kaplan. . . . An overview of thoughtful, multilayered positions and perspectives evolving through changing circumstances."--Publishers Weekly "These essays constitute a truly pathbreaking, brilliant synthesis and analysis of geographic, political, technological, and economic trends with far-reaching consequences. The Return of Marco Polo's World is another work by Robert D. Kaplan that will be regarded as a classic."--General David Petraeus (U.S. Army, Ret.) "When it comes to geopolitics and the analysis of world affairs, Robert D. Kaplan is the best in the business. These essays are not only astonishing in their breadth, depth, and range but beautifully crafted and accessible."--John Bew, professor, the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and author of Realpolitik: A History and Castlereagh: A Life "A characteristically thoughtful and provocative collection of essays from Robert D. Kaplan, born of his own Marco Polo-like wanderings and rich grasp of history . . . Elegant and compelling, these prescient pieces are a valuable guide to the endlessly complicated geopolitics of Eurasia, and what it all means for Americans in the decades ahead."--Ambassador William J. Burns, president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former deputy secretary of state "Robert D. Kaplan has long been one of the most unrelenting realistic commentators on the rough, mean, conflictual world disorder that has evolved since the Cold War. In these essays he provides a compelling antidote to the facile optimists in the ethnocentric Western intelligentsia. Read it with a stiff drink in hand, but be ready to be excited."--Richard K. Betts, director, the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University