Robert D. Kaplan Quotes

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth. Security issue or no security issue, there would need to be a focus on it.

The other aspect is that you become much more aware of the structural problems that pertain to that continent. You feel the need to act to try and solve them.

In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

Mexico has not achieved the advances that the population demands or deserves.

Famine is about so much more than food: it is about a famine of education, democracy, health, transport, and so many other items. The food famine becomes a symptom of that vast failure.

By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years.

Well, as a general remark, I would say that I was discouraged by the physical and economic conditions in continental Europe after the war.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

It's so hard to write about countries like Haiti because there's truths behind the misperceptions people have. But there's so much more. There are multiple truths.

Obama might as well be president of Turkey or Brazil; it does not matter. It's the system that is absolutely flawed, where 25 or 35 or 50 people make multi, multi-billions on building Olympic structures while people live in Barbados and have no roads or clean drinking water. There's something pretty inequitable there.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

Shaped like Texas, but twice as big, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. It exports almost nothing - mostly just cotton, gold and livestock - and doesn't have enough money to import much of anything, either.

It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.

Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential - and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed.

I am concerned about Africa. You can’t have 600 million people of one identifiable ethnicity going backwards and the rest of the world going forwards.

This is a third world environment.

Halve the income of the country and you double the risk of civil war.

What starts in the Middle East never stays in the Middle East..

I saw exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. Such has been the effect of slavery.

I think a lot of Americans have never been all that hungry. They've never had war on their shore, and they've never suffered the way other cultures have suffered. I'm not saying we should go suffer. Not at all. I'm saying we should be more aware of how other cultures exist.

Africa is the continent that the rest of the world prefers not to think about.

Supplying food to sub-Saharan African countries is made very complex because of a lack of infrastructure.