Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. 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. He was a member of 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.

An incisive portrait of the American landscape that shows how geography continues to determine America s role in the world

Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times    There is more insight here into the Age of Trump than in bushels of political-horse-race journalism. The New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice)

At a time when there is little consensus about who we are and what we should be doing with our power overseas, a return to the elemental truths of the American landscape is urgently needed. In Earning the Rockies, New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan undertakes a cross-country journey, traversing a rich and varied landscape that still remains the primary source of American power. Traveling west, in the same direction as the pioneers, Kaplan witnesses both prosperity and decline, and reexamines the history of westward expansion in a new light: as a story not just of genocide and individualism but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain. Concluding at the edge of the Pacific Ocean with a gripping description of an anarchic world, Earning the Rockies shows how America s foreign policy response ought to be rooted in its own geographical situation.

Praise for Earning the Rockies

Unflinchingly honest . . . a lens-changing vision of America s role in the world . . . a jewel of a book that lights the path ahead. Secretary of Defense James Mattis

A sui generis writer . . . America s East Coast establishment has only one Robert Kaplan, someone as fluently knowledgeable about the Balkans, Iraq, Central Asia and West Africa as he is about Ohio and Wyoming. Financial Times

Kaplan has pursued stories in places as remote as Yemen and Outer Mongolia. In Earning the Rockies, he visits a place almost as remote to many Americans: these United States. . . . The author s point is a good one: America is formed, in part, by a geographic setting that is both sanctuary and watchtower. The Wall Street Journal 

A brilliant reminder of the impact of America s geography on its strategy. . . . Kaplan s latest contribution should be required reading. Henry A. Kissinger

A text both evocative and provocative for readers who like to think  In his final sections, Kaplan discusses in scholarly but accessible detail the significant role that America has played and must play in this shuddering world. Kirkus Reviews

As a boy, Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America. Now he undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. In his moving meditations, Kaplan shows how we must understand our geography in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes.