Is America Fated to Lead?

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. That is because to know a country is in large part to know its geography, the prism through which Kaplan has viewed the world since his earliest forays in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan. More expansively, Kaplan elevated the nascent field of “sociography”, pointing to the importance of integrating sociology and economics into one's analysis. But geography is foundational: it explains these other disciplines much more than the reverse.