To the minders of the literary establishment, he peddles ‘boneheaded nonsense’ (David Rieff in The New Republic) or takes ‘intellectual shortcuts’ (David Lipsky in the New York Times Review of Books), yet Robert D Kaplan remains one of the most-widely read commentators of present times. His often polarising work – dismissed as ‘cheap pessimism’ by most in academia – has been mandatory reading for US foreign policy mandarins of Republican and Democrat administrations alike.
Mr Kaplan (66) attained sage-like status for predicting and documenting the rise of religious fundamentalism in Central Asia and for warning about its capacity to redefine warfare, long before the clash of civilisations became a global concern somewhere in 1996.