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

By Robert D. Kaplan

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780399588235

Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of nineteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including 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 US Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine has twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

Book preview

II

A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

H e was a Homer in his way, recalling as if by memory with his eyes half closed a sacred past. He captured nation-state America at dead center: from his vantage point of World War II looking back a hundred years to the settlement of the American West. He did it with his own language, a true American idiom: consciously colorful, without being purple, like a good yarn told around a campfire by the last free men below the Tetons, in the illimitable silence of the mountain night, as he had once put it. ¹ Both the Left and Right at various moments would hate Bernard DeVoto, but within his rugged, twangy, unapologetic prose, buttressed by research in the Harvard library and the experience of a Utah boyhood, there is the sense in his writing that this is how it really was.

My father’s youthful memories, oases in the midst of his sad and humiliating adulthood, encouraged me to discover the geographical wonders of my own country: one of the handful of inspirations I could salvage from a dreary youth. Bernard DeVoto was the one who taught me how to think about those geographical wonders. And by helping me to understand the American experience as a function of geography, DeVoto would help me understand America’s function in the wider world. I discovered DeVoto by accident in a bookstore in Boston in the early 1990s, after which I was immediately swept up in the writer’s narrative flourish that was in keeping with my father’s own enthusiasm, and own vision, about the American West. DeVoto became a pivotal figure for the way I look at America, and by extension the world. He, more so than other writers, taught me that America’s first empire was not in the Caribbean or more famously in the Philippines, but earlier, in the American West itself. And that imperial legacy spoke about patience and limits, rather than just about expansion.

Because DeVoto is so critical to the way I see the American continent and its fate in relation to the rest of the globe in the twenty-first century, it is necessary that I describe his work in some detail. Rereading his work constituted preparation, albeit indirect, for this final journey: from one seaboard to the other.

—

BERNARD AUGUSTINE DEVOTO, born in Ogden, Utah, in 1897, studied at the University of Utah and Harvard and later became a columnist for Harper’s for twenty years, until his death in 1955. DeVoto was the lyrical historian of westward expansion, devoting his literary life to the subject, especially during the darkest days of the 1940s when he employed the geopolitics of Manifest Destiny as a means to tell Americans how not to despair. He was undoubtedly a romantic, not in the way of a booster or propagandist, but rather as an area expert, somewhat in the erudite and sensuous manner of a Patrick Leigh Fermor or Lawrence Durrell. DeVoto demonstrated that the Rockies are deserving of the same exquisite, love-of-subject treatment as regions like the Balkans and Central Europe. In his classic The Year of Decision: 1846, published in 1942, DeVoto has a chapter, "Anabasis in Homespun, about the trek of the First Missouri Mounted Volunteers across 3,500 miles of prairie, desert, and mountain from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the Rio Grande by way of Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the Mexican War. It is a trek that he ever so faintly compares to the march up of Xenophon’s army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries from Mesopotamia across Anatolia and back to Greece 2,400 years ago. In both ancient Greece and nineteenth-century America, democracy is not merely some theoretical or philosophical construct but the organic reaction to an epic ordeal that is argued about by individual soldiers each night under the moon. This is Greek classical studies transported to the American frontier, written, as Wallace Stegner once remarked about his friend, with gusto and a sense of participation" in history.²

DeVoto wrote about westward expansion less than a century after it had actually transpired—at a time when the East Coast elite still focused on its own country to a degree it doesn’t anymore. Thus, he was not consigned to being a mere regional writer, but was a historian of the first rank. As Stegner says, DeVoto’s The Year of Decision: 1846 was a declaration of national unity in time of crisis, completed just as the tide was turning at the Battle of Midway.³ DeVoto intuited deep in his bones, perhaps better than anyone else before or since, that the conquest of the Great Plains and the Rockies had been a necessary prelude in order to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese. And yet at the same time, his aversion to triumphalism allows him to approvingly quote Ralph Waldo Emerson on the tragedy of the Mexican War: The United States will conquer Mexico but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn.⁴ DeVoto, while celebrating the American expansionist impulse, throughout his narratives dependably recognizes the moral ambiguity of it.

DeVoto never once left the soil of North America. As a historian, he wrote, I have interested myself in the growth among the American people of the feeling that they were properly a single nation between two oceans; in the development of what I have called the continental mind.⁵ This made him, above all, a man of maps. He spread them on the floor of our living room, remembers the historian and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen, and we crawled from map to map, with Benny talking, until our knees were sore and our minds enlarged with names like Ogallala, Little Blue, Three Forks, Elephant Butte, the country of the Mandans, the Arikaras, and the Blackfeet.⁶ Yet rather than being an American nativist who was uninterested in the rest of the world, DeVoto, according to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was a radical idealist. Nothing does greater credit to DeVoto’s intelligence, Schlesinger writes, than the clarity with which he saw the meaning of fascism. His character and concerns—his absorbing interest in the American past, his refusal ever to travel outside the American continent, his impatience with European examples and analogies—might well have predisposed him toward isolationism. But he had no doubt from the start either about American stakes in the war or about American responsibilities to the world.⁷

Schlesinger explains, In that eerie twilight period between the invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor, DeVoto never faltered in the trenchancy of his perceptions. ‘What ought they to say?’ DeVoto wrote of the presidential candidates in November 1940 [thirteen months before Pearl Harbor]. ‘Simple, elementary, readily understandable things….Just that the world is on fire. That America will be burned up unless you come awake and do something.’ ⁸

And so it was that isolationists across America accused DeVoto of hysteria.⁹

Despite his love for the continental interior, DeVoto, Stegner adds, "was almost offended by how safe that same interior felt, how snug and secure behind their lawns and banks of flowers the Americans of the heartland were, even as Europe was suffering the onslaught of barbarians; so much so that DeVoto warned the Middle West about its smugness and isolationism. These warnings came in the course of a summer 1940 road trip across the United States, remembered fondly by DeVoto’s traveling companion, the young Schlesinger, fresh from a postgraduate year at the University of Cambridge in England. It was DeVoto who mentored Schlesinger and taught him how the geography of the American West freighted the United States with a precise and unprecedented international destiny. DeVoto saw dynamic, westering America, in Schlesinger’s words, as the redeemer, spreading its free institutions to less fortunate peoples."¹⁰ DeVoto was a humanitarian interventionist without the need of any moral philosophy. And he came to that conclusion by observing and meditating upon the continental landscape. He was foremost a listener. The soil of the American West taught him all he needed to know.

DeVoto was not a cloistered scholar, writes the late Stephen E. Ambrose. He got out on the trail, by foot, on horseback, and by canoe. He traveled where his characters had gone, seeing what they saw, listening to what they had said, and arguing for the conservation of their world.¹¹ DeVoto was an environmentalist before his time, out of a deep love of the American past more than out of an aesthetic love of the planet. For DeVoto this historical landscape of the West was liberating, for it was westward expansion into the Great Plains that defeated slavery (because the water-starved Great American Desert could not support a cotton culture). How sad it is that this man, this winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award—the very epitome of a liberal internationalist and environmentalist—who in his last years struck up a rich and penetrating friendship with Adlai Stevenson, even as he waged intellectual war against J. Edgar Hoover and the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, is, incredible as it may seem now, no longer read. Alas, in post–Vietnam War academic circles, the tendency to reduce American history to the crimes of slavery and genocide has simply left no room for DeVoto’s vivid, solidly researched, full-bodied re-creation of the nineteenth-century American West.

Just as my father was usefully behind the times, so was DeVoto.

—

DEVOTO BEGINS HIS GREATEST and most essential book, The Year of Decision: 1846, with a quote from Henry David Thoreau: Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free….I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.¹²

Oregon, in this context, refers to the Oregon Territory, which includes the present-day states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. To walk in that direction, in the sense that both DeVoto and Thoreau meant it, was not to turn inward and parochial, the way it might be perceived today, but to walk toward progress and freedom and away from the hatreds and constraints of the Old World: 1846 was the year that put America firmly on that path. It was the year when a one-term president, James Knox Polk, basically conceived and connived the doubling of the size of the United States, bringing into the fold of the Union the lands lying more or less west of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase: the Oregon Territory, California, Texas, and New Mexico, as they were then known, thus conquering the Great American

Reviews for Earning the Rockies

[streamsong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Conservative historian Robert Kaplan roadtripped across America to demonstrate the regionality of our history and geography, which both divide and unite the citizens of the US. He based his meditations on what he could observe, his experience and knowledge of the history of the regions, and overheard conversations in rest stops and cafes to understand what the so-called average person living in the area was discussing.

I came away with an appreciation that the modern wealth of the country as shown by dollars, new ideas and even fine arts, is often concentrated in the cities along either ocean. However, even this wealth has been created by the vast farmlands, rivers and other natural resources, and secondarily the manufacturing centers that are now often in decline. It is this broad basis of geographical richness that has made the US the nation what it is – and now many of the heartland's fundamental areas of wealth-creation are the very geography and people that are unrecognized by the urban dwellers.

I also enjoyed reading a viewpoint that often 'leaned right' as I unabashedly lean left.

“There are miles of ribboned ground bearing corn and soybeans, punctuated by wide, circular metal silos. The native grasses and black earth alleviate the loneliness of the landscape, reminding you just how wealthy it is. Because this production and fecundity will go on for hundreds and hundreds of mile, both north and south and east and west, it constitutes the basis of continental wealth that, in turn, permits an approach to the world so ambitious – marked as it is every few decades by an epic, bloody disaster—that the human and material costs are easily absorbed by the very wealth and sheer size of the land that began it in the first place. It is these Illinois cornfields that ultimately allow elites in Washington to contemplate action even as others my suffer or be sustained by the consequences.” p 76.

“Meanwhile, our expanding urban areas are becoming global city-states, with increasingly dense and meaningful connections with the outside world. But the weakness of global culture is that, having psychologically disconnected itself from any specific homeland, it has no terrain to defend or fight for,and therefore no anchoring beliefs beyond the latest fashion or media craze. So we unravel into the world. And the more disconnected we become from our territorial roots- the more urbanized and globalized we become- the greater the danger of artificially reconstructing American identity in more severe and ideological form, so that we risk radicalization at home.” 176-177

It was a hard book for me to read, as Kaplan's style can be rather ponderous, and for me it was slow-going. Nevertheless, I found myself jotting down many quotes from the book.

Here are a couple more:

“The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes – slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants… History, though, can also be the story of ideas – and the more useful the idea, the greater the history. America’s was an anti-idea: philosophers generally know less than the masses, which, left alone to seek their own interests, often know best. Such democratic populism tempts narrow-mindedness, cruelty, and barbarism, and it cannot be successfully applied everywhere, even if Americans…believe otherwise.” (p. 42-43)


“And what form does that conquest take now? It takes the form of trying to export our civic religion: representative democracy, human rights, rule of law, and so forth. But this assumes that no history anywhere matters except our own. It assumes that the very different historical experience of other peoples around the globe and the conclusions that they draw from them do not count. While democracy, human rights and the rest are self-evidently good, that doe not mean other peoples will arrive at them-or even variations of them- through the processes we demand. And this is to say nothing of the fact that such tenets as democracy and human rights are themselves not always in harmony:for in a number of places, minority rights are better protected by monarchies and dictatorships than by tyrannies of the majority or by outright chaos-which ill-conceived experiments in democracy often bring about.” p171

I read this as part of the PBS/NYT Now Read This Book Club.

[brangwinn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a history and geography fan, I really enjoyed this book. I hadn’t thought about how the rivers in the US have helped to strengthen the country while the rivers in the USSR divided the country. I found the concept that if the US had been settled from the west to the east, our country might have different strengths and values.

[ltietz-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have always taken great pleasure in reading Robert Kaplan’s books, and this one was no exception. Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World is a look at American society through an east to west road trip. I enjoyed the thought-provoking insights Kaplan provides by weaving together geography, history, and socio-economics.

[diana_long_thomas · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Book received from NetGalley.

This was a good but not great read for me. I loved how the author talked about his father and how his father ended up being on of the reasons why Kaplan got the traveling bug. However, when he was explaining the books his father read and had him read and why they were also a part of it, the storytelling seemed to go off on a bit of a tangent and was a bit confusing for me. The best part of the book was Kaplan discussing parts of the United States that I haven't been to yet and are on my "bucket travel list", it made me want to buy a ticket and fly out so I could see the places and things he mentioned.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A rare 5. One of the best non-fiction and Kaplan books I have read and I've read them all. At once familiar and enlightening there were a number of those, yeah, that's exactly what I mean moiments and also a new and more positive view of the great unwashed in the "Heartland". This is why I read.

[unkletom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are memoirs of road trips that are guaranteed to stand the test of time; Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels with Charlie’, Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, Francis Parkman’s ‘The Oregon Trail’, and Ernesto Guevara’s ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ to name just a few. Robert D. Kaplan’s latest book describing his journey through the heartland of the United States in 2015 just as the primary season for the recent election was getting under way is probably not one of those. But in its own way, ‘Earning the Rockies: American Ground and the Fate of Empire’ is just as important a book. Kaplan took his trip during a defining moment in American history and through keen observations provided invaluable insights into the story behind the most mindboggling political upset in American history.

Kaplan, inspired by his father’s tales of travel and the books of Harpers’ columnist Bernard DeVoto (Don’t worry. I hadn’t heard of him before either.), set out to find America by retracing a journey he took as a young man in 1970. This time, he sought to gain an understanding of how geography shapes America and makes us Americans who we are. In doing so, he linked his journey westward with that of America’s journey west over the centuries. Although ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ are terms often heard in conjunction with discussions about f imperialism, Kaplan holds that the rigors of westward migration and the land itself forged and molded those who challenged the frontier and continue to shape and define them today.

Kaplan’s journey began in the spring of 2015, just as the Republican primary with its vast herd of presidential wannabes was getting started. His strategy included spending a good deal of time in in restaurants and coffee shops, just listening to the conversations that swirled around him. His logic was that while people may adopt a pose when speaking with strangers in general and journalists in particular, they speak most openly when in the company of friends and family in a non-threatening environment. One thing that surprised him was that although the televisions were constantly blaring political and international news, these were seldom the topic of conversations. Talk was more likely to be about ‘work, family, health and sheer economic survival’. What was happening on the TV was just noise to them. The real drama was playing out right there in the room with them. As Kaplan pointed out, “Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical…Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America. People here are too busy making money — an extension of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.”

Perhaps even more than what he heard, Kaplan was deeply affected by what he saw as he crossed the country. Many cities and towns were dying. In cities like Wheeling, West Virginia, and even Springfield, the capitol if Illinois, one was more likely to encounter empty streets and boarded up shops than indications of a healthy economy. Cities that once housed a vibrant middle class now have only a struggling working class that is teetering on the brink of poverty. Automation and globalization have gutted the mining and manufacturing industries that many communities relied on for their economic existence. Kaplan also attributed this decline to what he called the growth of ‘flashy and sprawling city-states, often anchored to great universities’ such as Chicago, Austin, or Raleigh-Durham with its Research Triangle. These urban centers offered jobs and opportunities for young people and stripped places like Wheeling of any chance that an ambitious future generation will stay and turn things around.

“I will not see very much of the middle class in my journey at all. This thing that the politicians love to talk about has already slipped from our grasp. I will encounter elegant people in designer restaurants and many, many others whose appearance indicates they have in some important ways just given up — even as they are everywhere unfailingly polite and have not, contrary to their appearance and my first impressions of them, lost their self-respect. The populist impulses apparent in the presidential campaign following my journey in early 2015 obviously emanate from the instability of their economic situation, suggesting the anger that resides just beneath the surface of their politeness."

And this, more than anything else, is the crux of the issue when it comes to Donald Trump. Per Kaplan, "Trump represents a sort of antipolitics: a primal scream against the political elite for not connecting with people on the ground, and for insufficiently improving their lives. People trapped in their own worries as life becomes ever more complex, are simply alienated. And that alienation is registered in a taste for populist politicians." What is the value of preaching diversity to a community that has none, or trade deals to a town whose local market has closed because it couldn’t compete with a Wal-Mart thirty miles away? Much of the world that these people yearn for is gone and they know it isn’t coming back. But still if a politician comes to their town and says “I here you, and I am with you,” don’t you think that they will be tempted to believe in him, even if deep down they know better?

For better or worse, the genie of globalism is out of the bottle. While there are many benefits to a global economy, there are also areas of concern.
“ the weakness of global culture is that, having psychologically disconnected itself from any specific homeland, it has no terrain to defend or to fight for, and therefore no anchoring beliefs beyond the latest fashion or media craze. And so we unravel into the world. And the more disconnected we become from our territorial roots, the greater the danger of artificially restructuring American in more severe and ideological form, so that we risk radicalization at home. "

Bottom line: Of all the books And articles that I have read recently in hopes of gaining an understanding of what the hell happened in November, this comes closest to giving me an answer. No, we are not a nation of racist misogynists. What we are is a nation of people who once in a while would like to believe that the powers that be are listening to us. If we believe that all politicians lie, then why not vote for the one whose lies tell us what we want to hear? Perhaps, as the saying goes, you really can fool all of the people some of the time.

*Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.

FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.