Kaplan grew up in Far Rockaway with a Jewish family, son of the late Philip Alexander Kaplan and Phyllis Quasha. Kaplan's father, a truck driver for the New York Daily News, instilled in him a love of history from an early age. He attended the University of Connecticut on a swimming scholarship and earned a B.A. in English (1973).

After graduating Kaplan applied unsuccessfully to several big-city newsrooms. He was a reporter for the Rutland Herald in Vermont before buying a one-way plane ticket to Tunisia. Over the next several years he lived in Israel, where he joined the Israeli army, traveled and reported on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, lived for some time in Portugal and eventually settled down in Athens, Greece, where he met his wife.

Kaplan is not related to journalist Fred Kaplan, with whom he is occasionally confused. He is also sometimes confused with neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan.

He lives with his wife in Massachusetts.

He traveled to Iraq to cover the Iran—Iraq War (1984). He first worked as a freelance foreign correspondent reporting on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but slowly expanded his coverage to all regions ignored in the popular press. His first book, The Wars Behind The Famine (1988) contended the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s was more complex than just drought and Cold War US foreign policy, pointing the blame instead to the collectivization carried out by the Mengistu regime.

Kaplan then went to Afghanistan to write about the guerrilla war against the Soviet Union for Reader's Digest. Two years after writing Surrender or Starve, he wrote and published Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan (1990) in which he recounted his experiences during the Soviet-Afghan War.

Neither of these books sold very well, and Kaplan's third book, Balkan Ghosts, was rejected by several editors before being published in 1993. At first, it did not sell very well. But when the Yugoslav Wars broke out, President Bill Clinton was seen with Kaplan's book tucked under his arm, and White House insiders and aides said the book convinced the President against intervention in Bosnia. Kaplan's book contended that the conflicts in the Balkans were based on ancient hatreds beyond any outside control. Kaplan criticized the administration for using the book to justify non-intervention, but his popularity skyrocketed shortly thereafter along with demand for his reporting. That same year, he also published The Arabists.

Kaplan had not set out to influence U.S. foreign policy, but his work began to find a wide readership in high levels of government. Many felt that his reportage strengthened his arguments, as does his frequently-invoked historical perspective. In 1994 and 1995 he set out to travel from West Africa to Turkey, Central Asia to Iran, and India to Southeast Asia and published a travelogue about his journey in The Ends of the Earth. He then traveled across his home country and North America and wrote An Empire Wilderness, published in 1998.

His article "The Coming Anarchy" published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1994 about how population increase, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world and represent a threat to the developed world was hotly debated and widely translated. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Kaplan one of the "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War era, along with Francis Fukuyama, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, and Yale Professor Paul Kennedy. Kaplan published the article and other essays in a book with the same title in 2000, which also included the controversial article Was Democracy Just A Moment?, and his travels through the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle East at the turn of the millennium were recorded in Eastward to Tartary. Also written in 2000 was another controversial essay entitled "the Dangers of Peace" in which he described an America falling under peacetime's "numbing and corrosive illusion".

Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein notes that Kaplan "conveys a historically informed tragic sense in recognizing humankind's tendency toward a kind of slipshod, gooey, utopian and ultimately dangerous optimism."

Demand for Kaplan's unorthodox analysis became more popular after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. In his book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, published shortly after 9/11, Kaplan offered the opinion that political and business leaders should discard Christian/Jewish morality in public decision-making in favor of a pagan morality focused on the morality of the result rather than the morality of the means. He also published a pure travel book titled Mediterranean Winter.

Kaplan's book Imperial Grunts: The American Military On The Ground, was published in October 2005. In it, Kaplan tells of US Special Forces on the ground across the globe in Colombia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Afghanistan and Iraq. Kaplan predicts that the age of mass infantry warfare is probably over and has said that the conflict in Iraq caught the U.S. Army in between being a "dinosaur" and a "light and lethal force of the future." Kaplan sees large parts of the world where the US military is operating as "injun country" which must be civilized by the same methods used to subdue the American Frontier in the 1800s. He also praises the revival of Confederate military virtue in the US armed forces. Kaplan was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and wrote an often-cited report for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Five Days in Fallujah" about the spring 2004 campaign. In June 2005 he wrote the cover story for the Atlantic Monthly titled "How We Would Fight China", which suggests the inevitability of a Cold War-type situation between the US and China. In October 2006 he wrote "When North Korea Falls" for the same magazine in which he examines the prospect of North Korea's collapse and the effect on the balance of power in Asia in favor of China.

In addition to his journalism, Kaplan has been a consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces, the United States Marines, and the United States Air Force. He has lectured at military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, major universities, the CIA, and business forums, and has appeared on PBS, NPR, C-Span, and Fox News. He is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In 2001 he briefed President Bush. He is the recipient of the 2001 Greenway-Winship Award for Excellence in international reporting. In 2002, he was awarded the United States State Department Distinguished Public Service Award. From 2006 to 2008 Kaplan was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis. He is currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Kaplan's latest book reflects his continuing interest and focus on the US Armed Forces. Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground was published in September 2007 by Random House. He is currently working on a book for the Center for a New American Security on the importance of the Indian Ocean region.[1] The book is titled Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, to be published by Random House in October, 2010.

"Whether Kaplan draws the right conclusions from his travels, he certainly reports authoritatively on conditions in far-flung places. He has been everywhere... Certainly, Kaplan makes fresh observations." -- Rex Roberts

"Kaplan, over his career, appears to have become someone who is too fond of war. "It could be said," he has written, "that occasional small wars and occupations are good for us." He's expanded on this topic: those "occasional wars" are "evidence of humanity." This is because "peaceful times are also superficial times."" -- David Lipsky

"As a piece of travel literature alone, 'The Ends of the Earth' succeeds in providing a tangible sense of the sweaty, smelly reality of many exotic points on the map, with glimpses of their cruelty but also, occasionally, of beauty and human kindness. As a piece of analysis, it is deeply thought-provoking." -- Francis Fukuyama

"If Kaplan is a romantic, he is also a populist and a reactionary." -- Andrew J. Bacevich

"Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument--that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'--makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading." -- Michael Ignatieff

"This is breathtaking. Here is a serious writer in 2005 admiring the Indian wars, which in their brutality brought about the end of an entire American civilization." -- David Rieff}

"Kaplan offers no vision, no strategy, nothing beyond accurate descriptions of the current state of warfare inside the Gap. He is the global war on terror's best sideline reporter, but he's the wrong source to cite on how to run the entire franchise." -- Thomas P. M. Barnett

"The dire conclusion about coming anarchy seems overdrawn... Still, Mr. Kaplan's bold assertions do concentrate the mind. 'The Coming Anarchy' is informed by a rock-solid, unwavering realism and an utter absence of sentimentality." -- Richard Bernstein

"This remarkable man has found himself a large and sometimes powerful audience, and he is determined to convey some very practical, big-picture warnings to the more efficacious members of that audience before they get us all into terrible trouble. We should pay close attention, and hope for a reduced accident rate." -- Adam Garfinkle

"Because he specializes in exploring the San Andreas faults of the modern geopolitical system, his books have had more influence on politicians and policy makers than most travel writing." -- Adam Garfinkle

"Robert Kaplan is a vigorous reporter who thinks on his feet, often invoking historical perspective, but never staying still, always voraciously searching for the outlines of the future in his restless travelogues, as he calls his works." -- Suzannah Lessard

“Kaplan places him where he himself would like to stand, with the realists of this world against the idealists, with the tough-minded pagans of antiquity against the soft-minded strand of Christianity and its offshoots that too often shape modern thought and policy in the West.” - Donald Kagan

"Robert Kaplan set himself up to be the Kipling of the Empire that wasn't." - Thomas Grossman

"Kaplan can't understand trivialities. The triviality here is that nobody except the ultra right-wing jingoists like Kaplan are comparing atrocities by various countries. What honest people are saying seems to be incomprehensible: that we should keep to the elementary moral level of the gospels. We should pay attention to our own crimes and stop committing them. This would be true even if we were killing one person, OK? And it's even more true when we're killing millions of people." - Noam Chomsky

• (pbk.)
• , published September 1988, reprinted November 2003
• (also titled Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan), published February 1990, reprinted November 2001
• , published February 1993, reprinted March 1994
• , published September 1993
• , published February 1996, republished January 2000
• , published August 1998
• , published January 2000
• , published November 2000
• , published December 2001
• , published February 2004
• , published September 2005
• , published September 2007

Contributions to Other Editions

• , published April 2000 (Introduction, Modern Library 1400061334Edition)
• , published September 2002 (Contributor)
• , published April 2003 (Introduction, Modern Library Edition)