Robert D. Kaplan is one of our country’s most important geopolitical thinkers. His always incisive writings blend knowledge of geography, history, and usually healthy doses of Bismarckian realism. But in a new article in Foreign Policy, Kaplan strays from realism to embrace, of all things, Wilsonianism, or at least Kaplan’s version of Wilsonianism.

Kaplan faults Trump for viewing the Earth as divided by regions, but that is how all great geographers and statesmen ...  viewed (and view) the world.
Kaplan does this as part of his criticism of President Trump’s approach to our European allies who Kaplan fears are “becoming weaker and more divided, threatened by Russia to the east and political turmoil in response to migration from the Middle East and Africa to the south.” And, according to Kaplan, its all Trump’s fault because he is “ahistorical,” “post-literate,” and doesn’t care about defending Europe anymore. With all due respect to Kaplan, Trump, like many of his more “literate” predecessors, merely wants the nations of Europe to do more to defend themselves.
Kaplan, who has great respect for geography, criticizes Trump for being too wedded to geography and too “unappreciative of the postwar saga of the West.” Kaplan derides Trump for knowing nothing about the Atlantic Charter, which ironically was full of idealism but short on realism.
Kaplan’s admiration for Wilsonianism rests on the idea that the more democratic countries there are in key regions of the world, the more secure the United States will be. But Kaplan has seen what harm unbounded Wilsonianism can do to international stability and order, and he wrote about it brilliantly in his book The Tragic Mind. Kaplan apologized in that book for being a cheerleader for the Iraq War, which ended the reign of a terrible dictator but let loose the horrors of anarchy.
Kaplan accuses Trump of imagining that the United States can be made secure by hemispheric defense (Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada as the 51st state, ...