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

A concise and deeply moving portrait of the American landscape from coast to coast, "Earning the Rockies" offers a detailed and pragmatic framework for our foreign policy by examining the specific geography from which American power springs.
As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father s evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In "Earning the Rockies," Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light not just a story of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain to understand how settling the West shaped our national character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan lays bare the roots of American greatness the fact that we are a nation, empire, and continent all at once and how we must reexamine those roots, and understand our geography, in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes. "Earning the Rockies "is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope."