Conclusion: The Future of the United States 219"INJUN COUNTRY"
One highly regarded military analyst stepped forward to make the
connections between the "Indian wars" and what he considered
the country's bright imperialist past and future. Robert D. Kaplan,
in his 2005 book Imperial Grunts, presented several case studies
that he considered highly successful operations: Ye men, Colom
bia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, in addition to ongoing complex
projects in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq.2 While
US citizens and many of their elected representatives called for end
ing the US military interventions they knew about-including Iraq
and Afghanistan-Kaplan hailed protracted counterinsurgencies in
Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific. He
presented a guide for the US controlling those areas of the world
based on its having achieved continental dominance in North Amer
ica by means of counterinsurgency and employing total and unlim
ited war.
Kaplan, a meticulous researcher and influential writer born in
1952 in New York City, wrote for major newspapers and magazines
before serving as "chief geopolitical strategist" for the private se
curity think tank Stratfor. Among other prestigious posts, he has
been a senior fe llow at the Center for a New American Security
in Washington, DC, and a member of the Defense Policy Board, a
federal advisory committee to the US Department of Defense. In
2orr, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's
"top roo global thinkers." Author of numerous best-selling books,
including Balkan Ghosts and Surrender or Starve, Kaplan became
one of the principal intellectual boosters for US power in the world
through the tried-and-true "American way of war." This is the way
of war dating to the British-colonial period that military historian
John Grenier called a combination of "unlimited war and irregular
war," a military tradition "that accepted, legitimized, and encour
aged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages
and agricultural resources ... in shockingly violent campaigns to
achieve their goals of conquest."3
Kaplan sums up his thesis in the prologue to Imperial Grunts,
which he subtitles "Injun Country":