In a career spanning three decades and all continents, save perhaps Antarctica, Robert D. Kaplan has become our American Odysseus, forever ranging, it seems, across the oceans, penetrating far and legendary lands, collecting stories of warriors, priests, and princes that are passed on to eager listeners. Like the wily king of Ithaca, Kaplan, too, has finally come home, turning his critical eye toward his native land. After sixteen books limning nearly every global security issue of importance, Kaplan now asks his American readers to turn inward, to look carefully at their own country in order to understand why they do what they do abroad.

Those who have read Kaplan know that geography above all shapes his worldview. Unlike those who begin with ideology as the driving force in American history, such as Robert Kagan, in his Dangerous Nation (2006), or those who, like Walter Russell Mead in Special Providence (2002), typologize American foreign policy persuasions, for Kaplan it all begins with the land. For some, that will smack of old-fashioned geographical determinism, but in a world besotted with imagined communities and the chimera of ever-expanding globalization, the irreducible element of geography is a needed corrective.

Those who have read Kaplan know that geography above all shapes his worldview.

A brisk, compact book, Earning the Rockiesmay begin with boyhood lessons about the country taught by Kaplan’s biological father, but it is Kaplan’s intellectual progenitors who truly impart to him the wisdom of the American