Robert D. Kaplan T HE best thing about winter is that I can go cross-country skiing from my front door. I live in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the sharp, determined lines of steeples and old houses manifest the tight certainties and revealed truths of the early settlers. The landscape is austere, and makes me long for the sensuousness of southern Europe, where I used to live. In fact, what I like about skiing here is that the perfection of the view concentrates my mind on the more troubled and passionate places on which I report.
Military history pierces the philosophical fog that often surrounds the other humanities.
A correspondent who has long experience reporting from dimly understood regions of the world reports from his dimly understood native land, and his excursions expose the borderless forces that are pushing America into its next life. The global triumph of democracy was to be the glorious climax of the American Century. The disturbing freshness of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. At Fort Leavenworth, where the Army trains its top brass, captains and colonels study high-tech warfare, read the classics, and ponder what will be left to defend in a transnational world. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land.