Showing results by author "Fred Kaplan" in All Categories

This is a common critique of Obama’s foreign policy: that he evades hard decisions, that he is allergic to military force if it risks American casualties or escalation, that there is often a mismatch between his words and his deeds. “This is a pattern,” one retired four-star general said. “He issues stern warnings, then does nothing. It damages American credibility.”Is the charge true?

Four months into his presidency, at a summit in Prague, Barack Obama pledged to take “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet nearly eight years later, he presides over a program to modernize the entire US nuclear arsenal at a cost of $35 billion a year through the next decade and beyond. To those who accuse him of hypocrisy, Obama has said that he always regarded a nuclear-free world as a long-term goal, unlikely to be met in his lifetime, much less his time in office.

America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Daydream Believers combines in-depth reporting and analysis to explain how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track - and why much of the nation followed.

Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed AmericaWhile conventional accounts focus on the 60s as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that followed.

What is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition to both scientific realism and the more ego-driven energies of Romanticism.

The U.S. Department of Defense founded a kind of startup in Silicon Valley to accelerate the development and acquisition of new technologies useful to the military. But will it survive President Trump?

On Friday, January 8, several high-level officials from the Obama administration met at a federal office in San Jose with senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Apple. On the agenda for the discussion, according to a one-page memo widely leaked to the press, was this question: “How can we make it harder for terrorists to [use] the Internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?”

In this fresh and lively biography rich in literary analysis and new historical detail, Fred Kaplan brings into focus the dramatic life of John Quincy Adams - the little known and much misunderstood sixth president of the United States and the first son of John and Abigail Adams - and persuasively demonstrates how Adams's inspiring, progressive vision guided his life and helped shape the course of America.

Whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered to Abraham Lincoln. An admirer and avid reader of Byron, Burns, and Shakespeare, Lincoln was the most literary of our presidents. His views on love, liberty and human nature were all shaped by his reading and knowledge of literature. Kaplan explores Lincoln's life through his use of language as a vehicle for complex ideas and feelings and as an instrument of persuasion and empowerment.

As he did for Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, award-winning biographer Fred Kaplan offers a fresh, illuminating look at the life of Thomas Jefferson and his contributions as a writer. In this unique biography, Fred Kaplan emphasizes Thomas Jefferson’s genius with language and his...