Stratfor Hires Best-Selling Author and International Affairs Expert Robert D. Kaplan

As Chief Geopolitical Analyst, Kaplan will guide analyst team and contribute weekly column on geopolitical issues

AUSTIN, Texas, March 13, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Stratfor, a leading provider of geopolitical analysis on international affairs (www.Stratfor.com), announced today that Robert D. Kaplan, best-selling author of numerous books on national security strategy and foreign policy, has joined as Chief Geopolitical Analyst.

Kaplan will instruct and guide Stratfor's analyst team as well as its country assessments and will author a weekly column on geopolitical issues. He joins Stratfor's analysts who are regularly featured in leading news outlets all over the globe. Along with his vast experience as a journalist, Kaplan authored Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Balkan Ghosts and 12 other books on travel and international affairs. The New York Times Sunday Book Review reported that Kaplan's latest book, Monsoon, "affected thinking across the Obama Administration."

"I have read and admired Robert Kaplan's work over many years but only met him for the first time last year," said Stratfor CEO George Friedman. "Robert brings a level of experience and depth of geopolitical understanding that will enrich our analytic team. In addition to being able to draw on his own vast knowledge of the countries in which he's traveled, Robert will be a valuable mentor to our regional and global analysts. Stratfor's readers will have access to the thinking of one of the most distinguished writers of foreign affairs. I am thrilled he accepted our invitation to join Stratfor."

In 2011, Kaplan was named one of the world's "Top 100 Global Thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine and has served as a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century. His fourteenth book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, will be published in September 2012.

"It is with a great sense of a challenge before me that I am joining Stratfor," Kaplan said. "For years I have been reading it online and have admired Stratfor's singular focus on geopolitics, which allows it to cover the onrush of events unsentimentally and with complete objectivity. Stratfor covers every country in the world; not just those that concern the media at the moment. It is not limited by the news cycle. It uses geography to make events understandable. Its focus on energy and trade routes, as well as on naval deployment patterns, illuminates how news is about much more than personalities. I look forward to help shaping the future Stratfor, to contributing a column to its website, and to working with new colleagues to improve the editorial quality of the online product."

About Stratfor

Stratfor is a subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis. Individual and corporate subscribers gain a thorough understanding of international affairs, including what's happening, why it's happening, and what will happen next. Unlike traditional news outlets, Stratfor uses a unique, intelligence-based approach to gathering information via rigorous open-source research and a global network of human sources. Analysts then evaluate events looking through the objective lens of geopolitics. The company's goal is simple: to make the complexity of the world understandable to an intelligent readership, without ideology, agenda or national bias.

SOURCE Stratfor