From 2008 to 2012, Kaplan was a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC; he rejoined the organization in 2015. Between 2012 and 2014, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a private global forecasting firm. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the United States Department of Defense. In 2011, and 2012, "Foreign Policy" magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers". In 2017, Kaplan joined Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, as a Senior Advisor. In 2020, he was named to the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.