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April 28, 2002
REVIEW: Ode to war
THE main thesis of Robert Kaplan’s new book Warrior politics: why leadership demands a pagan ethos is what ancient historians and thinkers have to teach contemporary American leaders about conducting foreign policy in a dangerous world. He argues that many old lessons have to be re-learned, chiefly the need for and moral uses of war as informed by the works of Livy, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Churchill.
In less than 200 pages, Warrior politics takes the reader from ancient Sumer to the Serbia of the 1990s, arguing that while times may change, human nature does not. He echoes his guru, the conservative Harvard Professor, Sam Huntington, who in his The soldier and the state had said that “military leaders had to take for granted — and anticipate — the irrationality, weakness and evil in human nature”. Thus foreign policy today had to be conducted “only in terms of worst-case scenarios” where power has precedence over virtue, and pragmatism over idealism.
In his opening chapter entitled “There is no modern world”, Kaplan points out that the post-colonial era is only in the early stages of collapse. For the time being, only marginal states like Somalia and Sierra Leone have broken down. In the next decade, much larger countries, more populous and urbanized, like Nigeria and Pakistan may crumble. Today, owing to technological advancement, globalization and low-end urbanization there is the birth of a new warrior class which comes from hundreds of millions of unemployed young males in the developing world. “I saw first hand,” writes Kaplan, “the creation of these warriors at Islamic schools in Pakistani slums.”
Therefore, he warns American leaders to be prepared. “If our soldiers cannot fight and kill at close range our status as superpower is in question.” We must heed the lessons of history and unlike ancient Troy do not try to appease our enemies in the false belief that our wealth and success would buy peace. In other words, only all-out war is the solution to crush the increasingly cruel and martyrdom-seeking third world warriors. Kaplan quotes Achilles with relish: “What I really crave is slaughter and blood and choking groans of men.”
Having said that, Warrior politics embarks on a pseudo-scholarly journey of glorifying war and realpolitik. From Machiavelli, Kaplan gleans that the Judeo-Christian private morality is hypocritical. Instead it is the morality of results that is true public virtue, no matter it may be pagan. From Livy’s Punic wars he discovers that the vigour to face our adversaries must ultimately come from pride in our past achievements. Sun-Tzu’s The art of warfare and Thucydides Peloponnesian war teach Kaplan the central thought that war is not an aberration. Finally, Churchill’s river war against the Mahdi in Sudan in 1899 exposed the ancient world within the modern one.
As I read this book and its dubious odes to war, I came to realize what really constitutes the mind of a fundamentalist, not what he is thinking but how. Surely Osama bin Laden must be thinking the same so-called ancient truths and virtues when he ordered his attack on New York and Washington DC.
It is a tragedy that with 9/11 books like Warrior politics are receiving kudos in America today as “prescient”. Someone has to step in and prevent this war between fundamentalists. Human nature is not necessarily evil. Historicism begun by Hegel, modified by Marx and now manifest in post-modernism, clearly shows that human nature is not something immutable but is pliable and mostly an artifact of history, culture and language.
Despite a valiant effort at studying Machiavelli and Hobbes, Kaplan has failed to distinguish between selfishness (as Hobbes understood it as ignoring the interest of others) and self-interest (which is a far more complex action as Machiavelli understood it).
The fact of the matter is that Kaplan’s historical gleanings in this book are suspiciously convenient and brief to build a general theory on. To draw conclusions about 3000 years of human history and then build theories about the past and future upon them requires more reading and thinking than Kaplan appears to have done in this slim volume.
For example, witness again the lack of any evidence or good argument when he states that “liberty grew in the west mainly because it served the interests of power”. On the contrary, as was pointed out by Donald Kagan in The New York Times, it was the lack of a dominant imperial power in Europe owing to geographically separated weak rulers and the struggle between the church and the state that resulted in the emergence of freedom.
Warrior politics is a flawed book even though it comes from an influential reporter who is a senior correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly. Although he has written nine books in the last 14 years, Kaplan has over-reached his scholarly pretensions in his latest publication.
Kaplan enjoys great standing with the American leadership and has been invited to brief presidents who patronize him. But American policymakers will be better served if, instead, they read two recent books that provide genuine constructive thinking after 9/11: The paradox of American power by Joseph Nye, a former Clinton administration official, which cautions against an arrogant, unilateral employment of military power and On globalization by George Soros which provides a detailed economic plan for creating the much needed safety nets like health care, education and unemployment benefits for the hundreds of millions of jobless youth of the developing world so that they too have a stake in a civilized life.
Warrior politics: why leadership demands a pagan ethos
By Robert Kaplan
ISBN 0375505636
Random House
198pp. $22.95
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