I have read many of the books on history and geography by Robert Kaplan who is a journalist with decades of experience in foreign policy. His latest, THE TRAGIC MIND, is the fruit of his disillusionment with recent American involvement in the Middle East. In this unusual short book he has drawn on the Greek and Shakespearian tragedies to illustrate the hubris of wars and counsels humility in dealing with evil in the world. His conclusion is that statesmanship requires choosing between two goods not between good and evil. He comments:
“To believe that the power of the United States can always right the world is a violation of the tragic sensibility…the elites trust that every problem is fixable, and that to disagree with this constitutes fatalism…Tragedy is about bravely trying to fix the world, but only within limits, while knowing that many struggles are poignant and tragic because they are futile…Tragedy is often about accepting the lesser evil.”
Kaplan observed this in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where good intentions, which he supported at the time, resulted in worse outcomes. He opines that life is torment as Dostoevsky, Henry James and Joseph Conrad wrote about the cruelest facts of human nature. The world is in extreme disorder and several major Middle Eastern countries have collapsed into chaos. The United States, Russian and China edge closer to outright war and social media inflames ethnic, national and religious divides. Just look at Ukraine.
He loathed the tyranny of Saddam Hussein who kept order by oppression. But the core question he asks is what if there is no order at all? He experienced in Iraq the threat of a throng of small militia groups. The worst regime is less dangerous and terrifying than no regime at all. Elites who live in comfort of suburbia have never had to fear anarchy. Order comes before freedom, since without order there can be no freedom or liberty for anybody and no justice. Our present generation takes order completely for granted. Order remains the fundamental question behind the politics of many countries.
“Afghanistan and Iraq were ghastly failures because of the way the forces of local history and culture vanquished American ideals of democracy. The Middle East has never been an extension of America’s very specific historical experience. We never learned what the ancient Greeks knew: all things cannot be fixed, so we have to accept much of the world as it is…History counsels prudence.”
Kaplan’s book should be a primer for every political and military leader, public intellectual, opinion writer and social activist. It is an antidote to utopian idealism an a cautionary tale to interference in the affairs of other nations and tribal societies.
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We do need reflective analysis like Kaplan’s,,,
We do not need, as Americans, to think we can solve every problem in the world, especially when we do not under stand well other nations’ and groups’ political, historical. economic, and cultural compositions!
But, BUT — to paraphrase a wise saying — When good people or nations do little or nothing, evil advances and expands (i.e., Hitler, Saddam, Putin)! What would be the conditions in Europe without U.S. leadership and involvement in WW II, or in Kuwait or Ukraine?!
True, often America does not comprehend the complexities or difference without history and systems in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, so our “convert-them-to-our-ways failed. We need to be wise with less hubris.
Ted, I could not shake visions of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” as I read your review. The Congo swallowed Kurtz and the colonial world he represented. Thanks the recommendation to read Kaplan’s works. Patrick+
Ted, I could not shake visions of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” as I read your review. The Congo swallowed Kurtz and the colonial world he represented. Thanks the recommendation to read Kaplan’s works. Patrick+
Kaplan discussed many of the same themes in “The Loom of Time.”
Perhaps one of the byproducts of American Exceptionalism is utopian idealism: we want everyone to be as “exceptional” as we are.
We believe that our liberal democratic values are self-evident (think Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”) and that, once exposed, nations will discard centuries of their own values in favor of these “universal” values. With a certain amount of quasi post Christian evangelism we seek to impose our historical experience on theirs. Innocently arrogant, we remain woefully ignorant of their tradition, geography, history or religion. Why? It doesn’t matter. Ours are universal.
When, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, our efforts are colossal flops, when we have been burned, our idealism morphs into its opposite: cynicism, if not outright fatalism. As we witness today, we withdraw from the world and seek to isolate ourselves in disillusionment.
It is hard for us to reconcile our perfect ideals with an imperfect world of varying degrees of good and evil. Pragmatism in choosing the course of the lesser of two evils (think: alliance with the USSR in the Second World War) is compromise; compromise is selling out.
It may well take a cataclysmic event, a 9-11 or a Pearl Harbor, to shake us from our stupor. Then we will be motivated less by idealism than out of pure self-preservation, perhaps the most non idealistic, the most instinctual of all motives.
The price will not be cheap.
Amen brother