Men o'War. - Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos - book review

National Review, Feb 25, 2002 by Brian C. Anderson

Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 198 pp., $22.95)

Since September 11, America's political and military leaders have had to make many tough moral decisions. How many Afghan civilian casualties would be "acceptable" in waging the war on terror? How cozy should the U.S. become with unsavory regimes in the Middle East, if they could provide key intelligence that might help us nab Osama bin Laden and other terrorist bosses? Should the U.S. use targeted assassination to take out terrorists? For some, even to contemplate measures that would involve civilian casualties, alliances with despots, or assassination is morally compromising; actually to carry them out would put the U.S. on the same level as its fanatical Islamist enemies. A priest's sermon at a Catholic service I attended shortly after September 11 perfectly expressed this moral perfectionism; the U.S. must not respond militarily, he argued, but instead be the "gentle giant."

Robert D. Kaplan, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent and author of several books on international relations, thinks such moral delicacy both naive and immoral. In this lively new book, he argues that America's political leaders, confronted with the stark realities of 21st-century global politics, and entrusted with the safety of those who have elected them, have the moral responsibility to free themselves from what he sees as Judeo-Christian niceties and instead seek guidance from the tough-minded historians and philosophers of pagan antiquity, and those writers and statesmen inspired by them. Kaplan's "warrior" heroes are Homer, Thucydides, Livy, Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus, America's Founders, and Churchill.

Kaplan never defines his pagan "ethos," but several components of it are clear. First is a tragic sensibility that recognizes the permanence of human evil and political conflict. It was because he possessed in full this tragic sense, gained from years of historical reflection, classical learning, and hard military experience, that Winston Churchill -- a kind of exemplary modern pagan in Kaplan's view -- saw through Hitler from the start, when few others did. Such a realistic worldview, Kaplan adds, would also make American political leaders deeply skeptical of pursuing legal solutions to global conflict -- a permanent temptation for liberal humanitarians, who have long sought such remedies, from the failed Kellogg-Briand Pact banning war after World War I to the multilateralism of the Clinton years. Managing conflict among nations is possible; ending it is not.

If Churchill had no illusions about evil and conflict, he also knew -- and this is a second element of Kaplan's pagan ethos -- that history is not fate: Individuals can move and shape it, even when faced with huge obstacles. "Root causes" do not determine the destiny of man. Kaplan devotes several illuminating pages, heavily indebted to the historian Paul Rahe, to Churchill's extraordinary 1899 book The River War, which describes how, during the late 1890s, colonial Britain used guile, spirit, and force to recapture the Sudan from the Muslim warriors who had briefly conquered it. The genius of Churchill's narrative, Kaplan says, is to show how an "intractable physical and human landscape becomes the obstacle that moral men surmount."

But Churchill also teaches that some humility is vital if political action is to succeed. History may be open to human will, but not every obstacle can be surmounted. In Kaplan's outlook, the political leader must embrace what the French political theorist Raymond Aron called "probabilistic determinism": understanding that human freedom works within certain economic, political, and social constraints. By taking into account such constraints, America's leaders will be better able to use the freedom they possess.

In trying to move and shape history, Kaplan stresses, America's political leaders must be willing to get their hands dirty. Here Machiavelli and Sun-tzu are the best guides. "As Machiavelli says, in an imperfect world men bent on doing good -- and who have responsibility for the welfare of a great many others -- must know occasionally how to be bad, and to savor it." Democratic statesmanship requires a morality of consequences, not intent. Drawing on Sun-tzu, Kaplan observes that such a political morality would justify "every manner of deceit" if it prevented a greater evil like war.

According to this view, moralism has no place in foreign policy. A misplaced emphasis on human rights, for example, can lead to outcomes that actively harm human flourishing. However unjust, the military dictatorship now running Pakistan is preferable to the Islamic militants who might take power through democratic means. The modern media will be "willful and dangerous" enemies of the kind of leadership that accepts that a dictatorship might sometimes be better than a democracy, because the media are politically unaccountable and so can indulge in moral posturing. American statesmen must know how to ignore media moralists.