Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos. . - Political booknotes: pagan morality - book review

WARRIOR POLITICS: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos

by Robert Kaplan Random House, $22.50

THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMUNITY has never forgiven journalist Robert Kaplan for his award-winning 1993 book Balkan Ghosts, whose depiction of ferocious ethnic hatred in the former Yugoslavia is said to have spooked Bill Clinton into withholding U.S. troops from Bosnia until late 1995, until more than 200,000 people had been slaughtered.

Though Kaplan in fact advocated U.S. intervention in Bosnia as vital to our strategic interest, he is persona non grata to humanitarians horrified by his dark view of the world. In Warrior Politics, Kaplan summons the great classical writers on foreign policy and conflict to make his case for a "realist" American poli-abroad. Those who favor U.S. intervention may not appreciate Kaplan's prescription for an American foreign policy based on self-interest rather than humanitarianism. But what is valuable about Kaplan's latest book is that it forces even his opponents to consider global developments--from population explosion and environmental degradation to post-colonial breakdown--and their impact on our role in the world from a point of view different than the one found in conventional news and diplomatic coverage.

"This is not an essay about what to think," Kaplan writes in the opening pages of Warrior Politics, "but about how to think." Specifically, Kaplan wishes us to think harder about how U.S. values appear to the rest of the world. Developing countries try to emulate America's democratic capitalism which, Kaplan argues, places a premium on putting forth an image of strength. "If we are weak militarily--if we aren't able to meet the rising challenges of warriors--our political values may be eclipsed worldwide," he writes. To bolster this assertion, Kaplan embarks on a survey of great thinkers on war and statesmanship, including Hannibal, Thucydides, and Machiavelli, and, to a lesser degree, Churchill, Kant, and Hobbes, and explains how the lessons they offer apply to U.S. foreign policy.

Kaplan views ancient Athens as the best parallel to the modern U.S., arguing that both societies' affluence softened them to the ever-present barbarism that is the downfall of great societies. Soon after Pericles delivered his famous funeral oration on the virtues of the Athenian citizenry, a plague swept the city and those same citizens turned on each other like beasts. "Thus," Kaplan concludes, "the more socially and economically advanced the time, the more necessary it is for leaders to maintain a sense of their societies' fallibility and vulnerability: That is the ultimate defense against catastrophe."

He invokes Machiavelli to maintain that good statesmanship and responsible statecraft require political leaders to focus on the morality of results, not intentions: "If it isn't effective, it can't be virtuous." Kaplan points to the United Nations' decision to hold a referendum on independence in East Timor as an example of the sin of disregarding warnings. Knowing that a referendum would likely spur massive violence by anti-independence forces, the U.N. proceeded anyway, setting off massacres which prompt Kaplan to conclude that "in its startling lack of foresight, weak planning, and chaotic implementation, the U.N.'s exercise in democracy lacked Machiavellian virtue."

By contrast, Kaplan praises the decision of Jordan's King Hussein to dissolve his pro-Soviet government and impose martial law in 1957, and to suppress rebellious Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s. "King Hussein's antidemocratic acts," he writes, "saved his kingdom from forces that would have been crueler than himself--His violence, therefore, was central to his virtue."

What's troubling is that Kaplan offers citizens no way to "institutionalize" the virtue of their rulers. Though he praises the U.S. decision not to insist on democracy and human rights in places like Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey, such expediency seems debatable in the wake of September 11, as we've come to see the costs of supporting "friendly" regimes whose suppressed populations blame the U.S. for their political grievances. Though he doesn't address this argument, Kaplan knows from experience what such societies are like. "I saw firsthand the creation of warriors at Islamic schools in Pakistani slums," he writes in a chapter on Achilles that eerily anticipates the al Queda attacks. "The children of those shanty towns had no moral or patriotic identity except that which their religious instructors gave them. An age of chemical and biological weapons is perfectly suited for religious martyrdom."

Beyond Islamic militants, Kaplan identifies a burgeoning new warrior class in the criminal underworld of former Communist countries. He believes that these new warriors will also, as a matter of necessity, attack us without regard for the Geneva Convention: "America's military superiority guarantees that such new adversaries will not fight according to our notion of fairness: they will come at us by surprise, asymmetrically, at our weakest points."