Kaplan's War

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Mark Blitz

Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002), 198 pp., $22.95.

FROM WHAT standpoint should we conduct foreign affairs? We currently discuss this issue by deploying a stylized division between national interest and morality, or realism and idealism. Endless variations on this division, with degrees of neo- and paleo- as varied and subtle as the thousand shades of beige in a decorator's palette, try but necessarily fail to overcome the underlying split.

Many sensible people like to combine the contenders: national interest in the service of something noble, or limited by general rules; moralism that is neither self-immolating nor unaware that proper action requires a live actor. Nonetheless, it is difficult to put the two together convincingly. This should be no surprise, because the Kantianism in which the split originates must leave a principled gulf between the two halves. The free and ideal cannot be the determined and material; what is moral or legal ought to shape our actions even if these dutiful measures fail to satisfy. Some day, Kant believed it was moral to hope, what is right will always be what succeeds. That day is in the infinite future, though, and however close we come it can never be reached.

Our other reigning analytical division concerns how much to rely on others in our foreign policies and how much to go it alone. This split is deeper than a mere tactical squabble because idealism and internationalism are often conflated, as are realism and nationalism. Kant and Woodrow Wilson welcomed leagues and federations while America-firsters have preferred to seal our borders. These conflations are misleading, however. A case for world government can be made by realists on Hobbes' grounds of self-interest and fear alone. The democratic nation-builders of the UN-ridiculing Reagan era were motivated by a love of equal rights as much as if not more than by national interest. International institutions can govern for reasons as narrow, or under laws and regulations as palpably biased, as nations can be broad-minded and generous. The two major distinctions we have learned to use, problematic in themselves, do not overlap in any simple way.

We therefore need coherent intellectual ground from which to overcome--or, better, place ourselves ahead of--these ritualized divisions, especially the split between realism and morality. As it turns out, prior to the division of the world into interest and idealism by modem intellectuals, political choice in foreign affairs (often) appeared in a more unified manner. It is this unity that concerns Robert Kaplan--not only its history but also its future.

Kaplan's Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos is useful and interesting because it gropes toward such a coherent political perspective for the future, one based on interest without being immoral. That said, Kaplan clearly begins with what is harsh, not gentle, in this point of view. Indeed, reading him reminds one of the morbid thoughts that always seemed to be gathering under Andrei Gromyko's solemn countenance, a flock of ravens straining to be released into the howling night. Warrior Politics is the book of someone for whom an excess of dollar bills causes immediate concern about an impending shortage of green ink.

In the observer of foreign affairs, however, such a taste for worry can be beneficial. What would make for an annoying if darkly fascinating dinner companion can produce healthy caution when lives, fortunes and freedoms are at stake. For excessive concern to be useful, however, it must be moderated, and to be moderated it needs to be allied with good judgment. Aristotelian prudence rather than Nixonian brooding must be the guide.

Kaplan seeks to step in this prudential direction, and to develop from the habit or inclination to be on guard a useful standpoint from which to deal with what is threatening. He argues for "constructive pessimism" in foreign affairs, and makes his case not only with the evidence of his own journalistic eyes, but also the experience of others, as well as the views of thinkers and reflective statesmen. His strategy is to mine the philosophic literature and bring to the surface some brilliant advice on behalf of sobriety and watchfulness. He is not content to quote a sage remark or two, but allows himself the "excitement" of actually reading and following the authors to whom he is attracted.

Kaplan organizes his book around what he believes Machiavelli, Churchill, Kant, Thucydides, Livy, Sun-Tzu and others can teach us about how to face our international future. Because he examines these thinkers for his own purposes he is not altogether true to theirs: no one should read this book to learn precisely what Thucydides has to say. But because his sober intention is not far from theirs, because he is well guided in interpreting them, and because, above all, he is a serious man not blinded by pretense or pretentiousness, he is for practical purposes often close enough to the mark.