Robert D. Kaplan has made a name for himself by traveling to the world's most uncomfortable and dangerous places and returning with hair-raising predictions of impending military and/or political chaos in the countries he visited.
He was on the money in his book Balkan Ghosts, which foresaw a violent rift along ethnic lines in Yugoslavia, and may yet be proven correct in his assessments of political meltdown in West Africa, Pakistan and Indonesia in The Coming Anarchy and To the Ends of the Earth.
With his latest book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Requires a Pagan Ethos, Kaplan breaks the pattern of travel writing coupled with political reportage and stays home to delve into the territory of political science and military history. These are areas in which Kaplan admits to being a layman and that don't permit the trenchant personal observations that made his previous books so compelling.
For this reason Warrior Politics starts out promising with a chapter that echoes his more travel-based books, but then fizzles as Kaplan attempts in some 200 pages to formulate a guideline for foreign policy based on the wisdom of Livy, Thucydides, Sun-tzu (孫子), Machiavelli and Hobbes, among others.
Nevertheless, Kaplan's main premise that the great minds of antiquity should be the guiding lights to policy making in the contemporary world is a fascinating one and one that seems well grounded.
Kaplan writes: "As future crises arrive in steep waves, our leaders will realize that the world is not `modern' or `postmodern,' but only a continuation of the `ancient': A world that, despite its technologies, the best Chinese, Greek and Roman philosophers might have been able to cope with."
The ancient world, as Kaplan describes it, was a nasty and brutish place where only the strong survived. Summarizing Hobbes, he writes: "Altruism is unnatural, human beings are rapacious, the struggle of every man against every other is the natural condition of humanity, and reason is usually impotent against passion." True leadership then requires the measured and "self-interested" application of power and a policy's moral value will be judged according to its consequences not its intentions.
Though this sounds dangerously close to an apology for warmongering and the forceful spread of democracy and American values, Kaplan cautions against this trend. He draws a line between widening US power and exporting its system. To make his point, he quotes Sun-tzu: "The side that knows when to fight and when not will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted." A war over human rights, for example, may be a fight not worth fighting.
What Kaplan warns against is the strain of idealism, rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that dominated liberal thinking at the end of the Cold War that would pin its hopes on democracy and free markets as a panacea for the developing world.
Herein lies the crux of Kaplan's world view: that beyond the small group of countries that play by the rules of international law and trade, lawlessness prevails and what motivates and influences people is raw power. To deal with the groups or countries that will doubtless be nipping at the heels of the family of democratic nations in the coming century, Kaplan favors wielding a big stick.
He has made this case more forcefully, though, in his previous books that have used his observations of the economic disparities, environmental degradation, exploding urban populations and tribalism that are threatening struggling nations.
For the most part, Warrior Politics is a patchwork of historical examples and analyses that are alarming in their low regard for humanity and aggressive tone, but do not always mesh together. At what point, for example, does masterly inactivity become dangerous? And can't the lessons of the past be applied to avert crises?
Despite its weaknesses, Warrior Politics is an important book because Kaplan's thinking often gains currency in the halls of power in Washington and elsewhere and because the world is increasingly looking to be as "ancient" as he warns it is.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist