Reckoning The Danger Of Anarchy

"The Tragic Mind

By Robert D. Kaplan

Yale, 135 pages, $26

The irrepressible Robert D. Kaplan is the author of more than a dozen books on geopolitics, history, international relations, war and defense policy. He has also written works that are accurately described as political travelogues, though the term makes them sound much more boring than the graceful and wise accounts that they are. The best-known example of these is "Balkan Ghosts" (1993), with which he made a name as a far-sighted American observer of ethnic conflict in distant places.

"The Tragic Mind" is Mr. Kaplan's 21st book and the only one he has written as an act of self-flagellation. A reporting visit to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1986 proved to be, he says, more terrifying for him than anything he'd experienced before. Iraq was "one vast prison yard lit by high-wattage lamps." In the wake of 9/11, his mind already scarred by Saddam, he was quick to support the Iraq War, despite his "worries" about what could befall the country in a post-Saddam era. "The clinical depression I suffered for years afterward because of my mistake about the Iraq War led me to write this book."

Some readers will be tempted to call "The Tragic Mind" an exercise in self-regard. "I was a journalist who had gotten too close to my story," Mr. Kaplan writes, in the past-confessional tense. "I had let my emotions overtake dispassionate analysis." In April 2004, embedded with U.S. Marines during the first battle of Fallujah, he changed his mind about the war. In that battle, he tells us, he witnessed something far worse than even the worst of Iraq under Saddam: "the bloody anarchy of all against all" that the prodigiously brutal Saddam had kept under a lid of tyranny. Mr. Kaplan tells us here that he had failed his "test as a realist" -- a word he doesn't really define -- "on the greatest issue of our time, no less!" He then cites with approval the medieval Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, whose very un-Western observation "would henceforth ring" in Mr. Kaplan's ears: that a year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny.

It's here, right in the preface, that readers will find themselves switching to skeptical mode. Why should we accept without question an obviously debatable aphorism from another time and culture? Very few in present-day America -- not even a champion of Realpolitik like Henry Kissinger -- would embrace a century of tyranny in lieu of a year of civic mayhem. Yet Mr. Kaplan's answer is that the ancient Greeks say it must be so.

Anarchy, Mr. Kaplan writes, was for the Greeks the "greatest, most fundamental fear." Greek history -- and Shakespeare, too, for good measure -- is replete with examples of how a fear of chaos is often the most effective kind of wisdom. Mr. Kaplan doesn't call this anarchy-avoidance "realism." Instead, he calls it "tragedy." A tragic outcome results, he says (in my paraphrase), when a king or government must make the hard choice not to pursue a moral good -- say, the toppling of Saddam -- in order to prevent an outcome (bloody chaos) that's worse than the status quo (leaving Saddam untoppled).

In other words, Mr. Kaplan says, "tragedy is about bravely trying to fix the world, but only within limits." It was the Iraq debacle, he says, that taught him how cruelly important such limits can be, but his first glimpse of American miscalculation goes further back in time, to the meltdown of Yugoslavia. If his writings "helped promote a war" in Iraq, his "Balkan Ghosts" is reliably known to have caused Bill Clinton to delay American military intervention in that fratrigenocidal part of Europe. President Clinton at first thought that such involvement would be wasted on a people programmed by nature to kill one another. "Balkan Ghosts," Mr. Kaplan writes, "so depressed the president that it led to inaction on his part." This filled Mr. Kaplan with "lifelong remorse": "While I supported military intervention in print and on television," he tells us, "my book had the opposite effect of what I intended." Somewhat grandly, he asserts ownership of the region. "I had had the Balkans virtually to myself" before the "media horde arrived." And so he has no choice, in his own mind, "but to accept moral responsibility." Uneasy lies the head that wears the frown.

"The Tragic Mind" is really an extended essay that can be read in a sitting by someone passionate about the Greeks. Mr. Kaplan appeals to the ancient playwrights -- Euripides in particular, but also Aeschylus and Sophocles -- in support of his argument that "an orderly universe" is "always a virtue." Chaos is anathema. But Mr. Kaplan's contention that this position, rooted as it is in prophetic (and thus pre-scientific) times, holds true for the 21st-century world is more than a little baffling. It's enough, in fact, to make a reader mutinous, unconvinced as he will be by Mr. Kaplan's assertion that the answers to moral questions about the rightness of war are to be found more readily in the classics than in the strategic analysis of present-day experts.

"Tragedy is not fatalism," Mr. Kaplan insists, and I will define again what he means by tragedy, because it is far removed from our ordinary understanding of the word: Tragedy is the pain that we must live with that results from our opting for a "good" outcome that is less good than an even better outcome, because the pursuit of the latter would result in chaos. But his insistence -- which is so adamant as to be mulish -- that order is a good thing (even if enforced by a tyrant) if the alternative is anarchy (even in pursuit of a liberal democracy) will find few takers among those who aren't admirers of Agamemnon or worshipers of Zeus. How can anyone write with a straight face, many will ask, that while "removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing," it "supplanted a greater good: the semblance of order." Mr. Kaplan's own word, "semblance," should give him pause. What good is order if it is not real? What good is it if it is not based on moral foundations? Would removing Hitler from power have failed the Kaplan test if it had exposed Germany to some years of chaos?

Mr. Kaplan's book is a manifesto for realism -- which I'll define as a presumption against entanglements abroad -- dressed up in the cloth of ancient Greece. Alongside references to ancient plays, made to bolster his point that a fear of bad consequences is the key to wise governance, he offers observations of his own, all ready-made for the next edition of "Bartlett's." "Passion is often the enemy of analysis." "Man is prodigious. If he can overcome the natural world, he can overcome tyranny." "Geopolitics . . . is inherently tragic." We can live with those lines, however sententious. But what of Mr. Kaplan's assertion that Americans, "being an ahistorical people," lack a tragic sensibility? What does that even mean?

The modern-day American presidents that Mr. Kaplan truly admires are Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. The latter was "our last aristocrat in the White House, the last spiritual descendant of Eisenhower." Mr. Kaplan praises Bush for the "wise sensibility" of a speech he gave in Ukraine in 1991 -- dubbed a "Chicken Kiev speech" by the columnist William Safire -- in which Bush warned the Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism." Yet those were words to which Vladimir Putin would have thrilled.

Ike, writes Mr. Kaplan, "got the balance between fear and ambition just right." He rejected counsel from his advisers to use America's nuclear arsenal against its adversaries in several crises, "thereby setting a precedent for the coming decades." He chose not to bail out the feckless French after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and didn't butt heads with the Soviets after they crushed the hapless Hungarians in 1956. Since statesmanship is primarily about "discipline and difficult choices, the greatest statesmen must think tragically," Mr. Kaplan writes. "In hindsight, the 1950s might seem dull and peaceful, but that is only because of Eisenhower's constructive pessimism."

We're expected to contrast this last quality with the destructive optimism of George W. Bush, whose actions resulted in years of war in Iraq and mental trauma for Mr. Kaplan.

---

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society." [1]

 

If the results of anarchy remain locked in the country where we caused the anarchy (e.g. Germany after the war), then we can put up with that because, supposedly, the Germans got what they earned). But if the results of anarchy come home to us, like the crowds of migrants through the destroyed Libya, or the Americans demonstrating in Washington with the newly elected President D. Trump, then Mr. Biden should really think about whether it is worth raising such anarchy.

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: Reckoning The Danger Of Anarchy
Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 14 Jan 2023: C.7.