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This
review, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College,
is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in part, without
permission and without charge, provided the source is acknowledged.
Released October 2004
Now
the book has appeared in paperback in time to fuel our reflections on the latest
Gulf War, an enterprise which, one can confidently assume, Kaplan would find
entirely in keeping with his hard-nosed approach, which seeks to persuade us
that we should demand our leaders downplay the importance of moral issues in
foreign policy and focus entirely on power and winning.
Let us follow, he urges, a morality of self-interested consequences
rather than one of good intentions.
In
launching his argument, Kaplan begins by staking out what looks like an orthodox
conservative position: there is no new world order, there is no discernible
pattern to history, no deterministic rule to guide us.
That being the case, we can expect world events to lurch from crisis to
crisis, as in the past, and our leaders have to cope as best they can.
In such a situation it’s good to have leaders with character (ethos),
men like Churchill, Marshall, Bismarck, and others.
The
key characteristic Kaplan wishes us to look for in our leaders, however, is not
the traditional conservative notion of virtue, which seeks to guide the
necessary use of force and deceit with a wise sense of larger purpose, but
rather a pragmatic determination to use whatever means are available to secure
our national self-interest at any particular moment.
And by self-interest Kaplan means an effective application of or increase
in power so that we, in effect, get what we want. A focus on virtue is a bad
thing, so in our foreign policy those who wish to bring in human rights are
wrong, and religious values are potentially disastrous. Skilful liars with no
reluctance to use force in pursuit of national security are far more successful
than moral idealists.
This
stance, Kaplan argues, is endorsed by a long tradition of great thinkers or
effective achievers. These he
parades haphazardly before us at breakneck speed—Churchill, Livy, Sun-Tzu,
Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus, Tiberius, and so on—interspersed
with rapid summaries of various modern political crises meant to illuminate what
the ancient writers are advising (Kaplan’s years of distinguished reporting
have given him first-hand knowledge of many of these events and their leading
players). If we attend to what he
is saying, he assures us, we will not know what to think, but we will learn how
to think, at least about foreign policy issues.
In
a curious way he does get the reader thinking, but for reasons which, I suspect,
would hardly please him. His
argument is so superficial and contradictory and his treatment of the past so
cursory and cavalierly reductive that the book becomes a fascinating negative
example: whatever intelligent thinking about foreign policy or about the past is
exactly, this is clearly not it.
Kaplan
quickly gets into some of the familiar difficulties people encounter when they
adopt a simplistic defence of self-interest by any means.
To take just one example (familiar to readers of Plato): What effect does
a policy of deceit have on the health of the body politic and the conduct of
political leaders? In dealing with
this thorny issue, Kaplan tries to distinguish between military and civil
leadership, urging the former to follow his advice and the latter not to
(“Generals should use deceit; judges should not”). But when the chief political leader and guardian of the
constitution is also commander-in-chief, how is a citizen (or, for that matter,
the president himself) to judge which hat he is wearing from one day to the
next? When the judicial branch is a
key ally in the war on terror, such easy separation is nothing more than a
convenient fiction (especially in America now when appeals court judges are
showing “deference” to the executive branch in the interests of national
security, as defined by the political leadership).
Like
most people who make this sort of argument, Kaplan relies heavily on examples,
none of which is given any detailed treatment.
But examples of successful Machiavellian tactics have a way of working
against the argument (as Machiavelli’s Prince demonstrates again and
again), simply because (apart from prompting all sorts of counter-examples) they
raise embarrassing questions about the nature of political success and what
exactly the writer means by self-interest.
When Kaplan praises an Israeli prime minister for using violent means
some years ago to promote peace with the Palestinians, for example, one wonders
if he has read a newspaper lately. It’s
curious, too, why the example of the Vietnam-Watergate years and of their effect
on the political Machiavels at the centre of the action and on the country
generally doesn’t raise any doubts in Kaplan’s mind about the case he is
making. No wonder Henry Kissinger
praised the book.
The
concept of self-interest is a much more complex issue than Kaplan is prepared to
admit. Identifying it with
short-term success in a particular political situation ignores the fact that
long-term consequences might be much more important to a nation’s future.
I would think that one of the most important things in America’s best
interests is maintaining faith in the processes of democratic government and its
language of public business. So
larding the State of the Union message with untruths in order to promote an
aggressive foreign policy might not be the wisest course of action, especially
as casualties accumulate.
Kaplan
again and again runs into the obvious point that without some sense of moral
direction a foreign policy has no purpose and becomes simply a power-scramble
from one crisis to another, a process in which today’s useful ally is
tomorrow’s bitter foe, but he seems unable or unwilling to explore the
relationship between such a requirement and the need for morally objectionable
means. Yet that is the heart of the
matter. He, however, is in no mood
to linger on complex niceties. He seems to think that by racing ahead at top
speed and crying out yet again “power first, values second” the very thin
ice he’s moving across won’t collapse under him.
But
the most disastrous feature of Kaplan’s book is his treatment of the past.
He clearly has not read carefully many of the books he cites and has no
firm grasp on what some key terms mean (one gets the distinct impression in many
cases that he has read something about the book, rather than mulled over the
original text, and that the main reason for writing his book might be to show
off how he can be just as clever as the scholars).
Take
the phrase “pagan ethos,” for example.
Kaplan ignores the long and justly famous pagan tradition of virtue as
the key element in leadership and insists that a pagan ethos simply means crude
Machiavellian tactics in foreign policy—just as he largely ignores the fact
that many of those leaders he cites with approval were pious Christians.
The phrase gives the title of the book a nice rhetorical ring, but simply
confuses any reader who brings to it a more informed sense of the classical past
or of the political contributions of organized religion within our own
traditions.
And
Kaplan’s imagination is totally out of touch with anything close to a tragic
awareness. Early on he announces
grandly that American institutions and their constitution “were conceived by
men who thought tragically.” This
turns out to mean that the founding fathers were men who realized that human
beings were problematic, hard to govern, greedy, and prone to fighting.
No wonder Kaplan totally misses the point of Thucydides’ great book and
can, in fact, derive a comforting moral from one of the most grimly tragic
masterpieces of pagan literature: “the acceptance of a world governed by a
pagan notion of self-interest exemplified by Thucydides makes statesmanship
likelier to succeed.”
Perhaps
that’s the reason there’s at least one very prominent omission in Kaplan’s
catalogue of great writers from the past—the man who spent much of his
creative life in the most profound and often disturbing exploration of those
political realities Kaplan wishes to educate us about.
So before he launches his next attempt of this sort it might be helpful
to us all if Kaplan spent his time reading and thinking more deeply about what
William Shakespeare had to reveal about Machiavellianism.
By
the end of the book, Kaplan has shifted from his apparently hard-headed
conservatism to cautious optimism about improving the world: “The more respect
we have for the truths of the past, the more certain our journey away from
it.” Given Kaplan’s repeated insistence that these past thinkers
got it right, this final sentence in his argument implies, ironically enough,
that what he is recommending may be the wrong route to take.
Of
course we will continue to be faced with exceedingly difficult political crises
and will expect our leaders to use a variety of means for dealing with them,
including, if necessary, deceit and violence.
But we might remember that when Plato (a fairly well known pagan who
thought about these matters, too, and who is also conspicuously absent from
Kaplan’s argument) urges wise statesmen to use lies, he adds the word
“noble,” and there is still a huge and politically significant difference
between a “noble lie” in Plato’s sense and a “self-interested lie” of
the sort Kaplan recommends, especially where the most important issues, foreign
and domestic, are concerned.
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