Tragic realism, history and foreign policy

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- In 146 B.C. Scipio Africanus the Younger, the Roman conqueror of Carthage, wept when he beheld the burning city, seized with the foreboding that his own county would meet the same fate. Scipio's grasp of history and human nature endowed him with a tragic sense too often lacking among modern foreign policy elites. An exception is Robert D. Kaplan, a voice for informed and humane realism that rises above a hum of moral posturing, wishful thinking and self-congratulatory blather.

"I am not an optimist or an idealist," Kaplan writes in the preface to his new book, "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos" (Random House, 198 pages, $22.95).

"Americans can afford optimism partly because their institutions, including the Constitution, were conceived by men (like Scipio) who thought tragically."

Kaplan calls the Founders "constructive pessimists" to the degree that they worried constantly about what could go wrong in human relations and built America's political institutions accordingly. The Founders had an overriding fear of anarchy, Kaplan says, and knew that "good government can emerge only from a sly understanding of men's passions."

Kaplan's understanding of those passions was shaped by 25 years of reporting overseas, much of it as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. "It was the shock of seeing wars, political upheaval, and Third World poverty firsthand that drew me to the classics of philosophy and politics in the hope of finding explanations for the terrors before my eyes," he writes.

In fact, Kaplan probably is the premier political ethnographer of our time. In five previous books and his Atlantic articles, he has chronicled the dark underside of contemporary humanity. Anyone who doesn't believe in mankind's "fallen" nature, what Christians call Original Sin, would do well to read them.

In "Warrior Politics," Kaplan looks forward by looking back. By bringing his observations to bear on the past and the present, he concludes that ancient history is the surest guide to what we are likely to face in the next few decades. That discipline "teaches that without struggle -- and the sense of insecurity that motivates it -- there is decadence."

In Chapter 1, titled "There Is No Modern World," he focuses on the dark side of globalism, under which he predicts the emergence of two dynamic classes - the entrepreneurial nouveaux riches and a sub-proletariat of "billions of working poor, recently arrived from the countryside, inhabiting squatters' settlements that surround big cities in Africa, Eurasia and South America."

Kaplan grasps the implications of the fact that the 20th century was the last in history when humankind was mostly rural. "The postcolonial era is only in the early phases of collapse," he writes. It's possible that "vast metroplexes, with their own adjacent hinterlands and loyal populations, will overshadow nations in political importance."

Later in the book, Kaplan predicts the emergence of a supranational world order. "I'm not talking about a government, but a loose system of world governance," he told United Press International in a phone interview from his home in western Massachusetts. "I'm making a comparison between what's likely to emerge in the 21st century and the very beginnings of the Han overlordship in China" in 206 B.C. "This was a very weak, shadowy Leviathan that merely contained violence and wars to a greater degree than what had previously been in China. I'm talking about gradual transitions here. Nothing absolute."

It would be wrong to conclude that Kaplan's tragic sense and his awareness that everything changes except human nature has led him to advocate a utopian abrogation of national sovereignties and the prudent exercise of power. Scipio, after all, didn't throw up his hands and say, "To heck with all this Roman stuff." The city of the seven hills still had a remarkable run ahead of it, and we use its legal and political institutions in modified form today.

"What I'm saying," he told UPI, "is even though eventually we will not exist, and even though probably in a few decades we will not dominate world politics to the degree that we do now, it would be totally irresponsible to in any way cede our power. Because we have the same responsibility that other great powers have had at other times in history - which is to try to spread our values and to try to stay powerful long enough so that something will emerge that can succeed us that has similar values."

Kaplan also is suspicious of the "enlightened" schemes of the high-minded. "High-mindedness leads ultimately to coercion," he said, "because if people disagree with your moral absolutes, it often leads you to impose it upon them for what you consider to be their own good."

In "Warrior Politics" he writes: "It takes a shallow grasp of history to believe that solutions exist to most international problems. Often there are no solutions, only confusion and unsatisfactory choices." Foreign policy, the art of permanent crisis management, is an outgrowth of thinking -- not feeling.

Perhaps inevitably, Kaplan turns first to Winston Churchill, for whom glory was "rooted in a morality of consequence: of actual results rather than good intentions" and who had a sense of human irrationality and intractability. Like all wise men, Churchill thought tragically, "for we create moral standards in order to measure our own inadequacies."

Kaplan shows that "Churchill the arch-colonialist is inseparable from the Churchill who stood alone against Hitler." Churchill saw through Hitler early on, Kaplan writes, because "Churchill was familiar with monsters to a degree that (Neville) Chamberlain was not."

Kaplan then turns to the 1st century Roman historian Livy, who "shows that the vigor it takes to face our adversaries must ultimately come from our own past and our achievements."

Central to the philosophy of Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu and the Greek historian-general Thucydides, Kaplan writes, is that war is not an aberration. These men knew war firsthand, hated it, but recognized it as an unfortunate necessity on occasion. "The strategic pursuit of self-interest is not a cold and amoral pseudo-science, but the moral act of those who know the horrors of battle and seek to avoid them," Kaplan writes.

Sun-Tzu affirmed the Confucian truth that a virtuous commander "advances without any thought of winning personal fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment." And Kaplan writes that French sociologist Raymond Aron echoes Thucydides and Sun-Tzu in saying that criticism of unbridled idealism is not only pragmatic but also moral, because "idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism."

Machiavelli, Kaplan writes, believed that Christian glorification of the weak allowed the world to be dominated by the wicked. "Machiavelli's pagan virtue is public virtue, whereas Judeo-Christian virtue is more often private virtue." For the Renaissance Florentine, virtue is the opposite of righteousness.

Exemplifying the latter are "human rights arguments advanced by the media (which) at their most extreme have a distinctly inquisitorial air" in their advocacy for the use of force. Members of the media are imbued with "classical liberal values, which embody concern for the well-being of individuals, whereas foreign policy concerns the relationships between states and other large groups." Hence, the media are "more likely to be militaristic when individual rights and sufferings are concerned, rather than when a state's vital interests are threatened."

"The power of the media is willful and dangerous because it dramatically affects Western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome."

This ties in with the idea of the Holocaust as the "emblematic atrocity," a model that, Kaplan writes with understatement, "will be hard to apply to our satisfaction in many places."

"In the hands of the media, the language of human rights -- the highest level of altruism -- becomes a powerful weapon that can lead us into wars that perhaps we should not fight."

"Warrior Politics" is a handbook rich in insight that cannot be done justice in a review of this length. It is readable, bracing and erudite. No serious student of foreign policy can neglect it.