Francis P. Sempa
Robert Kaplan, the Robert Strausz-Hupe Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, has written a short book titled The Tragic Mind that counsels American policymakers to proceed with caution in dealing with the twin crises of the Ukraine War and the increased tension in the South China Sea. His principal recommendation is for those policymakers to approach these crises with a “tragic sensibility” that looks to certain constants in history and human nature that will enable them to “think tragically in order to avoid tragedy.”
We are once again in an era of great power rivalry, and history teaches that when great powers go to war the consequences will usually be grave and in many instances unanticipated. But, according to Kaplan, it is not just history that teaches us that, but also the literary classics – especially those from ancient Greek writers like Aeschylus and Euripides, but also Shakespeare. The Greek tragedies and Shakespeare show us the unchanging nature of the human condition. The characters in their stories and plays engaged in “heroic and often futile struggles against fate” and had to make choices between lesser evils or between one good over another. Our statesmen are no different. Foreign policy “realism” is an acceptance of constraints, limits, and human imperfections. It values order and stability over chaos and anarchy.
Kaplan’s motivation for writing The Tragic Mind was his public support of the post-9/11 Iraq War, even though he worried about what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like. He admits to suffering “clinical depression” due to this mistake, confessing: “I failed my test as a realist – on the greatest issue of our time.” He writes that he kept thinking about a medieval Persian philosopher’s observation that “one year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny.” That led him to consult the ancient Greeks who, he writes, “were too rational to ignore the power of the irrational that lay on the other side of civilization.” The tragic mind knows that civilization is fragile. Thus, the need for order.
And Kaplan notes that it is experience--the experience of war--that most shapes a tragic mind. War erases the illusions of progress held by intellectuals and commentators who have never experienced it, and it reveals what Kaplan calls the “human proclivity for destructiveness.” War confirms for Kaplan (who experienced it as a reporter embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and as a foreign correspondent covering the carnage of conflicts in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone) the wisdom of the Greeks who held that “the tension between civilization and savagery is constant and ubiquitous.” And the literary classics, he writes, confirm that “[b]arbarism always lies within us.” The ancient Greeks understood this and created the mythical god Dionysus, whom Kaplan calls the “patron-god of Tragedy.” Walter Otto, the German classical philologist and expert on Greek mythology, described Dionysus as “the raving god whose presence makes man mad and incites him to savagery and even to lust for blood.”
A tragic sensibility, Kaplan writes, would also have cautioned Western leaders against “the blithe assumption that the end of the Cold War would lead to the unimpeded spread of democracy and free markets worldwide,” the widely held assumption that a post-Cold War China would transform into a more liberal society, the idea that NATO expansion would be grudgingly accepted by post-Cold War Russia, and that geoeconomics would replace geopolitics as the fulcrum of international politics. Kaplan is well-versed in classical geopolitics, having written several books on the subject, including The Revenge of Geography and The Return of Marco Polo’s World (parts of which were originally written for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment). He understands – like Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman and Alfred Thayer Mahan did before him – the importance to Western security of maintaining the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. An appreciation of geopolitics is also part of having a “tragic sensibility.”
Kaplan believes that Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and George H. W. Bush possessed tragic minds that made them capable stewards of U.S. foreign policy. Eisenhower had to send thousands of American soldiers to their deaths in World War II, yet as president he ended the Korean War, skillfully managed crises in the South China Sea, prevented the Suez Crisis from becoming a great power war, and publicly warned about the undue influence of the “military-industrial complex.” Nixon and Kissinger helped reshape global geopolitics to America’s benefit by conducting triangular diplomacy with Soviet Russia and China in the midst of waging then ending the disastrous Southeast Asian war they had inherited. Bush 41 successfully managed the peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire and displayed tragic sensibility in using military power to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait without toppling Saddam’s regime. All four statesmen sided with order over anarchy.
Kaplan uses the Iraq and Afghan Wars as recent exhibits of the tragedy that imperils even well-intentioned actions and decisions. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant who refused to abide by United Nations’ resolutions, but when the U.S. and allied forces removed him from power the anarchy that resulted drew Washington decision-makers into a military and political quagmire. Instead of recognizing the tragedy the war had created, the Bush 43 administration doubled-down and with pride and hubris sought to democratize the greater Middle East, including Afghanistan which we had invaded and occupied in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Suddenly,” Kaplan writes, “Americans learned that their power to change the world was circumscribed. The world had histories and traditions that were not subject to America’s own historical experience with democracy.”
Kaplan believes that American foreign policy is made today “in the shadow” of its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as our mid-to-late 1970s foreign policy was made in the shadow of our failure in Vietnam. We recovered from what some called the “Vietnam syndrome,” and we can recover from the Afghan and Iraq failures. But we face much more consequential failure in a “new age of great power rivalry” if our leaders act without reference to a tragic sensibility in today’s crises. The stakes today in Ukraine and the South China Sea are far greater than in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Never before,” he writes, “has thinking tragically--and husbanding fear without being immobilized by it – been more necessary.” Unfortunately, there are no Eisenhowers, Nixons, Kissingers, or George H. W. Bushes currently at the helm in Washington.
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