Robert Kaplan is an Atlantic Monthly writer who’s been fairly influential over the years. His books about the Balkans and West Africa both painted a picture of a world “out there”, far from the U.S., that was governed by ancient hatreds, dangerous to Americans, and irredeemable. He wrote a hate-filled book about those earnest US diplomats of an earlier era who actually cared enough to learn something serious about the Arab world: he made them out to be some heinous force for evil in the world, and thus contributed hugely to strengthening their demise and the rise of the wilfull “know-nothing-ism” regarding the Middle East in the US policy elite…
Now, he has gone even further in showing us his real colors. Taking the idea of a globalized “manifest destiny” role for the US to its logical extreme, he has now started calling openly for the US military to act in the rest of the world as though it were in “Indian country”.
What does this mean? As he tells us in this Sept. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it means this:
- in a world where mass infantry invasions are becoming politically and diplomatically prohibitive — even as dirty little struggles proliferate, featuring small clusters of combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts and jungles — the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians…
The range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, that the U.S. Cavalry and Dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa and South America in the early 21st century. When the Cavalry invested Indian encampments, they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among humanitarians back East…
Be aware that Kaplan is not merely noting or commenting on this “Indian-fighting” approach; he is openly advocating it.
He write–with amazing chutzpah–this:
- It would be difficult to fight more cleanly than the Marines did in Fallujah. [???] Yet that still wasn’t a high enough standard for independent foreign television voices such as al-Jazeera, whose very existence owes itself to the creeping liberalization in the Arab world for which the U.S. is largely responsible. For the more we succeed in democratizing the world, not only the more security vacuums that will be created, but the more constrained by newly independent local medias our military will be in responding to those vacuums. From a field officer’s point of view, an age of democracy means an age of restrictive ROEs (rules of engagement).
… As the thunderous roar of a global cosmopolitan press corps gets louder — demanding the application of abstract principles of universal justice that, sadly, are often neither practical nor necessarily synonymous with American national interest — the smaller and more low-key our deployments will become. In the future, military glory will come down to shadowy, page-three skirmishes around the globe, that the armed services will quietly celebrate among their own subculture.
Yes, right there, in that small fragment that I italicized, we have the crux of his admission: that the “abstract principles of universal justice” are “sadly … often neither practical nor necessarily synonymous with American national interest”. And if Americans have to choose between the universal principles and (Kaplan’s version of) the “American national interest”– he is quite confident that they (we) will choose the latter.
No, Robert, I don’t choose that.
In fact, I think you’re quite unhinged. Why would any body of citizenry that comprises just 4 percent of the world’s people thinkit can run rampage over the will of the other 96 percent– simply by acting as though it’s in “Indian country”??
It’s not only deeply unethical to advocate that. It’s also quite implausible to think that approach could ever succeed.
The sad thing is is, that as he rushes around the world– he is described there as now writing “a series of books about the U.S. military on the ground, the first of which will be published next year”– he has apparently been able to find a number of people in the US military (okay, make that, most likely, in the US “Special Forces”) who’ve been lapping up many of his quite half-baked ideas.
Like this un-named individual:
- In Indian Country, as one general officer told me, “you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects.”
… And so it goes on, with jejune little militaristic ramblings alternating with all his proffered prescriptions for foreign-policy disasters.
And nor does Robert Kaplan ever let the mere logic (or illogic) of an argument get in the way of his schoolyard bravado. At the end of that piece he argues:
- The Plains Indians were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy. It never did. In fact, the Army never learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective against the Indians than large mounted regiments burdened by the need to carry forage for horses… Had it not been for a deluge of settlers aided by the railroad, security never would have been brought to the Old West.
Now there are no new settlers to help us, nor their equivalent in any form. To help secure a more liberal global environment, American ground troops are going to have to learn to be more like Apaches.
Well, he’s certainly right that, at the global level, there are “no new settlers to help us”… So then he says, to make up for that, American solders are going to have to “be more like Apaches”–which in this context, presumably means “more fleet-footed and brutal” (and is most likely a gross slur on the morals of the Apaches, but never mind).
And he’s saying that this will help create a “more liberal” global environment???
As I said, Robert Kaplan has finally gone beserk. I really don’t know why anyone listens to him or publishes his books or articles. Except, I suppose, that he plays to a whole series of very deep-held and childish fantasies of American world domination… Grow up, Robert. Grow up, all of of your “fans” out there, too.
to me, he seem to be reflecting the pervasive attitude of the administration, and for that matter, the wall street journal.
its a pretty straight forward extension of neo-con thought. isn’t that article the logical progression of the ‘pre-emptive’ ‘bush doctrine’. when a policy does not work, its proponents dont give it up right away, they claim it has not been taken far enough. or has not been applied ‘correctly’.
personally, i dont think there is a single thing in that article that bush, rumsfield, ashcroft, wolfowitz, or the others dont agree with and believe in their hearts.
bush in particulay would LOVE the indian analogy.
Helena,
Excuse the blunt language, but wow! …what a sick f*** Kaplan has become. I never liked him before, but this is really wild. I’m surprised even the Wall Street Journal editorial staff would publish these murderous, psycopathic ravings.
Taking out after the “global cosmopolitan press corps” is a typical mark of desperation among nutty ideologues who are seeing their grand dreams slip away. Kaplan has finally dropped his earlier pose of a world-weary defender of the tragic responsibility for America to police a chaotic world, and shown that that attitude was just a mask for fanatical racist and ethnocentric hatred and a disgusting, virulent misanthropy. He apparently wants to cleanse the whole world of the degenerate human filth that doesn’t meet his own standard of order and liberality. Like Colonel Kurtz, Kaplan has finally reached the “exterminate the brutes” stage.
The cognitive distortions wrought by his twisted moral perspective is given away when he says:
“The range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, that the U.S. Cavalry and Dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa and South America in the early 21st century.”
The groups the Cavalry “had to confront”? It seems to me these are groups Americans *chose* to confront, by mounting a 250-year ethnic cleansing campaign. According to Kaplan, as we invaded more and more Indian country, and disposessed more and more Native Americans, it was apparently the fault of the savage braves that they sometimes stayed in their homes, forcing the luckless Cavalry to wipe out whole villages, rather than come out to the open field to be slaughtered:
“When the Cavalry invested Indian encampments, they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among humanitarians back East…”
Talk about blaming the victim. This is like a burgler blaming me for being asleep in my bed when he broke into my home, thus “forcing” him to murder not only me, but my wife and children as well. Perhaps Kaplan’s sensitive, ultra-chivalrous Cavalry should have just stayed out of the Indian encampments to begin with?
Even Kaplan knows that there is no road to peace and security through his own prescriptions. It was the demographic wave and the technical superiority together that turned Indian Country into the American West (not to mention the earlier transformation of the American Midwest and the American South).
Kaplan and those he appeals to want eternal war. They think they will benefit from it materially (and some may, for a while) and they certainly benefit from it emotionally, while their stooges have the big guns. But demography is working to undermine the Indian fighters this time. And the Indian fighters are creating more Indian country all the time. Iraq was not Indian country before the invasion: it was a mostly settled country with a brutal government and was occasionally subjected to air attacks. The West Bank at one point was not Indian country, but treating it like it was has created chaos there.
The logic of this argument is that Kaplan thinks he will never have to live in Indian country himself, but can support himself by talking about it in a reasonably stable environment. Maybe he can take an occasional escorted holiday there, as he has in the past, and patronize the Indian fighters while he does so. He, like the victims of this strategy, will eventually be swallowed up by it — as will all the rest of us.
If we could herd most of the world’s population onto reservations Kaplan’s plan would be feasible. Otherwise…
Shortly after the 1991 war, an Indian (Indian Indian, not Native America) general observed that the war’s chief lesson is that if you’re going to annoy the US, make sure you have nuclear weapons first. It seems clear that North Korea and Iran at least are taking that lesson to heart. If US policy continues on its present course, it’s a safe assumption that other countries will start moving towards a nuclear capability. One irony here is that the likelihood of nuclear use is actually greater after the Cold War than it was during it. Another irony is that it’s US policy that’s helping to bring about this state of affairs.
In other words,our elections matter, folks. An overaged sophomore’s attitude towards US politics just won’t do it anymore. Leaving aside the moral arguments against it, there’s a very pragmatic fallacy at the core of this attitude. A dismissive and contemptuous view of the US political process tacitly assumes that there’s a reasonably practical and well-informed policy-making elite that will go on “running things” regardless of our silly and hyped-up election campaigns. So, according to this reasoning, “it doesn’t really matter who wins”. Maybe that was true 50 years ago in the era of Achesons, Dulleses, and McCloys. It’s hardly the case now; there are no “Wise Men” to bail us out of our mistakes(as they did with LBJ in the spring of ’68). Now it really is up to us to do the bailing out.
Cobban on Kaplan
Helena Cobban has some harsh words for Robert Kaplan today. One point I would like to make – again, cause you know this blog is all about repetition – is that Kaplan says X, Y, and Z about American foreign…
Kaplan sounds like a deranged spokesman for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Or perhaps a bizarre version of Thomas Barnett, speaking out for a new map for the Pentagon (it could be his spin on how to integrate the “Non-integrated” Gap into the Core). In any case, he sounds delusional.
In any case, he sounds delusional.
We wish. Actually, Kaplan, a bestselling writer, was touted as one of the solid, thoughtful, middle of the road analysts whose support for the Iraq war prior to the invasion helped to change minds. That shows you how bad things have gotten here.
OTOH, I’m pleased to see that Juan Cole’s blog is fairly popular.
Good thing we only have 4% of the world’s population. Now, if we had more on the order of 1.2 billion or so people, would that make our ideals more worthy of being foisted upon the world?
I wonder how true it is that al Jazeera represents the liberalizing effects of America on the middle east. The way this country has been exercising its military and economic power in the region is so complicated and subterranean that it seems equally possible to me that the middle east would have been far more ‘liberalized’ by now had we not been so heavily involved in behind-the-scenes machinations and upfront invasions.
All the assumptions behind Kaplan’s position — it can’t be called anything larger than that, I think — are stereotypical. And weirdly quixotic, when you stop to think about them
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I read the “coming Anarchy” by Kaplan and was slightly interested in his take on the 3rd world. I felt a similar sense of dispair and hopelessness when traveling in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. For me, viewing the world like the senario in the Coming Anarchy was a passing feeling, at my most cynical.
What is really dangerous about people like Kaplan is that he appeals to the latent, hidden racist worldview many Americans subscribe to and leaders like Bush encourage and manipulate.
It is no surprise that in this current political climate that people like Kaplan and other neo-cons are considered “solid, thoughtful, middle of the road analysts” no surprise at all.
The Defining Moment
John Kerry lost the election the moment he saluted those desperate many at the Democratic convention. Certainly, the Democrats never displayed a particular interest in winning this race, evident by their insigificant efforts to legislate a paper trail …