Second paragraph of third chapter:
Syria is not unique. Before Syria, humanitarians in 2011 demanded military intervention in Libya, even though the regime of Muammar Qaddafi had given up its nuclear program and had been cooperating for years with Western intelligence agencies. In fact, the United States and France did lead an intervention, and Libya today is barely a state, with Tripoli less a capital than the weak point of imperial-like arbitration for far-flung militias, tribes, and clans, while nearby Saharan entities are in greater disarray because of weapons flooding out of Libya.
Kaplan is one of those hard-realist conservative commentators on US foreign policy of the old school. This is a collection of his essays from the first part of this century, so it’s a bit jumbled and in places repetitive. I found myself nodding in agreement about as often as I shook my head in baffled dissent.
My biggest point of dissent came as early as page 5, where he predicts the disintegration of Europe as a result of floods of migrants from North Africa, because the Arab Spring of 2012 has caused the downfall of the neighbouring “Muslim prison states”, meaning Iraq, Syria and Libya. This is simply bonkers. It’s difficult to decide where to start with dismantling it, but migrants are coming from all over Africa and western Asia, and the driving force for migration is economics rather than security; and anyway the migration question is but one of numerous factors contributing to economic inequality, which is the really big stress on European systems. Kaplan’s analysis privileges hard security over dull economics, and is the poorer for it.
The most attractive aspect of the book is Kaplan’s acceptance that he was wrong about the Iraq War, and that it’s not just that the aftermath of the invasion was mishandled (which is a line you will still hear from some apologists) but that the war itself was a bad idea. But this has unfortunately tilted him into a closer analysis of failures than successes, and it is noticeable that (Iraq apart) he is more drawn to analysing failures by Democratic than Republican administrations.
Fundamentally, Kaplan believes that geography is destiny, and self-interest should be coldly calculated. And yet there is clearly some room for values in his analysis; he doesn’t explain why, and you are left with the sense that he thinks human rights matter for white people and less for the rest of the world. And by emphasising geography, he loses the nuance of political choice in the countries that he is looking at; and even that is blinkered, as he considers risks to come only from states currently hostile to the USA.
Still, it’s very informative about the US foreign policy mind-set. I often like to say that the difference between Brussels and Washington as policy cities is that the depth of knowledge is often much greater in Washington, but you are lucky if there is more than one point of view to choose from, while in Brussels there is often diversity of opinion based on less profound analysis. This book is a good illustration. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan.
