Robert Kaplan’s recent short book “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power” (New Haven–London, Yale University Press, 2023) is a treatise on the moral psychology of leadership. Kaplan is one of America’s most prolific writers (he has written more than twenty books), and he produces with adept talent, accessible writing that conveys great insight. Like his previous book “Adriatic” in 2022, “The Tragic Mind” has a retrospective quality: the experienced American Jewish writer looks back on a long public career and talks about books that have “nourished” and shaped him, as well as the lessons (often bitter) he learned. People who are overwhelmed by the study of Politics and “politics”, with leadership and leaders, deserve to study this book diligently. Also, those who are concerned about the direction of the West and its American leadership, the book contains many essential and disturbing elements, which must be properly evaluated.
In the second text of this continuation, we recorded that the famous and great author Robert Kaplan is an American Jew, a former neoconservative [“Neocon”servative], preacher and apologist for Western hegemony under US domination, who served his military service in Israel. He is also the Robert Strausz Hupé Professor of Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). FPRI is a prestigious American international policy think tank based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which conducts research on international geopolitics, international relations, and international security in various regions of the world.
Robert Kaplan is not only a great writer, but he is also a politically active actor in his country: He has served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Council since 2009 and was a select member of the “Chief of Naval Operations’ Executive Committee.” [The Committee examines issues related to the role of naval power in the international strategic environment. It reviews current and proposed policies of the U.S. Navy to provide advice on enhancing its effectiveness in supporting national security policy. It also recommends alternative policies in light of evolving political, economic, technological, military, and social conditions.] It is therefore worth tracing and carefully studying his work, a useful “stack of historical snapshots” that, when viewed with methodical focus, ultimately present a moving image, a revealing “cinematic record” of historical and current reality.
In his aforementioned recent book on “The Tragic Mind”, Kaplan’s latest contribution to geopolitics, the gods (not God) are presented: Citing Sophocles’ tragedy “Aias”, Kaplan characteristically writes “and the gods love the wise” (“τοὺς δὲ σώφρονας θεοὶ φιλοῦσι”). Based mainly on Greek tragedians, Kaplan focuses on a page from the book of the British geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder (Sir Halford John Mackinder, 1861 –1947). Mackinder, the founder of geopolitical analysis, “twinned” the study of geography with religious belief systems. In particular, he believed that the difference between Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity was particularly important for world affairs. For Kaplan, a wise geopolitical approach certainly takes into account both geographical maps and certainly … the Greeks. He writes: “Geopolitics – the battle of space and power, fought in a geographical context – is inherently tragic.” Tragedians “know that there is a higher mechanism at work. This higher mechanism means nothing less than a form of order beyond that of men and women. The mechanism may be unjust, but like necessity, it must be accepted.” Kaplan recommends that leaders meditate on Hamlet (Act Three, Scene Two, where the King says: “Each of our wills is a play of chance. Our thoughts are our own, but their outcome is not ours at all.”) Unlike most of Kaplan’s books, “The Tragic Mind” is not simply a eloquent analysis of contemporary geopolitics. His books usually have a distinctive and clear signature: either a deep “immersion” in a conflicted region of the world, or a presentation and offer of a feasible model of humanitarian governance. His references are always fueled by knowledge drawn from his vast reading of travel books, philosophy, and history. But this book is truly a work about the human soul and its relationship to the assessment of reality.
Although the map is, as Kaplan says, “the foundation of all knowledge” (“understanding world events begins with maps and ends with Shakespeare”), relying solely on geography for geopolitics is an “underestimation” of it, because strategy is ultimately in the “province of the heart.” He quotes Hamlet, as he brandishes the skull of the jester Yorick: “This skull had a tongue and could sing once.” A moral psychology is therefore necessary, especially the cultivation of the virtue of humility. Kaplan again finds the guiding lofty meaning in Sophocles’ “Aias”: “as the day declines, so it raises up all men” (A day alone raises or crushes all men) human).
At a time when we hear so much about the prominent importance of the Anglo-American acronym S.T.E.M. (“Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics” – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, as a word = “shoot”) as the trunk of the right education for our future, Kaplan emphasizes elsewhere: Great leaders must read great books! The reading list includes the ancient Greek tragedians, the philosophers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Camus, and among the writers, Herman Melville. [Melville’s characters are all preoccupied with the same intense, superhuman, and eternal search for the Absolute among its relative manifestations, an obsession with the limits of knowledge, an obsession that leads to questions about the existence and nature of God, about the indifference of the universe, and about the problem of evil.]
Kaplan expresses himself very clearly: “In Greek tragedy, an ordered universe—the opposite of chaos—is always a virtue.” The Greeks were rightly terrified of “violence without subject.” “Anarchy was the greatest, the most fundamental fear of the ancient Greeks.” But this fear did not paralyze them. Not only did it focus the Greek mind on reality, it taught the Greeks the essential lesson of strategic modesty. Quoting Ajax again, he writes: “For in a city laws never retain their authority unless there is some fear nearby.” Indeed, in the various events of life, fear, properly cultivated, offers anxious and stressful, but useful foresight.
As Kaplan reflects on his own life experience, he writes: “The only way to escape ambition is through fear. Not personal fear, like the one I encountered in Iraq, but a godly fear, of the greater powers at work.” The problem with American politics is not simply that it has been created by people who do not understand the places they would govern, but, critically, their mindset is all wrong—driven by the ancient Greek “hubris.” Policymakers should take seriously Arthur Schopenhauer’s comments that “vanity pervades all human endeavor” and that “the whole world is a place of atonement.” Or to recall Shakespeare again, we quote from “Antony and Cleopatra” in Act 4, Scene 15, as Mark Antony dies, Cleopatra says: “There is nothing remarkable under the visiting moon.”
They need Nietzsche’s insight that the god Dionysus may visit us at any moment. One thinks again of the passage from Sophocles’ Ajax: “Never speak a word of insolence against the gods.”
The Greeks had another crucial lesson to teach. The problem facing power is not evil, but the choice between two competing goods. On this, the astute Kaplan states: “As the Greeks defined it, tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good but the triumph of one good over another good, a triumph that causes pain. The removal of Saddam Hussein was a good, but it replaced a greater good: a sample, a semblance, a semblance of order, an apparent order at least.”
Kaplan finds particularly essential the recurring refrain throughout Albert Camus’s book “The Revolted Man” (L’ Homme révolté, 1951): “seek justice always knowing that your best efforts must be limited if they are to remain good!”
“All previous generations in human history have been obsessed with order,” Kaplan writes. Almost all Westerners alive today know only an unprecedented security. Kaplan then turns to Freud for the warning: “Civilized society is constantly threatened by disintegration,” from the book “Civilization as a Source of Unhappiness,” written by Sigmund Freud in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 (“Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” “The Discomfort in Civilization”). Man is always threatened by countless sufferings and pains, as stated in “Oedipus the Tyrant” by Chorus in his final speech: “So that, as we wait to see the last day, let us not bless any mortal before he reaches the last hour of life without sorrow and pain.”
Worse than this is that not only do we have no experience of insecurity, but we also despise our ancestors. The great Aleksandr Isaakevich Solzhenitsyn observed that “no race will survive long with a cult of youth,” because order is inherited exclusively from the ancestors. Kaplan worries that China’s ancestor worship gives it the advantage in the current geopolitical confrontation with the United States. Not only that, but the West is now associated with the suffocating restriction of political ideas. Westerners have been led to believe that only modern anonymous bureaucratic states of “experts” can provide the necessary social and political order. The policy of the United States and its Western imitators and lackeys consistently despises and devalues the racial and national allegiances and allegiances that in most societies provide order. This disdain, this contempt, has led to chaos in every post-Cold War American ambition and has been a disaster for millions of people in the rest of the world. American policymakers need to learn and realize that there are several varieties of appropriate political forms. For example, apart from a romanticism around the British crown, almost no “progressive” Westerner takes monarchy seriously. But Kaplan believes that this is at least a historical and practical mistake, because monarchy distributes social order, exploiting the fact that “at the end of the day, tradition is everything.” He further points out that, by comparison, the most humanitarian countries in the Middle East are all monarchies.
Moderation is essential in policymaking. Kaplan argues that the last US president to understand tragedy was George W. Bush, the “Senior.” “Our last aristocrat in the White House” knew and understood war, so his strategic modesty defined his tenure.”
Kaplan, commenting on Shakespeare’s play, notes that “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra” are set in distinctly different political moments in Roman history. The former is about a rising provincial Rome, while the latter is about imperial Rome. Antony’s foreign adventure ends in disaster. Kaplan believes that America should set as the supreme superstructure of its thought Shakespeare’s analytical approach, where universality removes the audacity of self-interest. U.S. policy circles must recognize that the more power is spread across the territory, the more friction is experienced: “The world has had stories and traditions that are not subject to America’s historical experience with democracy,” Kaplan writes. He further worries that our technology is a false friend, promoting the illusion of security. In one fascinating observation, he recounts that when you board a warship, you enter “a sensory environment where every hard surface is gray and you can practically smell the heat of the liquid crystal displays. The tension here is as great as that under real fire in Iraq, since the enemy is now a “click” away. The fog of war is as thick at sea as it is in the desert…” Tragic thinking can help us effectively confront our illusions.
Moderation in policymaking is essential. Kaplan reminds readers that recent US policy failures include not only Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Ukraine, but also, without military involvement, Nigeria, South Africa and Ethiopia. He also argues that the last US President to understand tragedy was George Herbert Walker Bush, “the Sr.” As he claims, “Our last aristocrat in the White House” knew and understood war, so strategic modesty defined his tenure. The same is true of President Eisenhower, who showed courage and restraint when urged to use nuclear weapons during the Korean War. Since Bush the Elder, no American president has fought himself, and this is especially true of the American political elite. Kaplan believes that personal readiness for war is vital to sound policy, and that is why he has high hopes for the American military academies as a source of tomorrow’s leaders: “That is why the most emotionally sophisticated students I have encountered as a teacher were in the military war colleges.” If this mental preparation is lacking, the soldier and other leaders must turn to great books: “In this endeavor, the classics of literature will ultimately be a more solid and useful guide than any social science methodology, for all those who have not had personal experience with war and death.”
Discussing the complex and intricate bureaucracy of the US, Kaplan adds another revealing and dark layer to our moral psychology: Yes, he maintains a rivalry and a disparaging view of Putin as Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello, but he makes it clear that Washington bureaucrats, civil servants, people with clearly less knowledge and self-awareness than he, “value the lives of others” – and of their compatriots – cheaply and very cheaply. [Iago is a Machiavellian, ruthless schemer and manipulator of those around him, since he is often referred to as “honest Iago”, demonstrating his ability to deceive other characters, so that they not only do not suspect him, but count on him as the most honest person possible. evil is compatible and even seems to be associated with exceptional powers of will and intellect.]
War is the fate of men, and it is indeed interesting that Kaplan invokes the themes of monarchy, aristocracy, and the divine with which we associate the war ethos. Just think of the funeral of the last English Queen Elizabeth, the religious ritual, and its utterly military character.
We wish Kaplan had studied the Russian geopolitical thinker, Alexander Dugin. The theoretical writings of this particular Russian geopolitician probably surpass Kaplan and are constantly relevant. Dugin was probably wrongly called “Putin’s brain,” but he has nevertheless been a strong supporter of the Ukraine war from the beginning. We know that he has suffered a huge personal blow for his support of the national cause: His only daughter was murdered by a car bomb intended for him, as she borrowed his car. Dugin’s geopolitical thinking is largely based on Martin Heidegger’s view of the Greeks. It is worth noting that Heidegger was deeply crushed by the Greek tragedy only during his unspoken National Socialist years (1933-46).
Dugin finds Heidegger’s approach to the Greeks extremely appealing, especially as they prepare to face annihilating danger. Kaplan believes that tragedies teach the mitigation of risk, Dugin the exact opposite. Dugin is moved by the fate of the indomitable Prometheus, which is a hymn to the indomitable human spirit, which dares to fight even the gods. This difference in the way of interpreting the tragedies shows that the proverb from the words of the seer Locoon in Virgil’s Aeneid still holds true: “Beware of the Danaans even when they bring gifts” (timeo Danaos et dona ferentes).
The Greek world had, as Nietzsche says, the “morality of the star”, it was brilliant and merciless, with one purpose: to maintain the same unchanging orbit. Without a doubt, the gods have virtues to teach us, but those who attempt geopolitical analysis should perhaps ask themselves what lessons God should teach us.
“May you live in interesting times”. The saying comes from the English diplomat and politician Sir Austen Joseph Chamberlain (1863–1937), in a speech in March 1936, when he mentioned that a friend had told him that there was a Chinese curse that took the form of this saying.
The English diplomat Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen (1886–1971) in his book Diplomat in Peace and War (1949) writes that in 1936, a friend told him about a Chinese curse: “Better to be a dog in times of peace than a man in times of chaos!”
[The expression actually comes from the 3rd volume of the collection of 40 traditional short stories (1627), by Feng Meng Long, [(1574–1646) historian, novelist and poet of the late Ming dynasty (1628 to 1644)], with the general title “Xingshi Hengjian” – “Stories to Awaken the World”. In the 5th stanza interlude from the 3rd story “The Oil Vendor Defeats the Queen of Flowers”]
“May you live in interests times” is therefore an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. The expression is ambiguous, partly bitter as well as ironic: The “interesting” times of life are usually also periods of trouble.
In exile in Switzerland, shortly before the Russian Revolution, the great Lenin used to say: “There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.” This apt and concise phrase was wrongly attributed to Lenin, for the first time in this form in 2001 in the anti-war article “We Will Not Be Silenced,” by the then Labour MP for Glasgow, George Galloway, on Saturday, October 20, 2001 in the newspaper “The Guardian.”
Indeed, it is a simplistic platitude to say that “we live in historic times”, in the “most interesting times”, while in reality we are implementing a platitude attributed to Lenin, (although he probably did not say that “decades can pass and nothing happens, while then days and weeks and a few months pass and decades happen”). But now that such a correspondence has occurred in specific parts of the world (such as in Ukraine, starting in 2022, or in the Middle East, suddenly after about 20 years), I can say that entire decades “happen” in months, weeks or even days, for the entire global system! And the system is indeed global, because we now live in a unified, more anxious and at the same time more claustrophobic world, without “exceptions”, due to the way in which technology has not conquered geography but simply shrunk it, so that we are all “stuck” with each other, as the obstacles of time and distance have been minimized.
Alexander Dugin provided a popular “explanation” of the theories of Samuel Huntington, whose “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” posited precisely those developments, which after about three decades have now passed. However, we do not live intellectually following “in the footsteps” of the American and British thinkers, transmitters and carriers of the dominant “West”. But, we consciously lean towards the side of contemporary or almost contemporary European thinkers of the real, Continental National European Right, such as Martin Heidegger, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. For those whose experience in the fields of international politics and worldview is limited, our texts will prove to be a useful supplement and perhaps even a “course corrector”. Far from ungrounded prejudices, demonological distancing and reservations, even if we “live in interesting times”.
