Is Robert Kaplan becoming a starry-eyed optimist?
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For the last three decades, the globe-trotting journalist and essayist has chronicled many of the darkest corners of the planet, from the tribal badlands of Yemen and Pakistan to the killing fields of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, and the Balkans. Along the way, he has developed a uniquely pessimistic, contrarian view of the world: more Fyodor Dostoyevsky than Thomas Friedman, with a little Sun Tzu thrown in for good measure. He speaks often of the need for a "tragic" view of history -- recognition of the limits of power when faced with the more determinative forces of geography and culture.
In that sense, Kaplan's writing has often been a useful corrective to the techno-utopianism that characterizes much commentary on U.S. foreign policy -- the overweening aura of cultural and institutional superiority that trips up both liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike -- even if he has been generally wrong about a world that has gotten dramatically better over the last few decades, not more chaotic and violent. "The best guide to foreign policy is to think tragically to avoid tragedy," he once wrote.
Sometimes, Kaplan's healthy cynicism can lead to rhetorical overreach, a penchant for seeing monsters under every bed. For instance, in a 2000 essay called "The Dangers of Peace," Kaplan saw peril even in post-Cold War stability, writing: "A long period of peace in an advanced technological society like ours could lead to great evils, and the ideal of a world permanently at peace and governed benignly by a world organization is not an optimistic view of the future but a dark one."
He has also attracted his fair share of critics, from the Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan, who has accused Kaplan of indulging in "cheap pessimism," to a much less polite David Rieff, who ripped Kaplan's 2005 book Imperial Grunts as "boneheaded nonsense" in a vicious cover story for the New Republic. Coming just as the American empire seemed to be meeting its Waterloo in Iraq, Kaplan's paean to the troops landed with a thud in public, even if it proved more influential among generals and Special Forces operators.
Kaplan has always been at his best when channeling the anxieties of the developing world, not the fears of the U.S. military. And if Surrender or Starve and The Coming Anarchy represented Kaplan at his darkest, Monsoon, his newest work, finds the author waxing positively giddy about the rise of Asia. As he told Foreign Policy's Tom Ricks, "This is my most optimistic and -- hopefully, that is -- nuanced work."
Indeed it is. In a sweeping narrative that traces Kaplan's journeys along the Indian Ocean littoral -- the coastline of the world's third-largest body of water, which stretches from Africa in the west to Indonesia and Malaysia in the east -- he deftly weaves history, reportage, and grand strategy cobbled together from several previously published essays into a coherent portrait of an undercovered region whose importance will only grow in the decades to come. "No image," he writes, "epitomizes the spirit of our borderless world, with its civilizational competition on one hand and intense, inarticulate yearning for unity on the other, as much as the Indian Ocean map."
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