The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power by Robert Kaplan (Yale University Press, £20)
One could be forgiven for concluding that a perfectly sensible book lies within The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, the latest offering from the American journalist Robert Kaplan. In it, a case is made for what theorists of international relations call “realism”. That is, for an awareness that, in a complex world, powerful states must be able to acknowledge the reality both of competing virtues (the demands of freedom vs order, say) and of the more frequent responsibility to opt for the lesser of two evils. We are, in short, reminded that the best is the enemy of the good, and that the good is contingent: what works in the Balkans might not work in Afghanistan; what works in Ukraine might not work in Vietnam—or at points further north in the South China Sea. And so on.
But this is not a conventional book of “realist” analysis and prognostication. Instead, Kaplan advances his views through discussions of ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. There’s perhaps a nod here to John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, but Kaplan’s starting point is in his own telling more personal. Embedded with a unit of the US Marine Corps during the disastrous first battle of Fallujah in April 2004, he has a moment of clarity in which he recognises that his cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq has been a terrible mistake: “the bloody anarchy of all against all” was worse than the brutality of Saddam. “I had,” he declares, “failed my test as a realist,” and “the clinical depression I suffered for years afterward… led me to write this book.”
By my reckoning, The Tragic Mind is the ninth title Kaplan has published since 2004, but even as we mark the 20th anniversary of “shock and awe,” his sincerity cannot be gainsaid. On an earlier visit to Iraq, in 1986, he had stayed with Kurdish militias for 10 days, and came away with such a vivid picture of the Ba’athist regime’s “reputation for torture on almost an industrial scale” that when the chance came to overthrow it in the aftermath of 9/11, he was all in. Before long, he was honest and intelligent and well-informed enough to see that this was a blunder, and a culpable one at that.
The other error of judgement with which Kaplan seeks to reckon concerns his Balkan Ghosts. This work of history and travel writing first appeared in 1993 and describes the ancient and insoluble ethnic hatreds that, for Kaplan, frame the realities of political life in southeastern Europe. Bill Clinton read it, and was apparently dissuaded from intervening in the Yugoslav Wars as they reached their deadliest passage: if all this one-eyed cruelty and bloodshed is just the way things are over there, why bother? In Kaplan’s own estimation, “a book I wrote had the result, however unintended, of delaying a president’s response to mass murder in the Balkans.” Viewed from here, his turn to tragedy seems fitting.
Kaplan’s engagement with tragedy is neither profound nor particularly well-managed—though as this complex and often contested field of enquiry is far from his usual beat, it may feel appropriate to cut him some slack. At root, his approach is Hegelian. He is interested less in what tragedies themselves might have to disclose than in their capacity to validate his notions of the tragic as a mode of thinking that alerts us to the constraints that, whether or not we acknowledge them, determine the scope of our moral and political decision-making. For Kaplan, the tragic mind understands the obligation to adjudicate not just between right and wrong, but between competing models of right; the ineradicable role of irrationality in human thought and action; the ease with which our deeds, despite the best of intentions, can transform order into chaos; the flimsiness of the dividing line between civilization and barbarism; the awful necessity of warfare. In sum, the tragic mind grasps that political and military leaders do not enjoy the luxuries of the commentariat: they are in a position akin to that of Agamemnon deciding whether to sacrifice his daughter or his army’s chances against Troy. Come what may, somebody is going to be righteously angry: “here is the true pathos of high office.”
Although Kaplan’s style—veering back and forth between the declamatory and the quasi-aphoristic—can grate (tragedy is “a triangle formed by ambition, violence, and anarchy”), he, for the most, part writes well. And when he turns to particular tragic plays, the results can be impressive. He is good on Shakespeare’s Iago, as he is on Euripides’s Trojan Women and on Sophocles’s Oedipus as a study in “the degree to which men deceive themselves”.
And yet, despite Kaplan’s awareness that one of the principal subjects of tragedy is our inability to comprehend either ourselves or the worlds to which we belong, he is wedded to the conviction (Hegel again) that tragedies impose meaning on the dilemmas and anguish they depict.
Take his treatment of Julius Caesar. He asserts that, in the act of murdering Caesar “because he has become a dictator”, the “tribunes” reduce him to the “poor, forked, fallible, physical body he undoubtedly is”—thereby opening the door to anarchy “until another Roman dictator rises to restore order”. That Kaplan should mistake Caesar’s killers for “tribunes” rather than members of the senatorial elite feels like more than a slip. These aristocratic conspirators make it clear that although Caesar’s tyranny is something they fear, it is something that he has not yet either obtained or sought to obtain; but because their fear is real enough, they convince themselves that they must act while they can. The rub is that Shakespeare’s Caesar has already refused the crown, and that Shakespeare takes pains to portray him as physically and mentally enfeebled: an epileptic, a poor swimmer and deaf in one ear; one who is hesitant, imperceptive, superstitious, and given over to the self-mythologisation of former glories. But if he must be transformed into an overwhelming threat in order to justify his extra-judicial killing, then so be it. Not to remove him from the scene would, the patricians believe, threaten the privileged position conferred on them within the Roman republic.
The play’s tragedy inheres in the consequences of the high-minded untruths that Brutus and the rest of them tell themselves about what they are doing and why they are doing it—not the least of which is the destruction of the political system they sought to defend. Shakespeare’s Cicero shrugs at the ways in which people “construe things after their fashion / Clean from the purposes of the things themselves,” and it’s curious that, in prosecuting his case about the tragic necessity of order, Kaplan should be quite so stark a case in point.
Here we arrive at the most interesting feature of The Tragic Mind. The discrepancy between Kaplan’s tragic theorising and the plays that he seeks to elucidate not only does an imperfect job of conveying his counsel on the way things are—it also suggests that the way he thinks things are might be as wide of the mark as his literary criticism. If Julius Caesar, shielded by the patterns of artistic design, can be hustled into conformity with Kaplan’s theories, then the one-thing-after-another of history has no chance of making it past him unscathed. If the history and politics of the Balkans need to be reduced to a series of folk tales about ancient enmities in order to make a case against the post-Cold War liberal triumphalism of the early 1990s, why worry? If reports of Saddam’s brutality heard from Kurdish informants exert a greater hold on one’s imagination than the poison gas and nerve agents used to murder those same Kurds less than two years after one spoke with them, how could it be otherwise?
Realists like Kaplan disdain the teleological fictions through which Marxists and liberal internationalists distort the world, but on this account show themselves no less dependent on wishful thinking. It’s just that instead of cleaving to the promise of an idealised future, they are attached to a hypostatised version of the status quo—of the status quo, that is, as they misconstrue it.
Rather than probing this attachment, Kaplan’s book is an attempt to rescue the dignity and solemnity of the realist worldview from the terrible consequences of which it has been the author—to remind his readers that “passion” of one kind or another “should not be allowed to distort analysis” in shouldering the burden of geopolitical greatness. If I might adapt the famous quip attributed to Gandhi about the desirability of western civilisation, a book in which tragedy is used to explore the tensions at the heart of “realism” as Kaplan understands it would be a very good idea.
