The Books: “Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos” (Robert Kaplan)

History Bookshelf:

warriorp.gifNext book on this shelf is called Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert Kaplan.

The main set-up of this book, while not original, is a really good read in Kaplan’s hands. Kaplan’s first book published after September 11 (but very soon after – so the bulk of it was probably written pre-Sept. 11) – Warrior Politics looks to ancient and not-so-ancient philosophers, thinkers, and leaders for ways to look at the challenges facing the world today. So we’ve got a chapter on Sun-Tzu, a chapter on Kant, a chapter on Machiavellie, Hobbes, Malthus – all those big guys.

I’ll post a bit from the Machiavelli chapter. Mainly cause I dig Machiavelli. Also cause I just finished His Excellency (Ellis’ superb biography of George Washington) – and there’s quite a Machiavellian strain in Washington. Not because he sat around and studied Machiavelli, but because he LIVED it – in the early years of his life, fighting the French and Indian War, and with other aspects of his life (changing crops, land acquisition, becoming commander-in-chief, fighting the Revolutionary War). It was not just VIRTUE that got him through all this stuff, and he thought, actually, that “patriotism” was not a reason to do anything. Or it was all well and good, but it wouldn’t SUSTAIN anything. Quote from George himself:

Men may speculate as they will, they may talk of patriotism; they may draw a few examples from current story � but whoever builds upon it as a sufficient basis for conducting a long and bloody war will find themselves deceived in the end � For a long time it may of itself push men to action, to bear much, to encounter difficulties, but it will not endure unassisted by Interest.

Over and over and over in his life, he faced this. He believed in INTEREST, that was the only way to establish relationships between human beings, and also between nations. He didn’t believe in “trust” – at least not in any pure ideal way. He was suspicious of it. He knew that everyone acted through their own Interests – and if they didn’t, or if they said they didn’t, they were probably lying. Which is a very Machiavellian concept.


From Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert Kaplan.

The Prince, as well as Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, are full of bracing insight. Machiavelli writes that foreign invaders will support local minorities over the majority in order “to weaken those who are powerful within the country itself” — which is how European governments behaved in the Middle East in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when they armed ethnic minorities against the Ottoman rulers. He writes about the difficulty in toppling existing regimes because rulers, no matter how cruel, are surrounded by loyalists, who will suffer if the ruler is deposed; in this, he anticipated the difficulty of replacing dictators such as Saddam Hussein. “All armed prophets succeed whereas unarmed ones fail,” he writes, anticipating the danger of a bin Laden. Savonarola was an unarmed prophet who failed, while the medieval popes, along with Moses and Mohammed, were armed prophets who triumphed. Hitler was an armed prophet, and it required an extraordinary effort to vanquish him. Only when Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would not defend Communist regimes in Eastern Europe with force was it possible for the unarmed prophet Vaclav Havel to succeed.

Nevertheless, Machiavelli may go too far. Wasn’t he himself an unarmed prophet who succeeded in influencing statesmen for centuries with only a book? Wasn’t Jesus an unarmed prophet whose followers helped bring down the Roman empire? One must always keep in mind that ideas do matter, for better and worse, and to reduce the world merely to power struggles is to make cynical use of Machiavelli. But some academics and intellectuals go too far in the other direction: they try to reduce the world only to ideas, and to neglect power.

Values — good or bad — Machiavelli says, are useless without arms to back them up: even a civil society requires police and a credible judiciary to enforce its laws. Therefore, for policymakers, projecting power comes first; values come second. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy,” writes the political scientist Thomas Schelling. Abraham Lincoln, the ultimate prince, understood this when he said that American geography was suited for one nation, not two, and that his side would prevail, provided it was willing to pay the cost in blood. Machiavelli’s prince, Cesare Borgia, failed to unite Italy against Pope Julius, but Lincoln was sufficiently ruthless to target the farms, homes, and factories of Southern civilization in the latter phase of the Civil War. Thus Lincoln reunited the temperate zone of North America, preventing it from falling prey to European powers and creating a mass society under uniform laws.

Virtue is more complex than it seems. Because human rights are a self-evident good, we believe that by promoting them we are being virtuous. But that is not always the case. If the United States had pressed too hard for human rights in Jordan, King Hussein might have been weakened during his struggles for survivial in the 1970s and 1980s. The same is true in Egype, where a US policy dominated completely by human rights concerns would weaken President Hosni Mubarak, whose successor would likely have even less regard for human rights. The same is true for Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, the Republic of Georgia, and many other countries. Though regimes such as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and China are oppressive, the power vacuum that would likely replace them would cause even more suffering.

For Machiavelli, virtue is the opposite of righteousness. With their incessant harping on values, today’s Republicans and Democrats alike often sound less like Renaissance pragmatists than like medieval churchmen, dividing the world sanctimoniously between good and evil.

Isaiah Berlin’s observation that Machiavelli’s values are moral but not Christian raises the possibility of several just but incompatible value systems existing side by side. For example, had Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore subscribed to America’s doctrine of individiual liberties, the meritocracy, public honesty, and economic success fostered by his mild authoritarianism might have been impossible. While Singapore ranks near the top of key indexes on economic freedom — freedom from property confiscation, from capricious tax codes, from burdensome regulations, and so on — the West African state of Benin, a parliamentary democracy, stands in the bottom quarter of such indexes.

Machiavelli’s ideal is the “well-governed patria,” not individual freedom. The “well-governed patria” may at times be incompatible with an aggressive media, whose search for the “truth” can yield little more than embarrassing facts untempered by context, so the risk of exposure may convince leaders to devise new methods of secrecy. The more the barons of punditry demand “morality” in complex situations overseas, where all the options are either bad or involve great risk, the more virtu our leaders may need in order to deceive them. Just as the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe undermined political authority, so too do the media. While suspicion of power has been central to the American Creed, presidents and military commanders will have to regain breathing space from media assaults to deal with the challenges of split-second decision making in future warfare.

Machiavelli’s ideals influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. The Founders certainly had more faith in ordinary people than Machiavelli did. Nevertheless, their recollection of the debacle of Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentary rule in mid-seventeenth-century England made them healthily suspicious of the masses. “Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” writes Alexander Hamilton, echoing Machiavelli’s (and, unwittingly, the ancient Chinese). That is why James Madison preferred a “republic” (in which the whims of the masses are filtered through “their representatives and agents”) over direct “democracy”, in which the people “exercise the government in person …”

The core of Machiavelli’s wisdom is that primitive necessity and self-interest drive politics, and that this can be good in itself, because competing self-interests are the basis for compromise, while stiff moral arguments lead to war and civil conflict, rarely the better options.

Machiavelli exphasizes that “all the things of men are in motion and cannot remain fixed.” Thus, primitive necessity is irresistible, because, as Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield explains, “A man or a country may be able to afford generosity today but what of tomorrow?” The United States may have the power to intervene in East Timor today, but then can we afford to fight in the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula tomorrow? The answer may well be yes. If we have the means to stop a large-scale human rights tragedy, it is a good in and of itself to do so — provided that we confront our capabilities not only for this day, but for the next. In an age of constant crises, “anxious foresight” must be the centerpiece of any prudent policy.

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