Traveling Light.

• Author: Goltz, Thomas
• Position: Review

Robert D. Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East; and the Caucasus (New York: Random House, 2000), 364 pp., $26.95.

LIKE HIS previous works, Robert Kaplan's most recent opus, Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, is a study in prophylactic pessimism. It is also a strident plea for his mostly American readers to understand those beyond their borders without sentiment or excessive hope. American policymakers are urged to remember that, the juggernaut of globalization notwithstanding, the counties now emerged from the shadows of communism are not blank slates upon which the financiers and idealists of the West may write what they wish. For this message alone we should all be grateful to Kaplan.

For years, Kaplan has been a refreshing, if exceedingly dark, voice among American observers of foreign affairs. His Balkan Ghosts was allegedly Bill Clinton's bedside reading and has been widely cited as an unintended inhibition on America's intervention in the wars of Yugoslav succession. Eastward to Tartary, which Kaplan introduces as a sequel to Balkan Ghosts, covers a sprawling region extending from the southeastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, to the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, to the desert wastes of the Arabian Peninsula. He has roamed over a three-pronged region he defines as the New Near East, with Turkey at its geographic center, asking weighty questions of everyone from hitchhikers to intelligence agents in his search for insights about everything from national character to national interest. And, as in all of his books, he does this for the purpose of assaying the future.

That future, as Kaplan sees it, is unlikely to be very pretty. Democracy and market institutions require certain attitudes to work well, and those attitudes are scarce in most of the New Near East. He gives timely warning against mistaking the facade of democracy for the real thing, and against outsiders urging systems of governance onto societies not yet ready for them. Overall, Kaplan believes this entire region is in for a long period of bad government and frustrated material prospects.

Kaplan's traveling companions are not the usual headline-seeking hack-pack of parachute journalists, for whom one Sheraton hotel is much the same as another. Rather, we find Kaplan working out of down-market hostels, sniffing around the tangled past, most often in the company of Herodotus and Gibbon as his personal guides to the murky future.

When Kaplan is good, he is very good. His exegesis of why the post-communist societies of Romania and Bulgaria are in danger of being forgotten by the West--because we have "declared" them to be market-driven democracies successfully remade in our own narcissistic image--is right on the money. Kaplan sees a less stable scenario and a different, and deeper, dividing line:

With Romania's 20 million Orthodox Christians joined to NATO, a civilizational divide at Hungary's eastern border would be unlikely; with Romania outside, such a...