Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos.

• Author: Rozen, Laura
• Position: Political booknotes: pagan morality

WARRIOR POLITICS: Why Leadership Demands A Pagan Ethos

by Robert Kaplan Random House, $22.50

THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMUNITY has never forgiven journalist Robert Kaplan for his award-winning 1993 book Balkan Ghosts, whose depiction of ferocious ethnic hatred in the former Yugoslavia is said to have spooked Bill Clinton into withholding U.S. troops from Bosnia until late 1995, until more than 200,000 people had been slaughtered.

Though Kaplan in fact advocated U.S. intervention in Bosnia as vital to our strategic interest, he is persona non grata to humanitarians horrified by his dark view of the world. In Warrior Politics, Kaplan summons the great classical writers on foreign policy and conflict to make his case for a "realist" American poli-abroad. Those who favor U.S. intervention may not appreciate Kaplan's prescription for an American foreign policy based on self-interest rather than humanitarianism. But what is valuable about Kaplan's latest book is that it forces even his opponents to consider global developments--from population explosion and environmental degradation to post-colonial breakdown--and their impact on our role in the world from a point of view different than the one found in conventional news and diplomatic coverage.

"This is not an essay about what to think," Kaplan writes in the opening pages of Warrior Politics, "but about how to think." Specifically, Kaplan wishes us to think harder about how U.S. values appear to the rest of the world. Developing countries try to emulate America's democratic capitalism which, Kaplan argues, places a premium on putting forth an image of strength. "If we are weak militarily--if we aren't able to meet the rising challenges of warriors--our political values may be eclipsed worldwide," he writes. To bolster this assertion, Kaplan embarks on a survey of great thinkers on war and statesmanship, including Hannibal, Thucydides, and Machiavelli, and, to a lesser degree, Churchill, Kant, and Hobbes, and explains how the lessons they offer apply to U.S. foreign policy.

Kaplan views ancient Athens as the best parallel to the modern U.S., arguing that both societies' affluence softened them to the ever-present barbarism that is the downfall of great societies. Soon after Pericles delivered his famous funeral oration on the virtues of the Athenian citizenry, a plague swept the city and those same citizens turned on each other like beasts. "Thus," Kaplan concludes, "the more socially and economically...