Secrecy and Power
I’ve been wanting for some time to mention Robert Kapan, a contributing writer to the Atlantic Monthly who I’ve had on my radar for some time. The first time I saw him was on television a few years ago being pitted against Robert Wright on the future of mankind. Kaplan, who can be characterized by the dour title of his year 2000 book The Coming Anarchy was, needless to say, not optimistic. It was strange to see a humanist like Kaplan dressed up in the pessimistic realism. I think of him as a humanist because despite the doomsday ring of his writing (that I’ve read) he has a twinge of idealism and faith in the power of man1 to if not perfect, stabilize and subdue the cruel world around him.
Another fascinating thing about Kaplan is that he is a modern day adventurer, zoning in on hotspots and danger with the kind of instinct that a Kobe Bryant has for a basketball or Ronaldo has for a foot(soccer)ball. I think of guys like “Livingstone, I presume”, Jesuit priests and Marco Polo when I read his work; far flung places, dangerous natives and forgotten geography.
A few months ago I read a small piece by him in The Atlantic which surveyed two such places, Eritrea and Yemen. The story was more brief and descriptive but it left a few open threads of discussion, threads that he has taken and presented in a piece that hardly conceals his opinion of who America is and what America is to do about the countries along the edge of civilization to which he is drawn.
This month he headlined The Atlantic with a sinister title: Supremacy by Stealth, a story in which he reveals 10 rules pertinent for a U.S. dominated world. I won’t attempt to summarize the article but I’ll point out things I thought were interesting. First is the establishment of the idea that the U.S. is irreconcilably an empire with troops in 65 countries around the world. His choice of focus is quite interesting – a deliberate discussion with frequent references to a perennial trouble spot to which we’ve become desensitized: Colombia.
The next thing perspective shift is his view of the U.S. military. We (I) have been given to seeing it “top down” with a large emphasis on generals, brigadier generals and CENTCOM. Kaplan describes things quite differently, emphasizing the actual soldiers themselves and the immediate commanders who come in direct contact with the conflict. He returns, over and over, to the multitalented special forces who must be vicious warriors at one moment then cultural ambassadors at the next. His model for the American soldier is Victor Joppolo, a character from a book called A Bell for Adano (I purchased the book for about 65 cents on Amazon). It reminded me of a story I heard from the conflict in Iraq: an American contingent of soldiers trying to protect a local religious leader and being mistaken for aggressors and as a crowd gathered and became more confrontational the commander told his soldiers to “take a knee” and “smile” to defuse the growing anger of the mob. Apparently it worked but I don’t think it’s in the playbook from U.S. Central Command. Imagine Donald Rumsfeld taking a knee. Okay, stop laughing, I’ve got more to say…
Kaplan brings up the Roman empire in the most novel of ways – his bullet point is to emulate second-century Rome but along the way he talks of America granting citizenship to its subjugates. I have never formally heard this and the more I think about it, the better an idea I think it is – what better way to endear yourself to others and provide a sense of unity? Rather than conquering a place and forcing people to endure a transition why not facilitate their participation in American prosperity? That this idea springs not from a disenfranchised protestor at a G8 summit but from the hardest of realists out there also grips me considerably. It is not logistically possible to grant the entire country of Iraq citizenship to the U.S. but I find the idea useful nevertheless with many minor steps to alleviate their suffering.
Finally, the realpolitik of the article is chilling. The stealth to which Kaplan refers in the article title is really the use of clandestine special forces, media influence and flexible rules of engagement. You can read from the article that Kaplan doesn’t believe in the UN as a peacekeeping presence and he harbors an acerbic cynicism for the street protestor. Imagine his world:
“The best information strategy is to avoid attention getting confrontations in the first place and to keep the public’s attention as divided as possible. We can dominate the world only quietly: off camera, so to speak. The moment the public focuses on a single crisis like the one in Iraq, that crisis is no longer analyzed on its merits: instead it becomes a rallying point around which lonely and alienated people in a global mass society can define themselves through an uplifting group identity, be it European, Muslim, anti-war intellectual, or whatever…”
“Our intelligence officers, back by commando detachments should in the future be given as much leeway as they require to get the job done, so that problems won’t fester to the point where we have to act in front of a battery of television cameras.”
I’ve only pointed out a few things from the article and it is important, if you want context, to read it yourself. But the essence is frightening, is it not? Next month’s Atlantic should prove quite interesting; many a response will find its way into the letters section. I’m not interested in a Noam Chomsky / Robert Scheer response(shrilly: The US is the bad guy! People want to make their own history! George Bush was not elected!) nor am I interested in Kaplan’s bedfellows (think Rumsfeld). I am interested in the moderate reaction – what, for example, might Ignatieff say in response to something like this? What about Tony Blair – how can the very definition of an idealist reconcile his perspective with this hard line?
What is also interesting is to interpolate the origin of these sentiments in Kaplan. He isn’t an entrenched fellow who just speculates on what he hears through “trusted sources” – he is out there on camels, Land Rovers and twin engine planes trying to capture what we are so safe from here in the U.S., in sleepy little communities like Brookings, South Dakota.
My own guess is that he’s jaded. What may have started as a love of adventure and different people has turned into a worrisome knot in the stomach: a ‘coming anarchy’, a pagan reality in which oppressors either dominate or get crushed. You can't travel off the main highway in Yemen or Afghanistan or Colombia and think (Bush! Clinton! Bush! Clinton!) - you rather feel trouble and insecurity as you realize how large and intractable the world is - how isolated and informationless the west must be, how something must be done but not knowing exactly how. My intuitions don’t lead me down as hard a path as Kaplan describes but of himself there is an accurate assessment one can glean in the words of his own article: people who are ‘area specialists’, the entrenched, hands-on sort who work the field are able to give more sophisticated descriptions of the outside world than caged policy analysts. They may not know how to solve what is out there but their information is top notch.
1Insert gender-specific language disclaimers here. I'm just going by convention.
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