Deconstructing Kaplan

With the exception of a lovely Atlantic profile of Sam Huntngton, I've never really cared for most of Robert D. Kaplan's writings. I fear that part of this is born out of petty jealousy. Kaplan has my dream job, a bewitching m?lange of travel writer and analyst of world politics. It's as if P.J. O'Rourke had given up writing to entertain and instead tried writing for policy elites -- and then those policy elites actually took him seriously. Part of it is more substantial, however. According to numerous accounts, Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts and its "ancient hatreds" thesis convinced Bill Clinton not to intervene in Bosnia during the earlier years of his presidency. Well, now I'm jealous of David Lipsky. In today's New York Times Book Review, Lipsky does a number on Robert D. Kaplan's latest book, Imperial Grunts -- and, by extension, Kaplan's entire body of work. The good parts: [T]he book goes to pieces immediately. The first problem is headgear. Kaplan's got both his hats on at the same time, and the travel writer (who likes flavors and vistas) keeps barging in. "Who here was Al Qaeda? I asked myself, licking my fingers after devouring a greasy chicken in a sidewalk restaurant filled with armed youngsters." The next one is my favorite: "We were suddenly going out on a nighttime hit of a compound just outside Gardez. There would be no time for the steak and shrimp dinner that had been prepared." And it's a shame such well-traveled eyes are welded between numb ears: Details are "grisly," murders are "gruesome"; you hear "faint" echoes but "shrill" cries; "chiseled" bodies cross "manicured" landscapes; troops become "hardened," resemblances grow "uncanny." Kaplan is trying for fine writing - literary special effects - but he doesn't resist the old grooves, and if a writer can't avoid stock expression, it suggests imprisonment at the conceptional level. Kaplan keeps getting into scrapes at the keyboard. "I wanted a visual sense of the socioeconomic stew in which Al Qaeda flourished." You smile in admiration, as at something rare, like a triple play; it's a double mixed metaphor.... Like many writers and houseguests, Kaplan needs an argument to get his best juices flowing. But here he's on a trip to utopia, and what emerges are surprising opinions. He meets a Filipino and observes: "His smiling, na?ve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism." He chastises the "elite" for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war "every bit as sanctified as the nation's others." The longtime Kaplan reader pulls out the older books. Vietnam is the war he's described as a "mire," a "mistake" and "a disaster.".... Kaplan, the realist, has elsewhere defined his realism as "an unrelenting record of uncomfortable truths. . . . The realism exhibited here may appear radical." In fact, it tends toward the cozily familiar: like evolutionary psychology, his findings don't so much upset conventional wisdom as support it with a surprising pillar. Most situations, however novel, will submit to cold-war realpolitik and the "he's-our-son-of-a-bitch" alliance. Then there are Kaplan's predictions. He has amassed the same strikes-and-gutters record as anyone, with no loss of confidence. A year before 9/11, he foresaw the Taliban "inexorably" losing power in Afghanistan. He warned that the Caspian Sea region could become our decade's Vietnam (and so presumably sanctified). The central eye-popper in "The Coming Anarchy" - beyond Canada's "peaceful dissolution" - was that various stresses "will make the United States less of a nation than it is today." ("That was wrong," he flatly told a C-Span audience this spring. "You write a magazine piece, and if it's relevant for six months, you're happy.") That last admission is pretty mind-boggling -- because more than six months after "The Coming Anarchy" came out, Kaplan had converted its central thesis into a book-length treatment, The Ends of the Earth -- which I reviewed and panned here. [OK, smart guy, what about your own predictions?--ed. Maybe, just maybe, I've made a mistake or two. On the other hand, I was right about J. Lo!]