Robert Kaplan - Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

Timely as well as thoughtful. Kaplans warnings about Osama bin Laden, bioterrorism, and a volatile future were prescient when they were written, well before September 11, 2001.

The National Interest

An important book that cautions against the well-intentioned liberal idea that we should export the political ideas that have worked in this country to areas of the world that lack our history, literacy, economic success, and egalitarian culture.

Houston Chronicle

A provocative book. Tough measures and tragic choices will be necessary to win the war on terror, and revisiting Kaplans preferred political thinkers will hardly lead us astray.

National Review

Kaplan skillfully captures the relevance of classical political theory for todays leaders, whether they manage crises in the boardroom or the Oval Office.

William S. Cohen, former secretary of defense

The reason I have come to admire Bob Kaplans little book is its refusal to apologize for its analogies. This is so refreshing. What Kaplan is sayingand what Hobbes and Machiavelli and some of the Founders saidwas that such realism is in fact more moral than idealism. Idealism in state craft is based on an abdication of responsibilityto govern the world as it is.

Andrew Sullivan

I read Warrior Politics with fascination. Kaplan makes a persuasive case that the insights of major philosophers are relevant to modern security problems. This book will be read by scholars, but it should also be read by those responsible today for making the decisions that affect our national security.

William J. Perry, former secretary of defense

Warrior Politics should be read by every citizen deeply concerned about Americas role in the world.

Newt Gingrich

Kaplan makes a compelling case. A lively philosophical run through the history and the classic works of ancient Greece and Rome, and the writings of Hobbes, Sun-Tzu, Malthus and Machiavelli, among others.

Barrons

A profound and timely meditation on twenty-first-century global politics and Americas place in it. Deeply versed in classical scholarship, Robert Kaplan shows how the philosophers and historians of Ancient Greece and Rome offer vital lessons for American leaders today.

John Gray, professor of European thought, London School of Economics

A timely brave-new-world primer almost impossibly rich in quotable maxims. Essential ammunition for any debate about what to do next.

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

A fascinating intellectual exercise.

Newsweek

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the bestselling author of eight previous books on foreign affairs and travel, including Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth, The Coming Anarchy, and Eastward to Tartary. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War

An Empire Wilderness: Travels into Americas Future

The Ends of the Earth:
From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia,
a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

Soldiers of God:
With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine

The side that knows when to fight and when not will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted.

SUN-TZU

Anyone wishing to see what is to be must consider what has been: all the things of this world in every era have their counterparts in ancient times.

MACHIAVELLI

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2003

Copyright 2002 by Robert D. Kaplan

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York in 2001.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Kaplan, Robert D.
Warrior politics : why leadership demands a Pagan ethos / Robert D. Kaplan.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
eISBN: 978-1-58836-080-9
1. International relationsPsychological aspects.
2. International relationsPolitical aspects. 3. Leadership.
4. Political ethics. I. Title
JZ1253 .K37 2002
320.019dc21
2001031862

Author photograph Jerry Bauer

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

As future crises arrive in steep waves, our leaders will realize that the world is not modern or postmodern but only a continuation of the ancienta world that, despite its technologies, the best Chinese, Greek, and Roman philosophers would have understood, and known how to navigate.

How Churchills first large historical work, published in 1899, when he was in his twenties, reveals the roots of his thinking and the source of the greatness that enabled him to lead England against Hitler in World War II. The Battle of Omdurman was one of the last of its kind before the age of industrial warfarea panoramic succession of cavalry charges in which the young Churchill took part. The River War shows the ancient world within the modern one: it is here that we start our journey to wrest from the past what we need to arm ourselves for the present.

Livys The War with Hannibal offers canonical images of patriotic virtue and invaluable lessons about our own time. Livy, the quintessential outsider, proposes timeless insights into human passions and motivation and shows that the vigor to face our adversaries must ultimately come from pride in our own past and its achievements. Never mind, Livy writes, if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise.

There is arguably no work of philosophy in which knowledge and experience are so pungently condensed as Sun-Tzus The Art of Warfare. If Churchills morality is summarized by his hardheadedness and Livys by his patriotic virtue, then Sun-Tzus morality is the warriors honor. A virtuous leader is one who advances without any thought of winning personal fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment. Thucydides The Peloponnesian War introduced pragmatism into political discourse. His notion that self-interest gives birth to effort and effort to options makes his 2,400-year-old history a weapon against fatalism.

For Machiavelli, a policy is defined not by its excellence but by its outcome: if it isnt effective, it cant be virtuous. Modern leaders can learn how to achieve results by applying the concept of Machiavellian virtue. Since one must start with the present state of things, Machiavelli writes, one can only work with the material at hand. Seasoned by his own experience in government, Machiavelli believes in pagan virtueruthless and pragmatic but not amoral. All armed prophets succeed, he writes, whereas unarmed ones fail.