Review of Warrior Poitics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos By Robert D. Kaplan:

‘In late January, the diligent Internet surfer might have come across a chilling exchange of letters between Robert Wright and Robert D. Kaplan, the latter a respected foreign correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly; an author who has written a number of books based on his travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and North America; and war guru of the moment. Kaplan’s books blend history, current affairs, and forecasts of future world trends.

The first two letters reveal that Kaplan favors some form of “benevolent global hegemony” exercised by the United States. He instructs Wright that “nation-building requires the implicit assumption that we will only have one or two nations at a time to rebuild.” This sentence reflects what Kaplan believes to be humility and realism.

(…)

Conclusion:

Kaplan’s book seems to be, at bottom, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound. The Pagan Ethos aims to provide a kind of pseudo-intellectual and historical cover for the governing class of the United States to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants, all the while claiming the moral high ground and demonizing any opposition. Likewise, U.S. allies have a free reign to overthrow democracy, violently suppress independence movements, sell narcotics, and engage in torture, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing, while designated “enemies” of the United States can be bombed and invaded for doing the same things, or even for simply being accused of doing them.’

I had similar concerns about Kaplan’s dangerous conceit when I heard him interviewed on NPR last month. More about Ludwig von Mises and his Institute, which is located in Auburn, Alabama, and which describes itself as “defend(ing) the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive”, appears here. While I’m by no means aligned with absolutist free-market, private-property, non-interventionist less-government-at-any-cost principles, politics makes strange bedfellows…