WARRIOR POLITICS by Robert D. Kaplan

• The original sin of any writer is to see the world only from his or her point of view. Objectivity is illusory.
• Often, what passes for analysis is merely an expression of one’s life experiences applied to a specific issue.
• The evils of the twentieth century arose from populist movements that were monstrously exploited in the name of utopian ideals, and had their power amplified by new technologies.
• Thus, the evils of the twenty-first century may also arise from populist movements, taking advantage of democratization, motivated this time by religious and sectarian beliefs, and empowered by a post–Industrial Revolution: particularly information technology.
• Populist rage is fueled by social and economic tensions, aggravated often by population growth and resource scarcity in an increasingly urbanized planet.
• The benefits of capitalism are not distributed equitably, so the more dynamic the capitalist expansion, the more unequal the distribution of wealth that usually results.
• The spread of information will not necessarily encourage stability.
• The spread of information in the coming decades will lead not just to new social compacts, but to new divisions as people discover new and complex issues over which to disagree.
• There is nothing more volatile and more in need of disciplined, enlightened direction than vast populations of underpaid, underemployed, and badly educated workers divided by ethnicity and beliefs.
• Democratization is a long and uneven process: it will generate weak and uncertain rulers before it generates stable organizations.
• The twentieth century was the last in history when humankind was mostly rural. The battlefields of the future will be highly complex urban terrains. If our soldiers cannot fight and kill at close range, our status as a superpower is in question.
• But the post–Industrial Revolution empowers anyone with a cellular phone and a bag of explosives.
• America’s military superiority guarantees that such new adversaries will not fight according to our notions of fairness: they will come at us by surprise, asymmetrically, at our weakest points, as they often have in the past.
• Asymmetry gives terrorists and cybercriminals their strength, since such adversaries operate beyond accepted international norms and value systems on a plane where atrocity is a legitimate form of war.
• Biological weapons will become increasingly available to terrorist groups.
• New devices will provide new opportunities, as they always have, for human mischief.
• Conflict and community are both inherent in the human condition.
• It takes a shallow grasp of history to believe that solutions exist to most international problems. Often there are no solutions, only confusion and unsatisfactory choices.
• The realist may have the same goals as the idealist, but he understands that action must sometimes be delayed to ensure success.
• human passions and motivations have changed little over the millennia.
• To listen to public discourse in America, one would think that morality is entirely a Judeo-Christian invention. But it was the pagan writer Plutarch’s main theme in his profiles of great men.
• Times have changed less than we think.
• Foreign policy is the opposite of comprehensive knowledge: even with the best spies, area experts, and satellite surveillance, a critical area of darkness remains, caused not only by the absence of information but also by its surfeit, and the confusion it can lead to. Instinctive judgment is vital.
• If literature is the quiet resource of statesmen, then no literature is more relevant for our purposes than the ancient classics on war and politics, which provide an emotional distance from the present that is especially valuable in a media age, when too many of us have become creatures of the moment—obsessed with the latest news event or opinion survey to the degree that it seems as if the past and all its lessons have ceased to exist.
• The greater the disregard of history, the greater the delusions regarding the future.
• To read the eminent thinkers of pagan antiquity is to find an unusual coherence, clarity of analysis, and unanimity of convictions, variously expressed.
• There is arguably no work of philosophy in which knowledge and experience are so pungently condensed as Sun-Tzu’s The Art of Warfare
• Sun-Tzu explains that in war the “highest excellence” is never having to fight, for the commencement of battle signifies a political failure.
• The strategic pursuit of self-interest is not a cold and amoral pseudo-science, but the moral act of those who know the horrors of battle and seek to avoid them.
• Good spies prevent bloodshed, according to Sun-Tzu.
• Intelligence gathering was a fundamental ingredient in the West’s victory in the Cold War.
• Whatever we may think or profess, human behavior is guided by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos), and honor (doxa). These aspects of human nature cause war and instability, accounting for anthropinon, the “human condition.” The human condition, in turn, leads to political crises: when physis (pure instinct) triumphs over nomoi (laws), politics fails and is replaced by anarchy. The solution to anarchy is not to deny fear, self-interest, and honor but to manage them for the sake of a moral outcome.
• one must be careful with Machiavelli. Because he often reduces politics to mere technique and cunning, it is easy to find justification in his writing for almost any policy.
• followers helped bring down the Roman empire? One must always keep in mind that ideas do matter, for better and worse, and to reduce the world merely to power struggles is to make cynical use of Machiavelli. But some academics and intellectuals go too far in the other direction: they try to reduce the world only to ideas, and to neglect power.
• Values—good or bad—Machiavelli says, are useless without arms to back them up: even a civil society requires police and a credible judiciary to enforce its laws. Therefore, for policymakers, projecting power comes first; values come second.
• Men who live in conditions where there is not sufficient food, warmth, shelter, and the minimum degree of security can scarcely be expected to concern themselves with freedom of contract or of the press.
• We will, and should, intervene whenever an overwhelming strategic interest intersects with a moral one,
• The emergence of an authentic global constabulary force will widen the scope for involvement, but not infinitely.
• The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as the triumph of one good over another that causes suffering.
• A man’s greatest fear, Hobbes tells us, is of violent death: death at the hands of a fellow man.
• Because its founding purpose is to keep men from killing each other, the Leviathan is a monopolizer of force.
• Freedom becomes an issue only after order has been established.
• “The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in those qualities.”
• Fear of violent death is a deep and farsighted fear that allows men to comprehend fully the tragedy of life.
• Good government—and, likewise, good foreign policy—will always depend on an understanding of men’s passions, which issue from our elemental fears.
• Where food is scarce, whether because of prices, maldistribution, political malfeasance, or drought, conflict or disease has often resulted.
• Without evil there can be no virtue.
• Vast oceans have given Americans the protection necessary to advance universalist principles.
• Whether in antiquity or in the post–Cold War world, the central question of foreign affairs remains: Who can do what to whom? The phrase “balance of power” is less a theory of international relations than a description of it.
• Historically, democracies have been as prone to war as other regimes.
• Consequently, realists believe that while human rights are, in theory, advanced by democracy and economic integration, in practice they are advanced by resolving power relationships in ways that allow for more predictable punishment of the Unjust. Of course, that often involves both democratization and free trade, but not always. For in human affairs, moral questions are often linked to questions of power.
• To act with goodwill means seeing each man or woman as “an end in itself,” and not merely a “means.”
• A free man acts according to his principles rather than according to his fears or appetites, for it is such fears and appetites that are the external forces constricting our freedom.
• Statesmanship demands a morality of consequence. A statesman must be able to think the unthinkable. If he has to operate in an insane environment,
• The separation of private ethics from politics, begun by Machiavelli among others, and completed by Hobbes, laid the foundation for a diplomacy free from the otherworldly absolutism of the medieval church. We must be careful not to return to such absolutism, for if there is such a thing as progress in politics, it has been the evolution from religious virtue to secular self-interest.
• Groups that refuse to play by our rules will constantly be committing outrages.
• The split between civilian and military commands emerged only in the nineteenth century with the professionalization of modern European armies.
• Collaboration between the Pentagon and corporate America is necessary, and will grow. Going to war will be less and less a democratic decision.
• Today’s warriors come often from the hundreds of millions of unemployed young males in the developing world, angered by the income disparities that accompany globalization.
• Globalization is Darwinian. It means economic survival of the fittest—those groups and individuals that are disciplined, dynamic, and ingenious will float to the top, while cultures that do not compete well technologically will produce an inordinate number of warriors.
• An economy-of-scale is no longer necessary to produce weapons of mass destruction.
• Precisely because we are militarily superior to any group or nation, we should expect to be attacked at our weakest points, beyond the boundaries of international law.
• In the hands of the media, the language of human rights—the highest level of altruism—becomes a powerful weapon that can lead us into wars that perhaps we should not fight.
• Prudence dictates that we approach casualty-free war as a myth, despite technological advances such as bullets that incapacitate without injuring.
• As more information accumulates, the difference between information and real knowledge could widen.
• Exclusive reliance on technology, at once naïve and arrogant, takes little account of local history, traditions, terrain, and other factors that are essential for making wise judgments.
• The media is no longer simply the fourth estate, without which the other three branches of government could not operate honestly and effectively. Because of technology and the consolidation of news organizations—similar to the consolidation of airline and automobile alliances—the media is becoming a world power in its own right. The power of the media is willful and dangerous because it dramatically affects Western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome. Indeed, the media’s moral perfectionism is possible only because it is politically unaccountable.
• States and other entities—whether the United States or the Tamil Tigers—will go to war when they decide it is in their interests (strategic, moral, or both) and will, consequently, be unconcerned if others view their aggression as unjust.
• In places where the rule of law does prevail, one is expected to suffer insults without resorting to violence. But in a lawless society, a willingness to suffer insults indicates weakness that, in turn, may invite attack.
• Systems in which two great powers confront each other in a ritualized struggle, as in the Cold War, tend to be more stable than the present one, in which there are many secondary powers while the primary power is still not a Leviathan.
• Social theories tend to be linear. They describe a series of incidents and processes leading toward some definable end. But the world is characterized by simultaneity: many different kinds of incidents and processes happening at the same time leading toward different ends. Thus at best, a social theory is a useful failure; rather than prove its point, it gives people a new perspective on events, making them see the familiar in an unfamiliar light. Because all of these theories—optimistic and pessimistic—capture some important trend in a world going in different directions at once, they can be synthesized into a composite global picture that for all its complexity and contradictions has a concrete theme.
• Only through stealth and anxious foresight can America create a secure international system.
• The larger the scope of our imperium, the more complex our civilization becomes—with its rapidly expanding technical and scientific mandarinate—the more comfortable a statesman must be with loneliness.
• Because the very size and complexity of our political and military establishments are what make them so vulnerable, our salvation will lie with generalists who are not intimidated by the specialists under their command.
• True bravery and independence of thought are best anchored by examples from the past, culled from the pages of the great books.
• Effective leadership will always reside within the mystery of character.
• The more successful our foreign policy, the more leverage America will have in the world.
• The more respect we have for the truths of the past, the more certain our journey away from it.