An interview of Robert D. Kaplan by John Waters at RealClearDefense caught my eye. This snippet follows introductions, questions about classical thought, remarks about chaos, etc:
What is your critique of the Biden Administration?
I disagree with how the administration has framed the Ukraine War. For example, when James Baker III put together a coalition of three dozen countries to help eject Iraq from Kuwait, most of those countries were autocracies but James Baker didn’t care. There was enough of a common interest to work together but not a demand that everyone align totally on ideology. Now, we’ve framed the struggle in Ukraine as “democracy versus autocracy†and that is wrong. It should be framed as an invasion of a sovereign nation and a violation of the rules-based order.
Your book is instructive to political leaders and policymakers. Both have committed many errors since the end of World War Two. I’ll spare you the list of failed foreign interventions. But do you believe we are led by foolish people?
No. We’re led by brilliant people who are part of a technocratic elite. They are specialists. They know all about specific regimes and histories, and they know a lot about dictators. It’s all you read about in the newspapers. Elites live in the realm of ideas and dictators repress ideas and so they think these people are in fact the worst thing possible. Elites take their order and well-to-do lives for granted. But the problem in most of the world is how to erect an orderly system in the first place.
I’m curious how Mr. Kaplan thinks the Biden Administration can defend our participation in the war in Ukraine on the basis of a rules-based order while we bomb Serbia, invade Iraq, participate in the overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi, support the rebels in Syria, and aid the Saudis in making war on Yemen. How any of those actions that fit in with defending national sovereignty and a rules-based order is unclear to me and is not explored in the interview. I will only add that we have forfeited any moral high ground in pursuit of I’m not precisely sure what.
On the subject of the brilliance and wide-reaching expertise of our political leadership I’m going to restrain myself. I would certainly like to see examples of the brilliance of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy. Other than getting elected in what does their expertise reside? Quite to the contrary I think that our political leadership are canny navigators of the political waters that has complacent experts, some of whom may actually be brilliant, on whom they can rely to support their less-than-brilliant decisions.
But none of those is the point I actually wanted to make. I think there’s something that Mr. Kaplan fails to understand. There are multiple ways of maintaining order, e. g. by force, by virtue, or by consensus. Any rules-based order must be based on one of more of those. On what is there an an international consensus? I have no idea.
Indeed, I don’t there’s is a consensus within the U. S. any more. Once upon a time there was a consensus, loosely based on the popular understanding of our founding documents, e.g. the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, some of Lincoln’s addresses, etc. What’s the American consensus now? I don’t believe there is one.
