Robert Kaplan interviewed on his recent FP article, The Revenge of Geography (first noted and discussed here at CA) by Minnesota Public Radio.

Taras Bulba is a Russian classic, based on Ukrainian folk mythology, written by the famous writer Nikolai Golga. It is a brutal, quasi-historical tale about a bloody Cossack revolt in the Ukraine fighting against invading forces from Poland. When the book was republished in 2003, Robert D. Kaplan wrote the introduction, and a similar version of that text appeared in an article in The Atlantic titled Euphorias of Hatred. There, Kaplan warned:

The novel has a Kiplingesque gusto that makes it a pleasure to read, but central to its theme is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba, to better understand the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face today in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Kaplan’s warnings about the “emotional wellsprings” have turned out to be like much of what he writes—prophetic. Five years later, Russia and Ukraine are vigorously fighting over which country has claim to the heritage of the violent tale. Russia has financed a $20 million dollar epic film of the story, produced over the course of three years, in a Lord of the Rings-esque epic, and is the latest salvo in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine culture war (the previous chapter of which was covered here).

What’s the big issue? Taras Bulba has long been adopted as a Ukrainian national hero. Ukrainian nationalists conveniently ignored the fact that he spoke Russian, was fighting an enemy invading from the West, and acting as a proxy for the Czar and the Orthodox faith. Russia’s purpose in making the film is explicit. The director has said that he wants to show that “there is no separate Ukraine… When two drops of mercury are near each other, they will unite. You’ve seen this. Exactly in the same way, our two peoples are united.” Fighting words directed at the heart of the Orange Revolution.

Kiev’s political elite is naturally furious, accusing Russia of “borrowing” heroes when it has none of its own, and issuing a film that smacks of propaganda reminiscent of Soviet times—but many Ukrainians have already said that they admire the film and sympathize with its themes and the call for Pan-Slavic unity. Putting that aside, the real concern for the peoples of the civilized world is that two countries are fighting for title to this shamelessly glorified violent tale. To quote Kaplan writing in 2003:

As one Cossack declares, “I need hardly tell you that a young man cannot exist without war.” In such a world the notion of a rational “balance of power” with the Catholic Poles or the Islamic Tatars is not a pragmatic goal but a corrupting and effeminate conceit. Those outside the marrow of Orthodoxy exist only to be annihilated, or to be converted en masse to the faith.

The rare breaks in the fighting are given over to “spellbinding,” prolonged drunken orgies. “The inns in the suburb were smashed,” Gogol wrote, “and the Cossacks helped themselves to mead, vodka and beer without payment, the innkeepers being too glad to escape with their lives.” Hearing stories of Catholic victories to the west, and of Jewish collusion in those victories, the Cossacks take murderous revenge on local Jews, whom they toss into the river.

We will have to watch and see how this emotional wellspring will affect the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.

ENDNOTE: Here’s the trailer:

Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, 1994.

*The map illustrates data from “mega slums” with populations greater than 500,000.

Robert D. Kaplan, in the latest Foreign Affairs, discusses the rivalry between two rising powers as they compete for energy resources and regional influence. The Indian ocean will be the stage and as US naval primacy fades in an “elegant decline” America will play the role of mediator between two expanding navies. A passage:

Elegant Decline
The United States faces three related geopolitical challenges in Asia: the strategic nightmare of the greater Middle East, the struggle for influence over the southern tier of the former Soviet Union, and the growing presence of India and China in the Indian Ocean. The last seems to be the most benign of the three. China is not an enemy of the United States, like Iran, but a legitimate peer competitor, and India is a budding ally. And the rise of the Indian navy, soon to be the third largest in the world after those of the United States and China, will function as an antidote to Chinese military expansion.

The task of the U.S. Navy will therefore be to quietly leverage the sea power of its closest allies—India in the Indian Ocean and Japan in the western Pacific—to set limits on China’s expansion. But it will have to do so at the same time as it seizes every opportunity to incorporate China’s navy into international alliances; a U.S.-Chinese understanding at sea is crucial for the stabilization of world politics in the twenty-first century. After all, the Indian Ocean is a seaway for both energy and hashish and is in drastic need of policing. To manage it effectively, U.S. military planners will have to invoke challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and smuggling to bring together India, China, and other states in joint sea patrols. The goal of the United States must be to forge a global maritime system that can minimize the risks of interstate conflict while lessening the burden of policing for the U.S. Navy.

Thanks to Lexington Green for alerting us to Kaplan’s latest article in The Atlantic.

How Donald Rumsfeld remade the U.S. military for a more uncertain world

by Robert D. Kaplan
What Rumsfeld Got Right

In 1962, a Harvard economics professor named Thomas C. Schelling wrote an introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In a few hundred words, Schelling, a future Nobel Prize winner, delivered a tour de force about the failure to anticipate events. “We were so busy thinking through some ‘obvious’ Japanese moves,” he writes,

that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made … There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable … Furthermore, we made the terrible mistake … of forgetting that a fine deterrent can make a superb target.

Schelling’s introduction so impressed Donald H. Rumsfeld that he memorized parts of it and, as others have reported, regularly handed it out before the Pearl Harbor–level attack of 9/11. In his subsequent planning for the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld took Schelling’s precepts to heart, thought pessimistically about all sorts of dire scenarios, and got the best possible result.

But only up to the point when organized Iraqi military resistance collapsed. In a tragic, latter-day extension of Schelling’s analysis, Rumsfeld was so busy thinking about the Iraqis’ “obvious” military moves—launching chemical weapons, making a last stand in Baghdad—that he neglected to hedge against what they actually did: melt away and return weeks later as small bands of insurgents. Because of the meager resistance to our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and the swiftness of our apparent victory in Afghanistan in 2001, which Rumsfeld had played a great part in orchestrating, by early 2003 the specter of a debilitating Vietnam-scale insurgency against the United States military had been sufficiently exorcised to seem “unfamiliar,” and therefore to be confused with “the improbable.” By the time Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad, we had become too impressed with our own military to see it as a “superb target.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Eddie for sending us Robert Kaplan’s latest article in the Atlantic Monthly on what it takes to win the Medal of Honor.

No Greater Honor

Over the decades, the Medal of Honor—the highest award for valor—has evolved into the U.S. military equivalent of sainthood. Only eight Medals of Honor have been awarded since the Vietnam War, all posthumously. “You don’t have to die to win it, but it helps,” says Army Colonel Thomas P. Smith. A West Point graduate from the Bronx, Smith has a unique perspective. He was a battalion commander in Iraq when one of his men performed actions that resulted in the Medal of Honor. It was then-Lieutenant Colonel Smith who pushed the paperwork for the award through the Pentagon bureaucracy, a two-year process.

On the morning of April 4, 2003, the 11th Engineer Battalion of the Third Infantry Division broke through to Baghdad International Airport. With sporadic fighting all around, Smith’s men began to blow up captured ordnance that was blocking the runways. Nobody had slept, showered, or eaten much for weeks. In the midst of this mayhem, Smith got word that one of his platoon leaders, Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith (no relation) of Tampa, Florida, had been killed an hour earlier in a nearby firefight. Before he could react emotionally to the news, he was given another piece of information: that the 33-year-old sergeant had been hit while firing a .50- caliber heavy machine gun mounted on an armored personnel carrier. That was highly unusual, since it wasn’t Sergeant Smith’s job to fire the .50 cal. “That and other stray neurons of odd information about the incident started coming at me,” explains Colonel Smith. But there was no time then to follow up, for within hours they were off in support of another battalion that was about to be overrun. And a few days after that, other members of the platoon, who had witnessed Sergeant Smith’s last moments, were themselves killed.

Read the rest here.

Congressional Democrats continue to hold up a free-trade deal with Colombia.

All the debate about Colombian free trade has obscured something important: Colombia is far safer now than it was five years ago. In fact, if Iraq were reclaiming terrorist-controlled areas as effectively as Colombia is, even the most die-hard opponents of the Iraq War would admit error. Colombia is, after Iraq and Afghanistan, our third-biggest nation-building project, and it is by far our most successful.

Colombia demonstrates the value of the indirect approach in our overseas military deployments. Our military role there, started by Bill Clinton and continued by George W. Bush, has been significant: Army Special Forces have trained elite Colombian units, who have in turn engaged the narco-terrorists. When I first visited Colombia in early 2003, the border with Venezuela was a no-go zone. Now new businesses are opening, and the streets are crowded, even at night. Parts of the south and east are experiencing the same success. Indeed, by 2006 I could visit large swathes that were inaccessible before.

Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has fought—and is winning—a counterinsurgency war even as he has liberalized the economy, strengthened institutions, and improved human rights. Nuri al Maliki and Hamid Karzai could learn from him. The failure of Congress to pass a free-trade pact indicates that the greatest threat to our power is our own domestic dysfunction. What should be the icing on the cake to a successful nation-building program has become an embarrassment.

Read more of Kaplan’s recent writing on South American here. Thanks as always to the readers who send in the alerts to Kaplan stories, we greatly appreciate your contributions.

Kaplan on India, finally (thanks Eddie!):

Oh! Kolkata!

When judging a new place, a traveler must first always reckon with his or her point of departure. Arriving in Calcutta by bus from Dhaka, the capital of next-door Bangladesh, is like arriving in West Berlin from East Berlin during the Cold War—a trip I made several times. Grayness is left behind. Instead of the rusted signs of Dhaka, giant, swanky billboards advertising global products glow in the night like back-lit computer screens. Traffic is dominated in Dhaka by creaky old bicycle rickshaws; in Calcutta, by late-model cars. There are, too, the sturdy yellow Ambassador taxis, zippy little Indian-produced Marutis loaded with families, and many luxury vehicles.

Yet the rickshaws that you also see in Calcutta provide a signature image of exploitation worse than almost anything you’ll see in Dhaka: one human being is transported by another, who is not merely furiously pedaling uphill, but actually running uphill on his bare feet, pulling the rickshaw like an animal.

Calcutta is, frankly, obscene. I walked out of a tony espresso bar—its windows cluttered with credit-card stickers—that offered an eclectic Indian-cum-cosmopolitan cuisine of extravagant mocha cocktails and paneer-tikka sandwiches. As I left the air-conditioning for the broiling street, I was careful not to stumble over families sleeping on cardboard along a sidewalk where men and women urinated. It was here that a young man began to follow me. After several blocks, I still couldn’t shake him. He thrust his résumé as a documentary film producer in my face and pleaded with me to hire him. “I realize I am invading your privacy, sir,” he said. “But what am I to do? Perhaps you are angry with me. I will stop bothering you, but only if you give me a job.” He was dressed poorly but neatly, out to make an impression. In the United States, junk-mail offers and telemarketing calls at least allow you the luxury of tearing up the piece of paper or hanging up the phone. In Calcutta, such unwanted entreaties take a very personal form. Street solicitations here are a form of cold-calling. Escape is impossible.

Calcutta’s invasive poverty stopped hippies in their tracks. The hippie trail across Asia in the 1960s and ’70s followed the Ganges east to the holy Hindu city of Varanasi, then veered north to Kathmandu, Nepal, rather than continuing on to Calcutta. “On first acquaintance,” Geoffrey Moorhouse writes in Calcutta: The City Revealed (1971), the city “is enough to destroy any romantic illusions about gentleness and brotherly love.”

The slums may be worse in Mumbai (more than four times as many people live in them), but the slums there are more segregated from the wealthier areas; in Calcutta, beggars and street people spread throughout the city, making it much harder to avoid the poor. And like Mumbai, Calcutta has a population density that is among the world’s highest.

Read more here. And see the slideshow, unusual for Kaplan travelogues, here.

Thanks to Lexington Green from Chicago Boys for a head’s up on a recent interview with The Man:

The Inquirer: To scan the media, one might think people were starting to believe less and less in the “war on terror.” When you hear that, what goes through your mind?

Robert D. Kaplan: What goes through my mind is how little our public knows about what the American military does abroad. In Iraq, in general, there isn’t enough media coverage about what our troops are actually doing in tactical operations centers, in increasing bonding operations with the Iraqi people and security forces. There’s altogether too much media emphasis on the tales told by those either fighting or back home and no longer fighting. The public is not conditioned to appreciate the full complexity of our actual operations in Iraq – instead, they are conditioned to feel sorry for the soldiers who are there.

As for the war on terror, it really is a global war, in the sense that we have global deployments in many countries in any given week. In Africa, we stretch from Senegal to Djibouti, and yet there is no coverage of it. None of these operations is secret. Same with our missions in places like Colombia or the Philippines – all of them fall under the rubric of the war on terror. The American public is thus being misinformed and operates in a bubble of ignorance. Off the coast of Somalia, for instance, we’ve been successful in helping people in Mogadishu, but you see little coverage of it. In Afghanistan, we’ve gone a long way toward rebuilding the cell phone system there – not covered. What we get is the car bombing or the suicide bombing on Yahoo – otherwise, nothing about Afghanistan.

It’s not a right-left bias, just an “incident bias.” If there’s an incident, it’s covered; if not, not. Processes are hard to cover, and a lot of what we’re doing abroad involves processes.

Inquirer: Are we finding terrorists? Are we fighting terror directly?

[...]

Read the rest:

Yesterday, our Bob was on The Diane Rehm Show discussing his new book and answering questions. I’ve uploaded the podcast for readers as an mp3.

Download it here.

You can find Kaplan’s new book “Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts” here.

In addition, a new PBS series, America at a Crossroads: Inside America’s Empire, based on the book just aired three days ago on PBS which you can watch at the previous link.