The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power by Robert D. Kaplan. Yale University Press, 2023, 135 pp.
In his book, foreign affairs reporter and popular author Robert Kaplan recommends a perspective that US policymakers should cultivate to decrease the chances of foreign policy errors. He fashions this perspective from a study of classical Western literature and his own life experiences. The result is an accessible, helpful work using a qualitative approach on building and evaluating prudent US grand strategy. While Kaplan’s literary criticism is not perfect, he offers insights on some timeless human truths while striving for order and advances the study of international relations without demanding a weighty commitment to theory and data from readers.
In writing The Tragic Mind, Kaplan hopes to sway budding statesmen toward a certain mindset when deciding questions of US foreign policy. Thinking tragically, Kaplan argues, can help prevent policymakers from leading their countries into disaster in interactions with the rest of the world. This tragic mindset will enable those in power to realize that major decisions in foreign policy are rarely between good and evil but instead between competing goods. Thus, no matter what is chosen, some good will be lost, resulting in someone suffering.
By cultivating this mindset with the powerful lessons of great classical and Shakespearean plays, those in power can and should act with a reasonable measure of humility, stemming from a sense of fear of what might happen. National actions might provoke negative reactions. In such a situation, consequences only dimly understood might appear as a fate outside policymakers’ control, but Kaplan argues that “fate and human agency are intertwined” with unknown snares ever ready to catch those not treading carefully (44). Those holding power and responsibility for making policy, then, bear a heavy burden that their critics, such as the news media, usually do not share.
Considering US interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan as imprudent in either their start or execution, Kaplan argues that the foreign policy mistakes of these wars were strategic luxuries. Mistakes in initiating and waging these conflicts did not imperil the existence of the Republic. Today, with adversaries far more lethal than Islamist insurgents confronting Washington, the increased probability of a world war demands greater prudence. A tragic sensibility can help develop this virtue.
Unconvinced that either historical or scientific study can adequately guide statesmen, Kaplan sees in literature timeless truths that can help educate decisionmakers with “anxious foresight—the knowledge that our circumstances can always change dramatically, and for the worse” (4). By this, he does not argue for debilitating hesitation but rather for a clear-eyed modest approach to foreign policy. Practitioners should remain ever conscious that the United States will not solve all the world’s problems.
In concise chapters packed with literary criticism of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama, Kaplan expands on what he considers key characteristics of tragic thinking: awareness of competing goods, concern for order, humility and an openness to learning, respect for factors outside one’s control, veneration for the lasting and traditional, and healthy skepticism of the good that can result from war. Kaplan furthers his arguments with observations from his decades of foreign travel and interactions in tyrannical regimes and warzones.
His method is entirely qualitative, rejecting the idea of international politics as a hard science. Humans, their histories, and their choices are too complex. He evinces respect for those who have seen war firsthand, crediting them with a tragic mindset whether or not they have studied the great tragedies, while denigrating foreign policy wonks who have argued easy justifications for intervention.
In Kaplan’s view, suitable tragic thinking might arise from a study of Sophocles’ play Antigone. Following the war deaths of her two brothers—one a traitor, the other a patriot—Antigone defies the king’s edict that the traitor’s corpse lie unburied. A tragic mind might recognize and anticipate the clashing goods of sisterly love and the king’s order before the body count grows in this tragedy exhibiting an “air of mathematical certainty and doom” (48). Perhaps most impressive is Kaplan’s analysis of the concept of order. Too many Westerners view orderly society as the norm, despite ample evidence from history, classic literature, and even the contemporary world that order always requires struggle. Disruptive elements, which he labels after the Greek god Dionysus, are likely endemic in the human condition.
Kaplan describes an example of such disruption in Euripides’ play Bacchae, in which Dionysus recruits the city of Thebe’s women for frenzied ceremonies, then arranges for the skeptical king—representing the city’s order—to die at the hands of his own mother. In relaying this horrific tragedy, the play reminds audiences that being “unrelentingly rational is to be unrealistic,” as irrationality is part of reality (25).
While Kaplan offers some excellent literary criticism of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians, he errs in some of his comparisons between them. He argues that because the Greeks included active parts for deities in their plays and Shakespeare did not, “the Greeks are religious whereas Shakespeare is not” (14). With this, Kaplan blithely papers over 2,000 years of revelation, development, and revolution impacting Western religious understanding.
Arguably, the Greek tragedians inhabited a far more enchanted world than Shakespeare’s—in Weberian language, a world in which one could readily imagine divine beings physically wandering into a Greek city-state on an average Tuesday. Without recounting the immense history of religion between the death of Euripides and the birth of Shakespeare, one can acknowledge that both personal and community religious outlooks were fundamentally different by the sixteenth century. With religious duty both more personal and universal, a deity both outside the world and in believers’ hearts, and a more developed understanding of sin, Shakespeare could draft plays in which humans ostensibly are the only characters but still include religious themes of temptation, sin, grace, and redemption. While humans strut across the stage demonstrating free will, countless observers can discern the workings of influences both diabolical and divine in their actions. The subtlety may be one reason why the Western world keeps studying these plays, rather than, for example, the straightforward morality plays of medieval Europe.
Kaplan is certainly not the first writer in recent years to mine ancient Greek and Shakespearean plays for insights in areas of study far outside dramatic entertainment. Since humans remain the primary drivers of international politics, regardless of the extent of systemic determinism at play, the use of classical literature in studying this field is not new. The late Charles Hill, for example, supplies a wide-ranging explanation of international relations through analysis of multiple classic writings in Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (Yale, 2010). International relations theorist Richard Ned Lebow uses the study of tragedy to advance an overtly ethical position in foreign policy discussions, such as in his Ethics and International Relations: A Tragic Perspective (Cambridge, 2020) which provides more specific advice and direction on the crafting of foreign policy, backed by quantitative methods.
Nevertheless, Kaplan’s book is a valuable addition to this discussion in bringing forward a journalist’s non-academic perspective. Kaplan offers a different argument in presenting himself as someone who is trying to share lessons from his own mistakes, expressing regret in both unintentionally delaying US intervention in the Balkans and intentionally advocating for deeper US intervention in Iraq. Expressing what he sees as his culpability lends a certain gravitas to the work, coming as it does from such a prominent commentator on world affairs.
Using its own method, Kaplan’s book offers a concise boost to classical realist thinking in international politics that could easily appeal to those outside the area of specialized international relations study. By situating foreign policy advice in a work studying politics and unchanging human nature, Kaplan mitigates the intense specialization that has limited general understanding of the social sciences. By incorporating his personal and biographical information into his book, Kaplan offers a subtle but unmistakable opportunity for younger students and practitioners of national security to learn from his professed mistakes and misjudgments. With the immense flood of information flowing to those responsible for directing foreign policy, some filter is necessary to aid in decision-making. Though he does not call it this, Kaplan’s tragic mind is essentially a model that any casual reader can adopt to augment whatever scientific model or theory they currently employ.
Burdened with his guilt but armed with classical literature, Kaplan’s book remains relevant in today’s confrontations with Russia and China. Following its general recommendations, policymakers will act with anxious foresight, aware that an unwelcome fate might await them. They will know that order is not permanent, as only a deity would comprehend all the possible sources of Dionysian chaos. They will see that grand strategy, amid billions of humans pursuing their own choices with their own histories and cultures, must respect human nature—that opaque, frustrating, and complex essence which the greatest literature allows us to glimpse.
Lieutenant Colonel John M. Walker, USAF