BOOKS: Monsoon - The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. By Robert D. Kaplan (Jim Miles)

[Tace]

Monsoon - The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Robert D. Kaplan. Random House, New York, 2010

April 13, 2011 (Palestine Chronicle) -- When I first read Robert Kaplan, it was shortly after 9/11 when a whole library of books became available about U.S. foreign policy and how it should deal with the terrorist threat presented to the United States and democracy.

At that time, in his work “Warrior Politics,” he reasonably recognizes that his perspective is but one of many and none can be truly objective. He recognized the reality of the “American imperium” in terms that imperialism is the “most ordinary and dependable form of protection for ethnic minorities and others under violent assault,” and “an imperial reality already dominates our foreign policy.” Towards the end of the work he quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization,” and follows with his own summation that “the restraining power of our own democracy makes it hard for us to demand and orchestrate authentic transitions everywhere. Only through stealth and anxious foresight can America create a secure international system.”

We have had in the intervening years since that publication a significant decrease in democracy within the United States (constitutional issues, international law, and human rights issues such as torture). Indeed if democracy is inimical to mobilization, then democracy needs to be avoided, and its “restraining” power has been greatly diminished (when were the people, the demos, last asked if they wanted the United States to go to war?) As for demanding and orchestrating authentic transitions, that has been exposed through global media as being very real, although always with unexpected outcomes -- and notice that the “transitions” are not necessarily labelled as democratic, simply transitions. The record over the last decade would also show that stealth has not created a secure international system (secure for whom -- the global elites, the corporate bosses?) While stealth has been tried, so has massed military attack -- all with expected "unexpecteds" (sort of like Rumsfield’s “known unknowns”).

In short, yes there is an empire, a U.S. empire. It is not democratic. It wants transitions to its own favour, and will try to make it happen either covertly or overtly. Neither is working well, unless one considers that the global elite are becoming richer at the expense of the many. He noted that his personal first hand experience witnessing events in the world was his education and drew him to the classics of philosophy and politics “in the hope of finding explanations for the terrors before my eyes.”

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[swilton]

1. Thanks for the update

Too many 'realists' - Robert Kaplan, Paul Wolfowitz, Mearsheimer, Richard Perle, et. al. running US foreign policy. There is another way.