The Tragic Mind is a short book on the moral psychology of leadership. Robert Kaplan must be one of America’s most prolific writers—he has penned over twenty volumes—and he has a talent for accessible writing that conveys great insight. Like his 2022 Adriatic, The Tragic Mind has a retrospective quality: a man looking back on a long public career, talking about books that have nourished him, and lessons—often bitter—learned. Leaders will want to read this book and learn from it. For those anxious about the direction of America’s own leadership, the book includes plenty of evidence that there is a good deal to worry about.

The gods, not God, figure in Kaplan’s latest contribution to geopolitics: Citing Ajax, Kaplan writes “The gods favour wise restraint.” Relying primarily on the Greek tragedians, Kaplan takes a leaf out of Sir Halford Mackinder’s book. The founder of geopolitical analysis, Mackinder twinned the study of geography and belief systems; in particular, he thought the difference between Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity was especially significant to global affairs. For Kaplan, a wise geopolitics takes into account both maps and the Greeks. “Geopolitics—the battle of space and power played out over a geographical setting—is inherently tragic.” The tragedians “know there is a higher mechanism at work. That higher mechanism signifies nothing less than a form of order beyond that of men and women. It may be unjust, but like necessity, it must be accepted.” Kaplan recommends that leaders meditate on Hamlet: “Our wills and fates do so contrary run/That our devices still are overblown/Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.”

Unlike most of his books, The Tragic Mind is not an analysis of contemporary geopolitics. Kaplan’s books normally have a signature: a deep dive into a region of the world either in conflict or offering a potential model of humane governance. His reporting is always leavened by insights drawn from his vast reading of travelogues, philosophy, and history. This book is really about the soul.

Although the map is “the foundation of all knowledge” (the “understanding of world events begins with maps”), “it ends with Shakespeare.” Relying on geography alone for geopolitics is “lowering,” because strategy is ultimately in the “province of the heart.” Kaplan quotes Hamlet: “That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once.” Requisite is a moral psychology, most especially the cultivation of the virtue of humility. Kaplan finds the point in Ajax: “One day can lift up and bring down all human things.” At a moment when we hear so much about the importance of STEM to our future, Kaplan puts the emphasis elsewhere, great leaders need to read great books. The reading list includes the tragedians, the philosophers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus, and amongst writers, Melville.

The Wise

“In Greek tragedy, an orderly universe—the opposite of chaos—is always a virtue.” Rightly, thinks Kaplan, the Greeks had a horror of “themeless violence.” “Anarchy was the ancient Greek’s greatest, most fundamental fear.” This fear, however, did not paralyze. Not only did it focus the Greek mind, but it taught the essential lesson of strategic modesty. Quoting Ajax again, Kaplan writes, “Fear is the cornerstone of all order.” Fear, rightly cultivated, delivers anxious foresight.

As Kaplan reflects upon his own experience, “The only way to escape ambition is through fear. Not personal fear, like the kind I knew in Iraq, but divine fear of larger forces at work.” The problem with American policy is not merely that it has been made by people who do not understand the places they would rule, but, critically, the mindset is all wrong—it is driven by hubris. Policymakers should take seriously Schopenhauer’s comment that vanity besets all human striving and that the entire world “is a place of atonement.” Or to cite Shakespeare’s Anthony & Cleopatra, “There is nothing left remarkable/Beneath the visiting moon.” They need Nietzsche’s insight that the god Dionysius can visit us at any moment. One thinks again of the quote from Ajax, “Never allow yourself to speak arrogant words against the gods.”

The Greeks had another critical lesson to teach. The problem facing power is not evil, but the choice between two competing goods. Kaplan states:

As the Greeks defined it, tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good but the triumph of one good over another good that causes suffering. Removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing, but it supplanted a greater good: the semblance of order.

Kaplan finds essential the refrain throughout Albert Camus’s The Rebel: seek justice ever aware that your best efforts must be limited if they are to remain good.

Order

“All previous generations in human history have been obsessed by order,” writes Kaplan. Almost all Westerners alive today have only known unprecedented security. Kaplan turns to Freud for the warning, “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration.” Reprimitivism always threatens, as stated in Oedipus the King, “Till man lies within his tomb/Never dare to call him ‘happy.’”

The worst of it is that not only have we no experience of insecurity, we also disdain our ancestors. Solzhenitsyn remarks that “no tribe would survive long with a youth cult” because order is inherited from forebearers. Kaplan worries that China’s ancestor cult gives it the edge in today’s geopolitics. And not only that, but the West is tethered to limiting political ideas. We believe that only modern anonymous bureaucratic states can provide order: US policy has consistently snubbed the tribal loyalties that in most societies deliver order; this snub has played havoc with American ambition and been a catastrophe for millions abroad. American policymakers must learn that there are varieties of suitable political forms. For example, apart from a romanticism with the British Crown, we do not take monarchy seriously. Kaplan thinks this a mistake because the monarchy delivers order by exploiting the fact that “at the end of the day, tradition is everything.” He makes the point that the most humane Middle Eastern countries are all monarchies.

Kaplan notes that Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra are set in different political moments in Rome’s history. The first is about a still provincial Rome, and the second is about imperial Rome. Anthony’s foreign adventure ends in ruin. America, thinks Kaplan, needs to take on board Shakespeare’s analytical point that universality removes agency. US policy circles must recognize that the more power spreads over territory the more friction is experienced: “The world had histories and traditions that were not subject to America’s own historical experience with democracy,” writes Kaplan. Furthermore, he worries that our technology is a false friend, promoting the illusion of security. In a fascinating remark he talks of being on naval vessels, “in a sensory-depressed environment where every hard surface is gray and you can practically smell the heat of the liquid crystal screens: the tension here is as great as that under live fire in Iraq, as the enemy now is one click away. The fog of war is as thick at sea as in the desert.” Thinking tragically can help remedy our illusions. “

Regrets

Kaplan talks of his long struggle with clinical depression for his own contribution to America’s misbegotten wars these last thirty years. Kaplan’s depression had its origin in the use Bill Clinton made of his book Balkan Ghosts in the Serbian War and it retrenched with the Iraq War. Kaplan had believed that Saddam’s Iraq was the most terrifying and ghastly place he had visited and so he was a vocal advocate for the war. He regrets not having a more tragic mindset at that time, when the tragedians would have schooled him that “there is no human alternative to order.” What he came to learn, as an embed with the Marines, was Saddam’s order was, in fact, better than no order. American power ill-served the Iraqis. And not just the Iraqis. Kaplan reminds readers that recent US policy failures are not just Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and—he hints—Ukraine, but Nigeria, South Africa, and Ethiopia.

Temperance in policymaking is essential. The last President who understood tragedy, argues Kaplan, was George H. W. Bush. “Our last aristocrat in the White House” knew and understood war and thus strategic modesty defined his tenure. The same is true of Eisenhower who, thankfully, showed courage and restraint when urged to go nuclear during the Korean War. Post Bush the Elder, no American president has fought, and this is mostly true of our policy elite. Kaplan has come around to the position that personal preparedness for war is crucial to sound policy, and this is why he is hopeful about our military academies: “That is why the most emotionally sophisticated students I have encountered as a teacher have been at military war colleges.” Absent this mental preparation, others in leadership need to turn to great books: “In this effort, the literary classics will ultimately be firmer and more useful guides than any social science methodology for those who have not had a personal experience with war and death.”

Foreign Policy Establishment

An interesting thesis of the book is that our placid lives can quickly fall apart, as proclaimed in Trojan Women, “O god, O god, whose slave shall I be?/Where in this wide world shall I live…/I who was once the queen of Troy?” I always find Kaplan’s asides about elites interesting. As well as going to war zones, he hob knobs with elites. In Adriatic, he was very complimentary about elites, here far less so. He worries about credentials. For example, rather than understanding maps, “a vocal concern for human rights is a necessary tool of professional development in the high social echelons.” For years, “the etiquette of our policy elites” required of the ambitious:

to declare oneself an “optimist,” especially about the prospects of democracy in this or that Middle Eastern country, regardless of one’s actual instincts on the issue at hand, since being an “optimist” improves one’s moral standing within the group. But however salonfahig, this behavior is neither systemic nor rational. Tragedy rises above virtue-signaling.

Discussing the US bureaucracy, Kaplan adds a dark layer to our moral psychology: “The closer men are to the use of force—especially the closer they are bureaucratically to it—the more fulfilled they become.” This is an important point: even liberal-minded staffers are likely unable to resist the temptation of using the nation’s enormous military assets. Indeed, with a psychoanalytical twist, Kaplan fears that the high-minded are not all that. He warns: “In my experience, people will gladly exchange a lucrative business career for a badly paying government job, in which the call to serve may mask other objectives.” Kaplan reserves the parallel with Iago for Putin but D.C. staffers, perhaps with less self-awareness, hold cheaply the lives of others.

Tragedy

War is our lot, and it is interesting that Kaplan invokes the themes of monarchy, aristocracy, and the divine with which we associate the martial. Think only of the late Queen’s funeral, its religious ritual and thoroughly military character. This book is a quick read, and a really good one, too. I wonder if its core theme needs more elaboration, though.

Kaplan is particularly influenced by the Oxford classicist Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra, who was an artillery veteran of Passchendaele. He knew Tolkien, an infantry veteran of the Somme, and did not like him. Indeed, when Tolkien was recommended for national honours, Bowra wrote to the government against the idea. Tolkien was proud of his military service and especially his regiment’s war decorations (Lancashire Fusiliers). Bowra could see no good in the war and that difference likely chafed in their many interactions as colleagues at Oxford.

Relying heavily on Bowra, it would have been interesting to see Kaplan wrestle with Tolkien’s view of war and tragedy. It may have complicated the book—Tolkien disliked Shakespeare, for example. Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Silmarillion, is heavy with tragic themes, but Tolkien also invoked what he called the eucatastrophe, the fleeting moment amidst the dire when glory and love break through. In Tolkien’s mind, the eucatastrophe points to the Christian God. Interestingly, the Welsh modernist poet, David Jones, another infantry veteran of the Somme, also saw the Christian God lovingly afoot amidst the bloodletting.

Tolkien and Jones are warier of the gods—Greek or Viking—than Kaplan, and there is cause for concern. The point is philosophical. I wish Kaplan had considered the Russian geopolitical thinker, Aleksandr Dugin. His theoretical writings likely outpace even Kaplan’s, and he is much in the news. Likely wrongly dubbed “Putin’s Brain,” Dugin is nonetheless a strong advocate of the Ukraine War. He has suffered personally for his support of it: his daughter was recently killed by a car bomb meant for her dad when she borrowed his car. Dugin’s geopolitical thinking relies heavily on Martin Heidegger’s account of the Greeks. It is noteworthy that Heidegger dwells on Greek tragedy only during his explicit Nazi years (1933–46). Dugin finds attractive Heidegger’s treatment of the Greeks as squaring off against crushing risk. Kaplan thinks the tragedies teach risk mitigation, Dugin the opposite. Dugin thrills to the fate of Prometheus, a stand-in for the indomitable human spirit taking its licks from the gods. This difference in how to interpret the tragedies shows the adage still applies: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. As Tom Holland has pointed out so well, the Greek world was merciless. The gods have virtues to teach, no doubt, but geopolitical analysis can rightly wonder what lessons God might have to teach, too.