Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

by Robert D, Kaplan, Random House, New York, 2002, 198 pp., $22.95 (hardcover)

The future of warfare and global governance is behind us. In Warrior Politics, Robert Kaplan highlights major classical and contemporary readings of warfare and international relations to provide the framework for future foreign policy decisions. Kaplan's focus for this framework is not on utopian ideals, but on the reality of man's brutality.

Kaplan asserts that the reality of man's brutality is war. Moreover, war is subject to democratic control only when it is a condition separate from peace. He proposes that future wars will be unconventional and undeclared, fought within states rather than between them. He reasserts LTC (Ret.) Ralph Peters' idea that our future enemies will not be soldiers but warriors without material risk or a stake in civil order. Those cultures that do not compete well technologically will produce these warriors. These warriors will not be fragile to conventional warfare.

Therefore, Kaplan predicts that going to war will be less and less a democratic decision. He suggests that small groups of civilians and general officers will make the decision to use force. He asks what democratic restraints will remain on the resort to force.

Robert Kaplan is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. He is the well-published author of Balkan Ghost, The Coming Anarchy, The Ends of the Earth, and Eastward to Tartary. A journalist by trade, Warrior Politics is an easy read. His firsthand experience in recent crises form a valuable base for his writing.

His intention of not making it a lessen on the classics themselves, but on their relevance to today and tomorrow's foreign policy dilemmas, makes this an accessible read to all. For those who have read Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Churchill, or the others highlighted by Kaplan, it offers a contemporary perspective on the classics. For armor soldiers, it highlights the importance of reading military and political history.

1LT JOHN P.J. DEROSA

1-77 AR BN

Schweinfurt, GE

COPYRIGHT 2003 U.S. Army Armor Center
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group