Kaplan's response to Kagen's review of "Warrior Politics".
The New York Times Book Review
Letters
Sunday, Feb. 24, 2002
nytimes.com
--fl
-----------------
'Warrior Politics'
To the Editor:
In his review of my book ''Warrior Politics'' (Feb. 3), Donald Kagan suggests that I identify with fatalists like Chamberlain rather than with idealists like Churchill and Reagan, even as he admits that Churchill is my ''exemplary statesman.'' In fact, in the book I write that ''an ordinary man who values freedom will often recognize the truth. Ronald Reagan was such a man.'' I go on to say that ''Churchill and Reagan represented strategic and moral decisiveness against considerable odds.'' I devote an entire chapter to a celebration of Churchill's hardheaded morality. In ''Warrior Politics,'' completed months before Sept. 11, I use Churchill's support for a moral intervention in Sudan in the 1890's to justify the need for us to hunt down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Kagan says that I see a ''unified world without states, with globalization in place of religion.'' Here is what I write: ''There is no credible force on the horizon with both our power and our values. The United Nations or a combination of international organizations may one day become that force. But that is by no means certain. Kant's essay on 'Perpetual Peace' envisions an assemblage of freedom-loving nations; not a universal organization. Thus, for the United States, the most important decades in foreign policy lie ahead.'' Nowhere do I say, or imply, that globalization will replace religion. I write that we must ''use pagan, public morality to advance . . . private, Judeo-Christian morality. Put in our own terms, human rights are ultimately and most assuredly promoted by the preservation and augmentation of American power.''
Kagan's interpretation notwithstanding, Herodotus can be considered a naturalist of the human race. Herodotus writes that ''everyone believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things.'' This is in the course of Herodotus' long, often dispassionate descriptions of other peoples and cultures. Moreover, I did not call Herodotus a naturalist. The philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset did.
Robert D. Kaplan
Stockbridge, Mass. |
