The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

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Robert D. Kaplan’s early 2023 book, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, is the latest of his nearly two dozen books over the past 35 years. Like its predecessors, The Tragic Mind features Kaplan’s impressive powers of observation and analysis at the junction of politics, history, and world geography. Unlike his prior prodigious, geographically focused works including Balkan Ghosts (1994), Monsoon (2010), and In Europe’s Shadow (2016), this is a short work. It contains his personal musings unbound by specific geography and focused on both his experiences reporting from war zones since the early 1980s and his reflections about them in the context of great philosopher-thinkers from ancient Greece to modern America.

In The Tragic Mind, Kaplan describes the leader’s historic dilemma about the use of force. That choice is never truly one between good and evil but rather between one good and another or between lesser evils. That choice also is destined to cause suffering. Kaplan observes that leaders—political and military—must keep this in mind and be humble in their decisions and realistic in execution. They must think tragically to avoid tragedy.

Spanning 14 pithy chapters, The Tragic Mind is written with a foreboding tone. Kaplan has reported on Yugoslavia’s fragmentation and collapse into civil war after Josip Broz Tito’s death; Romania’s chaotic plight after the fall of its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu; and the tumult, turmoil, and suffering that convulsed Iraq, Libya, and Syria when external interventions, military and cyber, wracked long-standing tyrannical regimes. In this book, Kaplan works to make sense of the extraordinary human suffering during these dramatic events by consulting the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare for insights into the frailty of the human condition. He also references the philosophical wisdom from European thinkers like Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and G.W.F. Hegel to chronicle the patterns of human behavior, both noble and flawed, throughout the ages.

Kaplan’s literary journey blends with his personal war-zone tribulations to produce a work with chapter titles like “The Battle of Good Against Good,” “Order and Necessity Must Be Obeyed, Even When They Are Unjust,” “Because War Is Ever-Present, the Burden of Power Is Overwhelming,” and “Imperial Wars Are Decided by Fate.” There are more. All are signposts to Kaplan’s major insights and cautions. He reminds the reader that since the ancient Greeks and Persians, the eternal political struggle for humankind is that of “tyranny against anarchy.” Neither is an absolute good or an absolute evil. But for  Kaplan, 40 years of personal history with human suffering convinced him that the ancient Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali had it mostly right when he argued that 1 year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny. And so is Shakespeare, in whose works Kaplan observes, “[O]rder is the first step toward civilization. Only after order is established can the work begin to make order less coercive.” The tragic mind understands this and values order over chaos even while it understands that that order can descend into tyranny. The tragic mind does not wallow in passivity. It acts when necessary and with the humility that comes from the historic understanding that the dangers of hubris, pride, and human ambition are always present and will lead to tragedy if the “terrible power of the irrational” is allowed to drive a choice to use force in pursuit of “grand ambition.”

Kaplan laments Washington’s recent military forays in its pursuit of the “grand ambition” of making the world in America’s image as a liberal democracy. He views America’s last great statesman to be George H.W. Bush—“the last American President to embrace the use of military power while thinking carefully and tragically about it.” Kaplan defines Bush’s humility, prudence, and tempered determination to have exemplified the tragic mind and successfully guided the United States to win the first Gulf War, manage the fall of the Soviet Union, and sustain U.S. relations with China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He finds Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump wanting in comparison.

Most of The Tragic Mind looks back at examples of unsatisfactory U.S. military interventions to end tyranny. The book’s epilogue looks forward. Kaplan warns modern American politicians, pundits, and intellectuals that a “tragic sensibility” is required today to manage intensifying Great Power rivalry in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. A tragic mindset is not afraid to take military action but proceeds deliberately. It analyzes rationally and acts with temperance, prudence, and an understanding that action generates counteraction, and leaders who fail to appreciate the worst possible outcomes will only exacerbate human suffering with little to show for it.

In the context of America’s ongoing Great Power competition with Russia and China, the choices made in Washington are consequential. The tragic mind must consider whether pursuit of an absolute defeat of Russia in Ukraine could result in national collapse like that of a century ago when post-czarist Russia descended into anarchy and millions died. The tragic mind must also contemplate whether the prospect of Ukrainian success could lead Moscow to use nuclear weapons—taking the world to a new, dangerous threshold of destruction and encouraging other countries to acquire them. Likewise, would an overt American military engagement of China over its struggle to incorporate Taiwan be worth the impact on the global economy, or could such a clash unleash a series of destructive military, cyber, and space-based exchanges that would permanently shift today’s world of strategic competition into one of persistent war?

Kaplan’s insights urge American politicians and their military advisors to display humility and be mindful of history when evaluating the proper means to challenge China and Russia in this era of Great Power competition. The tragic mind requires “an awareness of the narrow choices we face and however vast the landscape, the knowledge that not everything is possible, regardless of the conditions.” Military planners are used to developing alternative courses of action based on best- and worst-case possibilities and narrowing the options to those that best mitigate risks. The Tragic Mind suggests that America’s most senior civilian and military leaders need to adopt and enhance this military planning technique, seasoning it with an understanding that actions taken to sustain order, however imperfect, are inherently less destined for tragedy than those targeted at ending tyranny without certainty that a better form of order will swiftly follow. JFQ