PrintMaybe empires aren't so bad?
"Robert Kaplan's Two Cheers for Empire" By FRANCIS P. SEMPA
The Wilsonian strain of American foreign policy emphasizes the self-determination of peoples and the promotion of democracy as goals of U.S. foreign policy. It was evidenced in Franklin Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter, the Truman Doctrine, John F. Kennedy's pledge in his inaugural address to "pay any price" and "bear any burden" in the cause of liberty and freedom, and most recently in George W. Bush's efforts to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Robert Kaplan surveys the history of imperialism in the Middle East and concludes that empires, for all of their faults, often imposed stability and order, which in most cases are preferable to chaos and anarchy.
Kaplan notes that empire has a bad reputation — much of it deserved. Western intellectuals sometimes blame Western colonialism for all of the problems in the Middle East and elsewhere. That is only a half-truth. It is true that after World War I, Britain and France drew artificial boundaries in the region that failed "to reflect the nature of well-functioning traditional societies that had long operated without hard territorial boundaries." Western colonial powers, Kaplan notes, "divided what should have been kept whole," resulting in post-imperial oppressive Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq in the latter half of the 20th century. The Ottoman Empire imposed a semblance of order on the region — order that was shattered by the First World War. "The tragedy of the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire," Kaplan writes, "has as much to do with the West's dynamic interaction with the region as it does with the Middle East itself."
The effects of Western imperialism, Kaplan notes, included "Marxism, Nazism, and nationalism," which influenced Arab intellectuals in the Middle East. Those ideologies and practices spawned the brutal regimes of the Assads in Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But even Hussein brought order to Iraq, and his overthrow by American military forces only produced chaos and anarchy. The so-called Arab Spring — which the Obama administration placed such high hopes in — only added to the region's chaos and anarchy, as evidenced in Libya and to some extent in Egypt.
The most stable regimes in the Middle East (with the exception of Israel) have been monarchies like the Saudi regime and the sheiks of the Persian Gulf, but Wilsonian illusions die hard. Many American statesmen and intellectuals still seek democratic reform in the region. The world's other great powers who vie with the United States for influence in the Middle East — China and Russia — don't care how the countries of the region are governed. Self-determination and democracy are not in their power playbook.
Kaplan's article is adapted from his forthcoming book, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China, but he already broached this subject in his most recent book, The Tragic Mind. "Empire," he concludes, "be it Ottoman or European, provided stability but little dignity; anarchy provides neither."
Often in international politics, the choice is not between good and evil, but between the lesser of two evils. Kaplan's tragic mind understands that better than most of today's commentators on global geopolitics.
