Robert reported on foreign policy for The Atlantic for three decades and is currently the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China.
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Great developments by nature are not linear. Things just don’t always continue as they have been. That’s why this idea that the Arab Spring came, it went, it happened, it didn’t work, therefore the Middle East will always remain an autocracy – that’s linear thinking. Great events are great precisely because they’re not linear.
Robert Kaplan
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:43
- What is the Greater Middle East? – 3:13
- Developing Political Institutions – 14:55
- Turkey and Iran – 26:40
- Iraq – 38:15
Podcast Transcript
Over the past year the podcast has done a number of episodes on the Greater Middle East. I find myself returning to this part of the world, because it represents a riddle for political or democratic theory. It is the most autocratic region in the world despite close proximity to Europe which is arguably the most democratic. It gave birth to the world’s oldest civilizations, yet its political institutions are among the least developed. Plenty of people will give reasons and explanations for the state of political development in the Middle East. But when we look at it from a ten-thousand-foot view, it’s not clear why democracy has not taken root.
Robert Kaplan has some ideas about the Middle East based on his experiences in the region and a lifetime of reporting. He reported on foreign policy for the Atlantic for three decades and is currently the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China.
Our conversation touches on a wide range of countries from Iran to Turkey to Egypt. But it’s tied together in larger themes about the region and its political trajectory. We talk a lot about the need for political institutions and why it’s so hard to develop them. Hopefully, it’s a conversation that longtime listeners will notice ties into themes from past episodes.
If you like this podcast, please do not keep it to yourself. The show has long been among the best kept secrets on democracy and world affairs. I know a lot of influential listen. It’s okay to tell your friends and colleagues or to mention the latest episodes on social media. Feel free to send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Robert Kaplan…
jmk
Robert Kaplan, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Robert Kaplan
It’s a pleasure to be here.
jmk
Well, Robert, I was really impressed with your book. I mean, it’s exquisitely well written. It’s called The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China. Before we get started, I don’t know if anybody’s ever said this to you before, but you look and you speak very differently than the image I have when I read your writing. Has anyone ever told you that before?
Robert Kaplan
No, nobody has actually. Well, explain yourself now.
jmk
Well, it comes across as some almost wizened sage sometimes. Let me read a couple quotes here: “Empire may be dead, because in a globalized world, one culture cannot simply appropriate and subjugate other cultures for its own ends.” Or there’s another line where you say, “Democracy, again, according to the long arc of time, remains but a bold experiment.” I mean, you seem like a very down to earth guy. It sounds like, an almost wizened sage that’s speaking at the end of his life and just dropping off nuggets of wisdom in the end.
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, well, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
jmk
It reads well, you’re obviously an amazing writer. You’ve been doing it your whole life and it’s definitely an interesting book that keeps you captivated and you learn a lot throughout the book. The book reads both as autobiography and also almost like a travel book, to be honest, in a lot of ways. You write about it not so much as the Middle East. You almost describe it as the Near East, especially as you begin in Greece and you extend out to some other places that we probably wouldn’t normally think of as the Middle East. What is distinctive about that region? What is it that sets it apart in your mind from other places?
Robert Kaplan
Well, a number of things. First of all, it’s mostly, but not completely Muslim. The other thing, but this may be more important, is that it’s between Europe and China and India. In Europe you have well developed states that are almost in every case a democracy. In China and India, you have these old continuous civilizations. Chinese bureaucracy started before time. China was China when Rome was Rome and India similarly. Whereas every place in between is more… arid. That’s another distinction. It’s more arid and there is not this drumroll of one continuous dynasty after another nor is there well-established democracy. So, it’s distinctive in that sense. It’s sort of a battleground, an arid and semi-arid battleground for different ideas and ways of rules.
jmk
Why has it been such a battleground and almost just a central place for civilization because when we look at it today? It seems like a place that would be somewhat undesirable. I mean a lot of it is desert. It doesn’t seem like it’s prime farmland. It is in between Asia and Europe, but it seems that there’d be other ways to be able to get around that. I mean, what makes this area such an important battleground?
Robert Kaplan
Well, first of all, I talk about the Fertile Crescent in the book and the Fertile Crescent may not be much, but it’s the only fertile area or was for much of history between what is today Europe and the Indian subcontinent. So, that’s where civilization got started. But for the most part, it’s arid. That made it hard to establish empires and dynasties. We have to remember that. Even Mecca at the time of Mohammed was incredibly sophisticated and cosmopolitan by the standards of its time. So, it’s not unnatural that a great leader would emerge from there and give his name to a great religion and empires that would come in the wake of his death.
jmk
There’s a line in the book where you write, “The Middle East hurdles forward, but not in a linear direction.” I think that line is really emblematic of a number of themes of the book. The way that the Middle East is moving forward, but it’s not moving forward in a way that we can think of like an arc of history that’s just trying to get to this end point that’s defined or that we can clearly see the journey.
Robert Kaplan
Yes, Westerners like to see journeys. They like to see linear progress, progress with a capital P and in italics. That’s the Western belief in progress. What I’m saying in this book is that’s not a fair way to measure what is going on in the Middle East. Great developments by nature are not linear. Things just don’t always continue as they have been. That’s why this idea that the Arab Spring came, it went, it happened, it didn’t work, therefore the Middle East will always remain an autocracy – that’s linear thinking. Great events are great precisely because they’re not linear. They zig and zag.
So, what I’m saying in the book… and I know the book may have a negative aura or a pessimistic aura, but generally, I don’t believe my theme is altogether pessimistic. So, what I’m saying is progress is possible and will happen, but not in the linear way that the West imagines it.
jmk
Well, you brought up the Arab Spring and a comparison that was made to the Arab Spring at the time was often to the Revolutions of 1848, which were also failures. They just didn’t turn into democracies anywhere. The best case was in France that turned into the Second Republic that also failed. It didn’t turn into liberal democracies anywhere in Europe. But at the same time, I think looking back on it, the Revolutions of 1848 were complete failures, because they moved the ball along. They created ideas about constitutionalism that helped things in the future. When we think of history not being linear, I mean, I don’t know that it’s just restricted to the Middle East? It seems like that’s true almost everywhere.
Robert Kaplan
It’s a very fair point. You know, 1848 was sort of a tragedy because had it been more successful, there probably would not have been World War I and there would have been no Hitler. But, you know, my diagnosis of 1848, and this applies also to Egypt in the Arab Spring, is the middle class, or the enlightened class, was just not quite big enough and not quite secure enough socially to carry the day so it ultimately failed, just like the Arab spring in Egypt ultimately failed because it was being driven by enlightened people, but there weren’t enough of them. It was still a country of semi-literate peasantry.
jmk
Well, in a lot of ways, the Revolutions of 1848 parallel the Arab Spring even more because the middle class turned against the revolution itself as it saw the socialists starting to look like they could actually take more power. We see in the Arab Spring that a lot of the liberal middle class started turning against the revolutions when it saw the Islamists taking power, at least in Egypt.
Robert Kaplan
Yeah. It wasn’t just the Islamists per se. Yeah, I did a lot of interviews in Egypt that are in the book. One of the things people kept repeating to me was it wasn’t so much the Muslim Brotherhood being Islamist, it was the chaos. It was that they didn’t know how to rule, how to govern bureaucratically. There were carjackings. There was crime. Nothing worked and this was something that Egyptians were not used to. They lived in a poor country, they were used to that, but it was basically crime free, very orderly, very safe. Suddenly it wasn’t for a time and that’s what really freaked out people. That’s why el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the current ruler of Egypt, when he first came to power, was very popular. His coup d’etat was actually popular even among the enlightened people.
Now that didn’t last all that long, but that was the feeling at the time – anything more than this semi-chaos, this semi-anarchy of an Islamist group. I think there was one former Egyptian foreign minister quoted in my book who says that if Iran had had an el-Sisi in 1979 in the Iranian military, there would have been no Islamic Republic. Iran today would be badly functioning, but not a lethal state. Just a normally autocratic, badly functioning state with reasonable ties to the West. He was defending el-Sisi. He was saying, ‘You Westerners come and you want democracy and you bring anarchy.’
jmk
Why wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood able to impose some semblance of order? I mean, I don’t know that that’s an intuitive conclusion that just because Islamists come to power. That chaos breaks out.
Robert Kaplan
No, it’s not intuitive. It was just that they had no experience in governing. That’s the problem. The problem is that the only people who have experienced governing are dictators in this part of the world and anything that replaces them by definition will have very little experience in bureaucratic governance, in delegating authority, and building chains of command. All the mundane things that allow the traffic lights to work, allow garbage to be collected, all of that stuff. I think a better example for this, a more interesting example, is not Egypt, which is so poor, it was Tunisia. Because Tunisia is a place without ethnic splits, without high mountains dividing it into regions, with a long, long, long Mediterranean coastline close to Italy, probably the most European of all Arab countries.
They had a basically elegant Arab spring. The dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who actually to give him credit where credit’s due, did a lot to build a middle class in Tunisia while he was in power, so that Tunisia came with a ready-made middle class. Tunisia should have succeeded at democracy, and it did for a time, but over a decade it wore down. Once you got outside the capital and into the various regions of the country itself, it was less and less organized. So that came apart. But as I say in the book, Tunisia remains the most likely place in the Islamic world that isn’t a democracy anymore, but which could become one again.
jmk
Democracy is obviously hard. It requires strong institutions. You need to develop a firm sense of the rule of law to make it so it becomes consolidated, so it becomes somewhat self-perpetuating. If you don’t come in with some strong institutions already, it’s just going to be difficult to be able to get off the ground. That’s the reason why in a lot of countries that are democracies today, there are so many false starts. I mean, we look at France, they had a lot of false starts on its way to democracy. Why hasn’t the Middle East been able to develop stronger political institutions that would give it a bit more of a head start towards something like democracy?
Robert Kaplan
I think the reason, and I go into this in the book in the first chapter, which is called “Of Time and Terrain,” is the legacy of imperialism. By imperialism, I don’t mean Western imperialism. I mean, since Muhammad’s lifetime, soon afterwards, you had the Umayyad dynasty, which was a homegrown imperial dynasty, which governed based in Syria, but governed from what is now Morocco, clear across the Mediterranean to what is now Iraq. The Umayyads were followed by the Abbasids, followed by the Fatimids, followed by the Hafsids. These were all empires. They just weren’t Western empires, but they were empires in the sense that they didn’t distinguish between states, modern states. It was governed regionally from Syria or from Baghdad in the case of the Abbasids or Cairo in the case of the Fatimids.
Then you had over 400 years of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which was a great empire, but it was not European either. It governed like the Umayyads, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, all the way into Iraq. Then you had the British and French imperial mandated authorities in the Levant, in the heartland of the Middle East. So, what you have is a history of imperial rule, whether it’s Western or it’s not Western. The emphasis was on an imperial capital, not on developing bureaucratic states all over the place. Critics of Empire are right that the West has hurt the Middle East, but they don’t have the whole story. It’s not just the West, it’s the history of Empire, which is pre-Western in many senses.
But it is true that the most violent parts of the Middle East are the ones who had their borders drawn by Western colonialists in the wake of World War I and that’s the Levant. Syria and Iraq, which, as I write in the travelish part of my book, never impressed me as stable countries. They were something like totally uptight, overloaded systems. There was an artificiality there even before Saddam Hussein, even before Bashar al-Assad. There was an artificiality there that was highly intense and highly unstable. This is the legacy of borders.
jmk
Are you surprised at how diverse the Middle East is in terms of the type of people, the type of beliefs, the different cultures, the different ethnicities? Because in the United States, just an American, you think about the Middle East and you think of them just as being more or less Muslim, the same type of culture. It’s almost a monoculture type idea when you’re looking at it from afar, but it seems like the closer you get, the more distinct and the more diverse every single one of those countries seems to be.
Robert Kaplan
Yes, I’ve known this for many years as a foreign correspondent, but that was one of the themes I wanted to bring out in the book without saying so openly. Just how different each chapter is – my chapter on Turkey is very different from the one on Egypt, very different from the one on Ethiopia or Saudi Arabia. It’s a different story wherever I go. You hear a different theme, different things, and the problems. are very, very different. Though there is an overarching theme to all the problems in the book, which is this search for a middle of the road way of order that is not empire on one extreme or anarchy on the other extreme. It may be democratic or it may not be, but something in the middle. Some sort of noncoercive consultative system is what everyone is searching for.
jmk
I got the impression that a lot of the countries in this region are looking for short term solutions in terms of governance and putting off a lot of the long-term problems in terms of building those political institutions that lead to democracy or something that is more democratic. Is that fair? Am I being too harsh?
Robert Kaplan
It’s fair. Remember when you’re in power in these countries, precisely because they’re not democratic… It’s not like in our society where an ex-president for the most part leaving Trump aside, but an ex-president or an ex-senator or somebody has speaking engagements, he’s put on corporate boards, he makes a lot of money, and so he’s very secure and stable for himself and his family. In these countries that doesn’t exist. There is no sinecure or safety net or economic safety net if you lose power. Staying in power is the crucial thing. Just staying in power is the crucial thing that doesn’t leave a lot of energy for building the kinds of things you’re talking about.
You know, there was one diplomat in the Ethiopia chapter in Addis Ababa who said the West always gets disappointed with African leaders because they start out wanting democracy and peace and freedom and then they become dictators or whatever. He said what the West doesn’t understand is these guys have no sinecure. They have no think tank perch awaiting them if they lose power. So, it becomes like a Machiavellian struggle just to maintain power.
jmk
That’s all true, but at the same time, there are other institutions that you can build even if somebody never actually leaves power, that they just remain as a dictator. A good example of somebody tearing down institutions would be MBS over in the Middle East. He is trying to modernize the country and is taking a lot of steps in terms of modernization that look very positive in a lot of ways. But at the same time, the few institutions that Saudi Arabia has, those traditions, those institutions, those other centers of power, he’s trying to tear down so that he can centralize this authority. So, from a political institution building sense, he’s moving backwards, even though he’s trying to move forwards in terms of cultural modernization.
Robert Kaplan
Yes, there’s a retired foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, David Ottaway, who I quote in the book saying that he fears that MBS is like Icarus in the Greek myth flying with his wax wings too close to the sun so that they melt and he falls into the sea. Time will tell about this, but we can say that MBS is certainly a brave leader, a risk taking leader, because of the very facts that you enumerated. He’s not like Mubarak. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt who is like a caretaker, even though he lasted for 30 years. He was like the butler. He left the house in the same place that he found it. No, MBS is different and I think part of it stems from his self-awareness of his youth.
He knows that he will probably still be in power after a lot of the leaders in the West who are criticizing him have retired or are dead. So, MBS does have a role model that I write about in the book, Lee Kuan Yew. That’s his role model. A number of people close to him or in contact with him have told me this. The foreign minister told me this. Lee Kuan Yew is the kind of figure who impresses autocrats who want to modernize, who want to become less autocratic as time goes on. You know, he’s not Václav Havel or Nelson Mandela. He doesn’t appeal to idealism. But what he does appeal to is good governance, efficient governance, clean bureaucracies that are competent rather than incompetent and get things done.
That’s MBS’s role model. Now as role models go, that’s not a bad one to have if you’re a dictator in the Middle East. I don’t think el-Sisi has a role model like that. You know, in many ways, MBS is more progressive than el-Sisi. But in terms of liberating women, opening up the society, all of that, he wants it all. He wants a more technocratic, ambitious, entrepreneurial society, but he also wants to shut down dissent in all forms and over the long term, you probably cannot have both.
jmk
Lee Kuan Yew is an interesting role model for MBS because in a lot of ways MBS is not faithful to the Lee Kuan Yew model. I mean, Lee Kuan Yew established a very firm rule of law, at least as firm of a rule of law tradition that you can have within an authoritarian state. And with MBS taking all of the different members of his family essentially into the hotel and shaking them down in terms of making them give up assets and claim different stuff in terms of corruption, that is the antithesis of the idea of the rule of law. I mean, it’s the antithesis of the Singaporean model in a lot of ways. So, I understand what you mean that he wants to have a more technocratic, more bureaucratic functioning state.
Again, Lee Kuan Yew did actually build a lot of institutions that people look at Singapore and think of it as a real opportunity to democratize eventually, because it has the institutions in place. It could make the shift and it has a strong political party that would probably continue to compete in elections. I don’t know that Saudi Arabia is going that direction.
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, all right. First of all, Singapore, correction, already is a democracy. You know, it evolved into one. A three quarters one, we’ll say, or a two thirds one. Though, Singapore is a small, tiny city state. Saudi Arabia is a country so vast that it has snow in the north in the winter and the southern parts are all truly hot and tropical 12 months a year. Saudi Arabia is also a family machine. It’s a tribe. It’s a family that gave its name to a country. So, the comparisons with Singapore are just beyond belief. I mean, they’re out of this world. You can’t compare the two. I just find it interesting that MBS has this role model. Even if he can’t achieve it, that he has it.
jmk
You mentioned that the region emerges out of a sense of empire and imperialism has shaped that region. The one country that you can clearly identify as being an imperialist country in the past would be Turkey. Some people consider that to be Europe. You lump it in to the region itself and many people consider it to be part of the greater Middle East. Turkey has flirted with democracy at different times. Some people would still consider it to be a democracy, although an illiberal one. Other people think it has crossed the threshold to become autocratic. Do you think Turkey is an even better prospect for a more liberal democratization than Tunisia?
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, Turkey is partially European, partly Middle Eastern. It’s a standalone country. It’s more important than Luxembourg or the Netherlands. So, that’s why it’s like Tito’s Yugoslavia in a way. It’s in NATO, but it does its own thing and this is partly geographical, partly demographic. At some point, Erdoğan will pass from the scene. I know he won the most recent election. My book went to press before it was clear who would win the election. That’s one of the difficulties of being an author. But at some point, he will pass from the scene, and then if Turkey can remain stable, it will go back to being a democracy. But the question is, will it remain stable?
Because as one after another person told me when I interviewed them in Istanbul and in Ankara, they said to me, could you imagine what would be the state of the Justice Department or any Washington agency if Donald Trump had stayed in power for 20 years straight? You know, he said, ‘Well, think of Turkey that way. Erdoğan has been in power 20 years. And remember, the US has much stronger institutions than Turkey has.’ So, their point was that Erdoğan had so destroyed institutions that after he left, there would be a void. That you could have a kind of Weimar Republic situation in Turkey with very weak rule, semi-chaotic, that Erdoğan has done so much damage, it’s unclear the system can quickly right itself. But if it can right itself, I think Turkey will go back to being a democracy.
jmk
You asked a lot of people in Turkey if they thought that there would be a coup.
Robert Kaplan
Yeah.
jmk
Do you think that Turkey needs a coup to take Erdoğan out of power?
Robert Kaplan
No. No, I don’t. Because he’s already old. He won this election. It was a close election, even though a lot of liberals were disappointed with the result. But it wasn’t a landslide or anything. Also, a coup is more problematic in Turkey these days, because Erdoğan has emasculated the military. There was a time, after Ataturk died, when there was a coup in Turkey every 10 or 15 years. The system would become somewhat chaotic, the military would come in, make things right and then would leave power and it would go back to being a democracy. This happened a few times. There’s no more military to do it because the military has been so emasculated by Erdoğan.
Because if you think about it, Erdoğan was such an extreme break from the Ataturk system that had the military been as strong as it used to be, it would have gotten rid of him a long time ago. The fact that it failed to do so, and the fact that, I think it was the 2016, the July 2016 coup attempt was such a shambles, showed how Erdoğan had already weakened the military. So, I think that it’s a matter of waiting. I think if the Turkish system can recover after Erdoğan, I’m optimistic about Turkey over the course of the middle 21st century.
jmk
Yeah, I think the last coup attempt, the failed coup attempt, had a number of negative repercussions. Number one, it allowed Erdoğan to consolidate power even further in terms of creating a presidential system and number two, I think it delegitimized the opposition claiming that they were fighting on behalf of democracy because Erdoğan was able to claim that he represented democracy and that anybody who opposed him was trying to fight against democracy. I think that just completely mixed up and jumbled the entire…
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, you no longer had a clear message and also because the coup was a failure, nobody wanted to be associated with it. There was a herd instinct. People wanted to run as far away as possible from it. And you’re right that Erdoğan did consolidate greater dictatorial style power in the wake of the coup. Turkey is still… You know, it has water. In an age of climate change and water shortages, Turkey has the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates. It has the Ataturk dam system. It’s rich in natural resources. As I said earlier, one analyst told me that it’s a stand-alone power. Turkey in NATO is like Tito leaving the Warsaw Pact. He may have stayed communist, but he was no longer in the alliance.
jmk
I think Turkey is a lot more important than Yugoslavia when we think of the Greater Middle East.
Robert Kaplan
Yeah. Oh, sure.
jmk
You get a sense that Turkey could become somewhat of a hegemonic regional power within that area. How possible is that in the future for Turkey to have an even greater influence within the region?
Robert Kaplan
Well, that was, of course, Erdoğan’s goal, to make it a hegemonic power in the Middle East. You know, imperialism is hated in the West. Turkish imperialism is popular in Turkey, the legacy of it, I mean. The legacy of imperialism is popular in Russia, in China, in Iran, you know. All these homegrown imperialisms are quite popular and they’re taught in the schools that way in all of these countries. I think, though, that what Turkey learned… You know, I had a long conversation that I go into in the book with the former foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, who told me that what they really learned was Turkey lacked the capacity to be a strong influencer in places like Egypt and Syria. They had overestimated Turkey’s own capacity.
They didn’t have the intelligence about these countries. They didn’t have the skills to really do things. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu thought that Morsi was going to become a pivot leader in the whole Middle East and when they actually met him, they were terrified because he couldn’t even rule Egypt. They also were surprised by the younger Assad, who they thought would follow the Turkish line rather than the Iranian line and he didn’t.
jmk
Speaking of Iran, I find it possibly the most interesting country within the entire region. It’s interesting too, because it’s similar in a lot of ways to Turkey. It’s set apart from the Arab culture. It’s not quite Arab, but it’s still within that region and within that tradition. It has the potential to become a hegemonic power, particularly if one day it had stronger political institutions and was more of a democracy or something like that. It could definitely have a more hegemonic place. What are your thoughts on Iran? Does that strike you as the most interesting?
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, I agree. I think my Iran chapter ends with the most optimistic passages in my whole book. Because I’m saying that regime change is not a dirty word when it comes to Iran, and by that I don’t mean a US invasion, obviously. I mean, a homegrown regime change. Iran, like Turkey, is highly educated. It’s sophisticated. It’s highly urbanized. It comes from a different culture than the Arabs. Turkey and Iran have very close cultural relations throughout history. Like Turkey, you’re dealing with 80 odd million people, 85 million people who are highly educated. So, Iran has the building blocks, better building blocks, for a non-coercive system than any place in the Arab world or almost any place in the Arab world. It is fascinating.
I know the Arab Spring has failed all over the Arab world, but I think a democracy movement in Iran might be different. The clerical regime there has made the clerics and the whole religious establishment highly unpopular in Iran. Iranians are very cynical about religion now. They associate it with unbridled power, not with spirituality. So a future Iran might be more secular. It might be democratic. It’s time that we start imagining a post-clerical Iran. You know, when the Shah was in power, although you had these experts all saying the Shah was weak and he was hated, nobody could really imagine the Iranian revolution as it transpired and in all the decades of the Ayatollahs being in power, nobody could really imagine them passing from the scene.
Well, I’m saying that you have to use your imagination. A time will come when they may no longer be in the scene and if Iran were to reform or to have some sort of an internal counterrevolution of sorts, that would lead to bigger changes in the region than almost anything the West could produce.
jmk
It could also look more subtle on the surface than it really is because Iran has elections, has political institutions on paper that could become democratic. I mean, the problem with Iran is the fact that the clerics actually control the politics. They determine who can run for office. But if you made some subtle changes within Iran. It could look very different politically than it does right now and you wouldn’t have to have a bloody revolution to be able to get there.
Robert Kaplan
That’s true. That’s absolutely correct. Or even just a change in the supreme leader or a change in the president that could move policy, say, 15 degrees in the direction of a more open pro-Western system could change Iran irrevocably over time. Iran has institutions, as you said, to a greater degree than almost any other place in the Middle East, excepting Turkey.
jmk
Iraq is a country that’s been shaped a lot by Iran in recent years and it’s been shaped by Iran because, really, we created an opening for it after the second Iraq war. You actually supported the United States going to war in Iraq. Can you tell us a little bit about your reasons for that?
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, I go into this in the book, obviously. Iraq was never an abstraction to me. I experienced on several visits Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, which was not just tyranny. He wasn’t just a dictator. He was like the North Korean leaders or Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. It was abject totalitarianism and very simply, I said, what could be worse than this? Nothing could obviously be worse than this.
jmk
This is before the first war, too, that you’re saying that it was totalitarian, right?
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, and nothing could be worse than this. Then I found out after the invasion that there is something that was worse than that. It was abject anarchy. That anarchy, at the end of the day, was worse than tyranny. Because tyranny you could survive in. There were rules of the game. In anarchy there was nothing. That’s why I have that quote at the beginning of the book from Edmund Burke from his Reflections on the French Revolution, where I said that frenzy and chaos can tear down more in a day than normal order could build up over a much longer time. So, I supported the Iraq War because it wasn’t an abstraction to me, because Saddam was that horrible. I couldn’t imagine anything else.
And when I did see something worse, again, not as an abstraction to me, but being on the ground embedded with the Marines, with army special forces in post-invasion Iraq, it was really devastating for me.
jmk
There’s a number of reasons that you can be opposed to the war in Iraq. One of those would be that no matter what the outcome was of the actual invasion, even if it’s the best-case scenario possible, to be able to get there you’re killing just scores of people, lots of people inflicting all kinds of death and violence to be able to get to the other side. It sounds like that part of it is less of a concern to you than the chaos that happened after the war. Am I understanding that right?
Robert Kaplan
Only because Saddam was so horrible. Had Saddam been a normal dictator let’s say, at the time – what do I consider a normal dictator? Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. These were the so-called normal dictators of the period at that time. Yes, they were dictatorial. They were military. But had Iraq gone from a system under Saddam to a system under Mubarak or Musharraf, you would have had a dramatic improvement in human rights, as crazy as that sounds. Because one thing you learn as a reporter overseas is the world is not divided in black and white between great democracies and horrible dictatorships. There are a lot of gray areas in between and to go from one kind of dictatorship to another kind in Iraq would have been an enormous improvement. Obviously, the whole place fell apart.
jmk
In the years since, obviously, after we’ve gotten past ISIS, after we’ve gotten past some of that, I’ve started to hear from scholars in Iraq that things are slowly starting to get better. Do you feel like there’s been improvements in terms of the politics over in Iraq, that it’s becoming more stable and starting to get to something that looks like it’s a functional country again?
Robert Kaplan
Well, a lot’s going to depend on what happens in Iran. If you were to have the kind of change in Iran that we were talking about a few minutes ago, I think Iraq would improve dramatically, because a big reason for Iraqi chaos since ‘03 or the inability to function well in its democratic regimes is because of Iranian meddling and interference. You know, you switch to an Iran that cares more about its internal development and less with adventurism next door or abroad, you could suddenly see a real dramatic improvement inside Iraq. That being said, in the book I traveled to Northern Iraq, the Kurdish area, but I did not go to the rest of Iraq for this book. I’ve been there many times in the past.
The reason is why is it’s too dangerous and that says a lot about the stability of the country today. People had warned me you could get kidnapped at the airport. The government doesn’t monopolize the use of force in Iraq. It’s gangs. It’s sectarian militias. It’s all of that. So, Iraq may be getting better. It may be making gradual improvement that you don’t read about in the headline news. That’s all good. But it is still a very chaotic country in the center and in the south.
jmk
You included a chapter on Ethiopia. It’s not a country that I would consider part of the Middle East. It’s not a country most people would consider part of the Middle East. Why do you consider it part of the greater Middle East?
Robert Kaplan
Well, it’s part of the greater Middle East since Herodotus. In the northern half, its language is Semitic. It’s closer to Hebrew and Arabic than to any African language. It’s had very close relations over the decades and centuries with Yemen, with parts of what is now Saudi Arabia. It’s not your typical African country either. It’s very, very institutionalized, sophisticated. The wars that have been fought in the region have been more like Middle Eastern wars than wars in other parts of the African continent. It’s part of Herodotus’s world and it’s part of that world between Europe and China. So, I thought it would be very interesting to include it because, again, in Ethiopia, like in all the other countries I’ve visited, there’s this turmoil, this striving to create a middle path of order between empire on one hand and anarchy on another.
jmk
The United States has played a very large role in the Middle East and even before the United States, European powers played a large role in the Middle East. I mean, one of the themes of the book is that you have imperial powers that get involved within this region. In recent years, the United States has begun to pull back out and become less involved for a variety of different reasons. What should the United States be doing in the Middle East? Should we be pulling out entirely or should we play a role that’s different than what we have done in the past?
Robert Kaplan
Well, I think in recent weeks and months, since this book was finished, the Biden administration has been moving back into the Middle East, so to speak. It’s apparently decided that it’s going to spend a lot of money to get some sort of a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And I say spend a lot of money because getting a deal like that is all about bribing each side. Each side tries to get as much out of you as possible before they sign on the dotted line. It’s made this hostage deal with Iran. I think what’s really frightened the Biden regime is the specter of China in the Middle East.
China, as I write in the book, is not just buying oil and gas in massive amounts from Iran and Saudi Arabia. It’s spending tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars in Egypt, in the Persian Gulf, everywhere in investments, building up infrastructure. Belt and Road has a lot to do with the Middle East. It’s what the Chinese envision will connect their trade deals with Europe and their economic hegemony, so to speak, in Asia. Also, the Chinese have military ambitions in the Middle East as well. They have a base in Djibouti. They have a state-of-the-art port in Gwadar in southwestern Pakistan near the entrance to the Persian Gulf. They’re envisioning some sort of military arrangement with Port Sudan, with Jiwani on the Iranian-Pakistan border. So, I think the Biden administration very genuinely is afraid of Chinese hegemony in the Middle East.
So, what it’s doing is trying to become the godfather of a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will have an enormous effect on the region. Because once Saudi Arabia, and it’s a big if, if Saudi Arabia makes a peace settlement with Israel, that’s going to open up the possibility of Israel opening up relations with places like Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, the whole Muslim world, because Saudi Arabia is not a normal Muslim country. It’s the keeper of the holy places. So, it has a cachet. I think, yes, there was a sense at the beginning of the Biden administration that we’re going to minimize the Middle East. We’re going to concentrate on this, that, and the other. But I think that shifted, because of reality, because of events.
jmk
So, you’ve just brought up Israel and that’s a country that you actually don’t write about directly within the book. But they’ve recently experienced a lot of turmoil and it’s ongoing to be honest with all of the protests about the judicial changes and everything else. Israel was just a beacon of democracy within the Middle East as long as it was almost segregated from the rest of the countries, from its neighbors. It seems that as it’s become more integrated with its neighbors, instead of making them more like Israel, it seems that Israel’s becoming more like the rest of the Middle East.
Robert Kaplan
Yeah, I left Israel out of the book deliberately because the main theme of the book was this search for order between empire and anarchy. I said that, well, Israel has a democracy, so it’s settled on that. There’s no debate in Israel on what kind of system they’ll have. The debate is about how democracy will function, so to speak. Also, practically, if I had a big chapter on Israel, all the questions and reviews would be about Israel and the Palestinians. I didn’t want that. I wanted to do a Middle East book that left that issue out. Something original. You know, I write about Ethiopia and places like that, make it more fun.
But I think that what’s happening in Israel is very basic. Democracy is about politics and a significant part of the Israeli electorate, which makes up this coalition, is not interested in politics, because they speak directly to God. They’re not interested in compromise. I think that’s the root of the problem, which has partially led to this impasse over the role of the judiciary.
jmk
Robert, thank you so much for joining me today. The book, one more time, is The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy from the Mediterranean to China. It’s definitely a fascinating read. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me.
Robert Kaplan
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Key Links
The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert Kaplan
Foreign Policy Research Institute
The Writings of Robert Kaplan at The Atlantic
Democracy Paradox Podcast
Steven Simon on American Foreign Policy in the Middle East including Iran and the Wars in Iraq
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