The Book Club: Robert Kaplan

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the American writer, reporter and foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, whose new book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power argues that it's in Greek tragedy that we can find the most important lessons in how to navigate the 21st century. He tells me how the reflections in the book arose from his remorse at having influenced the Bush administration with his support for the Iraq War, why it still makes sense to think about 'fate' in a world without gods and why George H W Bush was a paragon of the tragic mindset while his son George W Bush was a tragic hero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:28.7	Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for the Spectator.
0:34.7	And my guest this week is the writer Robert Kaplan, whose new book is The Tragic Mind,
0:41.1	Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. Robert, now this book in maybe appropriately tragic mode
0:48.3	is presented to you in the introduction as a sort of an act of atonement. Can you explain what you meant by that?
0:57.2	Well, it's not exactly an act of atonement, but it is a framing. The preface does frame the book.
1:04.5	And the high point of the preface is that I admit that I supported the Iraq War and it was wrong. And then I go into what that
1:16.1	made me think about. And what it made me think about and read about is the subject of this book,
1:23.1	which is about how to think tragically, how to think in terms of constructive pessimism,
1:31.1	anxious foresight, fancy terms for thinking ahead to everything that could go wrong before you take an
1:38.9	action. And I bring into it in the course of the book, the three great Greek tragic writers,
1:46.9	Escalis, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as some of the moderns like Dostoevsky and Conrad,
1:56.2	and also, of course, Shakespeare, who was, in addition to the three great tragic writers of Greek
2:05.1	antiquity, Shakespeare is like the fourth of the greatest. And this all motors along, so to speak,
2:15.1	derivative of my realizing my mistake about the Iraq war and what that entailed.
2:23.5	Can I just briefly, for those listeners who aren't completely familiar, I mean, it wasn't just
2:28.2	that you supported the Iraq War, you were sort of in a way, to borrow a well-worn phrase,
2:33.0	kind of in the room where it happened. Can you tell us
2:36.1	how that was? Well, basically, I was in Iraq. I made a number of visits there under Saddam Hussein
2:46.2	in the 1980s. And it was a form of order so oppressive that I never experienced it before in my life.
2:56.0	And I've been a foreign correspondent for decades. I've reported from Africa, from Eastern Europe,
3:02.3	from Asia, other places. And I never experienced a form of order so oppressive.
	...

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