Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

OPINION: "Modern Heroes: Our soldiers like what they do. They want our respect, not pity," by Robert D. Kaplan, Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2007, p. A19.

Kaplan, whose writing has sounded much better lately, in this piece lapses into the intense romanticism to which he is given.

I like the military. I've worked with them my entire life. I think they're great people--just not better people, nor more heroic, nor more full of faith, nor more worthy of respect than others. I see a world crowded with people who fill all those blanks and earn my respect day in and day out.

I just don't buy into that sort of traditional romanticism regarding soldiering, and doing the work I do, I think avoiding that sort of emotion is a very good thing.

I also don't find many military who buy into any romanticism on the subject. I sense very strong bonds between people who shared similar experiences, but they don't romanticize the life, and having spent so much of my own adult life living among them, I don't blame for refusing to do so.

I do think it's a tough job that demands a lot of sacrifices, but I think this world is full of tough jobs that demand a lot of sacrifices.

Don't believe me? Try being a Chinese coal miner for a day.

What Kaplan argues here is correct: the art of war has been demoted in the modern world. He sees it more as a fault of Boomer-dominated America (the evil editors in his morality play), but I see it as a fact of modernity.

Things get more complex in this modern world that America has done so much to birth. War is no longer the kingpin of international dynamics. It no longer sits atop all relationships, all alliances, all tensions, all bureaucracies.

Now it's just one of the mix.

Bob Keohane and Joe Nye drew this picture for me first in "Power and Interdependence," possibly the most important work in political science in my lifetime. Boring book, dull as dishwater, but revelatory all the same.

The 1977 volume examines U.S. binary relations with Canada and Australia and finds a "complex interdependence" with an "absence of hierarchy among issues" and a "minor role of military forces."

You could say, upon reading the book, "But that's just America's relationships with two countries that are very much like us!"

And in doing so, you'd have made the great realization that drives modern globalization: the nets replicate the dynamics from which they spring. Those spreading dynamics are first apparent in countries most closely aligned to our structures, but eventually those structures spread, making more countries like us.

Is this an American-centric argument? Yes and no, as I've written in both books. We start the process and so define it in its infancy, but with its spread, we lose immediate parentage, primarily because it changes as it expands.

One thing does remain, though, the lack of hierarchy among issues and the minor role of military forces.

Kaplan sees a world at war because that is what he recognizes when he travels. He dismays over the lack of hierarchy for his beloved soldiers, and I respect his love for them a great deal, for I share it.

I just don't romanticize it. I just accept that the world that once did romanticize them also romanticized war and a host of other very horrid dynamics, and that in moving toward the world in which we now live, we lost a lot of that romance, and I don't miss it one bit.

The loss of hierarchy means now that we can appreciate heroes all around us, in all their modernity, and not demote the rest in our romanticization of war, which is one of the worst things humanity has ever inflicted upon itself, far more damaging than the extremities of faith.

I see no reason to resurrect such romanticism. We will not win this Long War with it. We never could, any more than Israel could defeat intifadas with kinetics galore.

We simply need wider definitions of heroes, like the anthropologist who obviates the Medal of Honor-winning sacrifice and keeps that soldier alive.

Kaplan sees the decline of the nation-state with the decline of the mainstream media that controlled our images our heroism and fed that glorious romanticizing machinery of propaganda in the 20th century (a century that celebrated and romanticized war like no other).

I see the rise of the individual empowered by a system of states united in a non-hierarchical pattern spreading globally.

And I call it globalization.

And I find it replete with modern heroes, almost all of whom don't fire weapons even as many wear uniforms and a very special few wear U.S. military uniforms.

In the end, it's not just the Americanization of Emily, it's the globalization of America--like it or not.