Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997
pages 28-31 | 4116 words
The Frighteners
Jeremy Harding
- The Ends of the Earth by Robert Kaplan
Macmillan, 476 pp, £10.00, January 1997, ISBN 0 333 64255 4
The world according to Robert Kaplan has arrived in Britain. The Ends of the Earth is a piece of blockbuster journalism by an American reporter/traveller of some influence whose thinking has shaped the way that other people, more influential still – in the White House, the State Department, the United Nations and the international aid agencies – go about their business. The US edition will already be on a few desks here, and despite the fact that much of it reads like a long assignment by a man in a flak-jacket for other men in suits, this relentless survey of the fate of the world circa the millennium looks set for a wider readership. The sooner it is opposed, the better.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 10 · 22 May 1997
From Ethan Casey
In his review of Robert Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth (LRB, 20 March), Jeremy Harding manfully declares himself an anti, ending his first paragraph: ‘The sooner it is opposed, the better.’ Kaplan can be faulted mainly on two counts. First, there are the places where his authority is weak, notably in his superficial and unduly bullish passages on Thailand. Second, his omission of any discussion of the World Bank/IMF and the problem of debt seems to me less like ‘carelessness’ (Harding’s term) than wilful blindness. But on both counts detractors must take care. Too much of what passes for criticism is self-satisfied preaching to the converted. Perhaps Kaplan’s agenda is rightist. But by leaning consistently rightward, he articulates hard questions we all must face. For example, citing the ugly human rights record of President Karimov of Uzbekistan, he writes:
Karimov, the Nigerian generals, and others like them are betting that democracy is not the final word in political evolution. The West believes they are wrong. But what if they are right, or even partly right, in their cases? For us it’s a matter of principle; for tens of millions threatened by the spectre of civil conflict, it is a matter of life and death.
As a close watcher of events in Burma, I sense that Kaplan has put his finger on that country’s true dilemma. Unlike many writers, Kaplan has the courage to try to venture beyond his own limitations.
Ethan Casey
Bangkok
