[Futurework] Ten simple rules

[Ed Weick]

The current issue of Atlantic contains an article by Robert Kaplan entitled "Supremacy by Stealth". I’ve read most of it, but it's the kind of article that I find difficult to finish. It sets out ten rules that America, as the new Rome, should use to govern the world and make it safe for freedom and democracy, American style. I first encountered Mr. Kaplan a few years ago in an article entitled "The Coming Anarchy", also in Atlantic. The message there, seeming entirely credible at the time, was that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. The message in the current article is anything but credible. It’s that, yes, the world could go to hell in a handbasket, but it won’t because America is there to prevent it from doing so. And it can even be fixed up if America but follows Mr. Kaplan’s ten simple rules. It must, for example, produce more Joppolos, the central figure in John Hersey’s second world war novel "A Bell for Adano". Apparently, Mr. Joppolo knew exactly how to win the trust of the townspeople he had to deal with. As Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, it would be nice to have people like that, but they don’t come around very often. And, by being "light and lethal", you can accomplish great things, like helping the Bolivian government track down and kill Che Guevara in 1967. (Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, but some of us still remember Che as the eternal revolutionary and a force for liberating the oppressed. I for one do not see tracking him down and killing him as a good thing. It's a bit like the Romans bragging about tracking down and killing Christ!)  Or, like the British, and the Romans before them, by speaking Victorian and thinking pagan you can try to persuade people of the wisdom of your ways, but, if you can’t accomplish that, you do have other means. What Mr. Kaplan suggests is that American forces have already followed his ten simple rules, though perhaps not consistently enough. He says they have done a very good job at times, as when they trained Salvadorian counterinsurgency forces, but he doesn’t then mention is that these forces became government death squads and killing machines that brutalized the countryside and cost thousands of people there lives. The image that Mr. Kaplan presents in his ten points is a clean, tidy and efficient one that, like B52 bombers, flies high above the messy, dirty world of his earlier article. Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, it just doesn’t figure. Ed Weick