The books and articles by Robert D. Kaplan that I've read before (and there have been quite a few of them) have usually dealt with far-away lands. But in this book, published in 2017, Kaplan came home. In this book, he again combines his journalist's eye with a background of deep reading.
Taking his lead from trips made with his father when Kaplan was a boy in the 1960s (he was born in 1952), Kaplan acknowledges the effect that these journeys had on this boy from Queens, in addition to the stories his father told of his travels during the Depression that covered most of the "lower 48" states. Those trips must have helped plant some of the wanderlust that Kaplan has exhibited as an adult, with travels to over 100 countries throughout the world. But in this book, beginning on Long Island, and proceeding through Pennsylvania. Ohio, and Indiana and on through the Midwest and the Great Plans, Kaplan begins his drive toward San Diego. But unlike other journeys, Kaplans doesn't conduct interviews along the way; instead, he observes and eavesdrops. He undertook this journey in 2015, so he gained some premonition of the political upheaval to come (he heard little discussion of politics). As he travels and listens, he notices places thriving and places struggling: Wheeling, West Virginia and another city in Ohio are shrinking and obviously struggling, while the small city of Marietta, Ohio, seems to be doing well, apparently because it has a well-regarded liberal arts college there that draws students (and dollars) from around the world. And so it goes. All along the way, Kaplan describes a landscape familiar to anyone from the Midwest: some cities thriving (like Des Moines, Iowa) and other cities and towns struggling and in an acute decline. I can attest to the many small cities and towns in Iowa that have suffered declines in population and standards of living.
In addition to his travels and his first-hand conversations and observations, Kaplan stands-out for his deep reading. Through his reading of Herodotus and Thucydides to contemporary political thinkers like Francis Fukuyama and John Mearsheimer and fellow writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Claude Magris in Europe, Kaplan reads deeply about the past to bring perspective to his observations about the places and times that he inhabits. I should note that when Kaplan references a noted author, he's not just checking a box, he proves himself a deep and careful reader. For this trip, Kaplan consults three great authors in the mid-20th century who wrote about the American West and the conquest of the continent, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Walter Prescott Webb (with a hat tip to William Faulkner as Kaplan by-passes by the South). Each of these writers provides a melody upon which Kaplan plays a riff, noting as he does, that their melodies may not sound completely dulcet to our contemporary ears. But despite some differences from contemporary sensibilities, none of these authors were merely triumphalist in their appraisals of the American project. Kaplan, as he peruses the history of westward expansion while drives across the continent, notes the irreconcilable moral judgments involving the creation of a great nation that led the fight against totalitarian nations in the 20th-century but that arrived at its great power status through the terrible genocide against the American Indians. Part of what attracts me to Kaplan's work is his appreciation and nuance in addressing the moral ambiguities and moral tragedies that politics often entails. (He has repeatedly repented his support of the Iraq War for some time now.)
Kaplan also makes an important point--and this is perhaps his main point--that our experience as an expanding, continental power in the fertile, relatively underpopulated area of temperate North America, played into our thinking as an international power that began with Theodore Roosevelt and that reached its apex in my lifetime. He also appreciates the distinction between the myth of the Marlboro man (the lone cowboy) and the reality of communal regulation in a land where water is scarce. He describes the success of the Mormon venture (chronicled, at least for purposes of this book, by Wallace Stegner) by noting that the Mormon trek and settlement of the Salt Lake area was very much a communal venture. Not lonely cowboys or gunslingers, but a tightly organized, hierarchical venture, fostered the material success that remains apparent to this day.
Kaplan concludes his journey at the San Diego naval base, where American ships look out toward "Cathy"--China. In his appreciation of the importance of our Pacific shore and outlook, Kaplan seems to capture an outlook forwarded by William Irwin Thompson in the mid-1980s. Thompson described a shift in the center of power and culture from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and, in the late 20th-century, to the Pacific. While one might contest such a construal of historical dynamics, I suspect that Thompson, writing in the 1980s (
Pacific Shift (1986)), and Kaplan would likely agree. I suspect that in part because of his deep reading and extensive travel, Kaplan is correct in his perception of a shift in the center of power (and thus our attention) toward the Pacific and Asia (to include the Indian Ocean area and India). These areas have been topics of his earlier books and with more than half of the current population of the world located in a circle that encompasses an area centered in the South China Sea. This area has gone an immense cycle of economic growth, and no doubt this part of the world will become increasingly important to the Americas as a whole, the people of the United States, and their government.
Taking this brief but instructive trip with Kaplan across the United States is well worth the brief time required, and it provides us a perspective upon the future by a deep appreciation of our past.
