Robert Kaplan offers his rules for Supremacy by Stealth:
- Produce More Joppolos
- Stay on the Move
- Emulate Second-Century Rome
- Use the Military to Promote Democracy
- Be Light and Lethal
- Bring Back the Old Rules
- Remember the Philippines
- The Mission Is Everything
- Fight on Every Front
- Speak Victorian, Think Pagan
The last of those rules became one of the sub-titles of the Coming Anarchy blog:
Imperialism in antiquity was in many respects a strain of isolationism: the demand for absolute security at home led powers to try to dominate the world around them. That pagan-Roman model of imperialism contrasts sharply with the altruistic Victorian one, exemplified by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in his comment about protecting “the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan.” Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we weren’t, our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support and ultimately be effective. And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan. The idealistic shorthand of “democracy,” “economic development,” and “human rights,” by means of which the media make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh and complicated ground-level truths. Remember that even Gladstone’s vision was more effectively implemented by the realpolitik of statesmen such as Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli, who kept illiberal empires like Germany and Russia at bay and retook Sudan from Islamic extremists.By sustaining ourselves first, we will be able to do the world the most good. Some 200 countries, plus thousands of NGOs represent a chaos of interests. Without the organizing force of a great and self-interested liberal power, they are unable to advance the interests of humanity as a whole…