EARNING THE ROCKIES
How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World
By Robert D. Kaplan
201 pp. Random House. $27.
Hello. I’m Ann Szalda-Petree and this is The Book Review Radio Show from Missoula, MT, produced by KFGM Missoula Community Radio and Szalda-Petree Productions. Today I review Robert D.Kaplan’s 2017 book titled “Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World”.
Introduction.
Robert Kaplan’s 2017 book “Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World” helped me understand how the political right in the Unites States views colonization, imperial tendencies, America’s place in the world (which includes the belief, and I quote, “we are fated to lead”), and how foreign policy can be conceptualized as an amoral (not immoral) endeavor with moral consequences. I don’t agree with most of the arguments posited in this book, but it did give me a lot to think about in terms of how, as Kaplan calls us, the “left’s intellectual elite” argues itself out of being relevant to people living in the middle of the United States. Because of this book I can almost understand nationalism and how it evolves into white nationalism, explained by a former member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. This book is a mere 180 pages and well worth reading, especially for those who live in a liberal echo chamber.
Brief Summary.
The main reason for the existence of this book is to give Kaplan a chance to reflect on the US landscape in general, and in particular how our history of exploration and exploitation of this land shaped and continues to shape our national consciousness. His thesis is that westward expansion, in his words “a quasi-imperialistic” endeavor, influenced our national psyche to favor both communalism and individualism in a way that has never before been seen in the history of the world. Kaplan argues that we are special because we are simultaneously a nation, empire, and continent, and that specialness gives us the imperative to be the world’s peacekeepers through the biggest military ever to exist. He takes a month-long drive from the east coast, through the heartland of America, ending in San Diego looking lovingly at ships from the US Pacific Fleet, and toward the West back toward Asia and Europe, where it all began. He moves from East to West as he moves through the past toward the present and future, a metaphor for how conquering the wild territory of the west led to the future dominance of the US.
About the Author.
Robert D. Kaplan, according to the book jacket, “is the bestselling author of seventeen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior advisor at Eurasia Group. For three decades his work has appeared in The Atlantic. He held the national security chair at the United States Naval Academy and was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the worlds Top 100 Global Thinkers.
Since writing “Earning the Rockies”, Kaplan published the 2018 collection of essays “The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century”. “Marco Polo’s World” consists of essays published in various journals by Kaplan, although the first chapter, “The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response” does a good job of summarizing the final chapters of“Earning the Rockies”.
Kaplan has spent his career traveling and reporting for various publications. His website explains his“travel budgets were meager. The challenge was how to interview the prime minister while staying at a cheap hotel. Throughout my career, I have tried to avoid the herd instinct and to search out places and stories that the media was ignoring, but which deserved coverage because of their news potential.”
Kaplan most assuredly has the credentials to write this book, and is accepted as a foreign policy and military expert by many major publications.
Range of Topic.
Kaplan travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific over the course of ONE MONTH, listening to conversations heard at truck stops and restaurants, commenting on the interaction between BMI and geography in the populations he observes. At no point does he seem to identify with anyone besides male writers of the past 70 years and his childhood self, who got to travel with an iconic father who loved the automobile and national parks.
His view is hysterically and unalterably white and male, something never acknowledged in the book. His comments about people being “unfailingly polite”, or obese and dead-eyed, speak to a difference in perspective that entertained and horrified me. What would those dead-eyed people, who in his words had an obese stature that indicated they had “given up”, write about him? And more disturbingly, what would they write about me, a middle class social work professor living in Missoula, Montana? My own thoughts about his lack of identification of his view made me question my own, which is never fun but always instructive. More on that in a minute.
Kaplan truly loves Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and anyone who writes about expansionist tendencies in 19th century presidents. Never heard of Bernard DeVoto? Neither had I. From Wikipedia:
Bernard Augustine DeVoto (1897 – 1955),American historian, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer, was a lifelong champion of American Public lands and the conservation of public resources as well as an outspoken defender of civil liberties. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper’s Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described Devoto as”flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, … often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.”[1]
Kaplan quotes from DeVoto and Stegner extensively, combining them with quotes he overhears in restaurants and his thoughts on the ethnic composition of people he sees in parks and at national monuments on any particular day to support his primary thesis, which is: The United States of America is unique and important both because of it’s geographical location in the world, giving us access to seemingly unending power and water (although he shows that water is not unending and will be one of the primary issues that change how we see ourselves in the future), and because of how we defined ourselves as we added everything past the original 13 colonies to our nation. He argues that our expansion taught us military skills (learned from indigenous peoples), how to make our population small in the dessert and large on the coast, how to depend on others when necessary, and how be remain individual when it was expedient. The frontier personification of the country became so embedded it became our character. According to Kaplan, the American character is that of John Wayne and sometimes you have to do immoral things for morality to win in the end.
Strengths.
“Earning the Rockies” has several strengths, which are actually very, well, strong. First, it’s very readable and entertaining. Domestic and foreign affairs as topics can be tedious and difficult to understand. The topics abound with complexity and require a historical foundation to get right. Kaplan’s insistence on viewing the world though the window of a paneled station wagon in the 60’s was relatable to me,though of COURSE if won’t be to everyone.
There were a few points that caused me to pause and think about how I view myself in the world and how he paints a different picture. For example, he writes about how in Ohio, nearly everyone looks unhealthy and poor, but they are dignified. He goes on to say that Walter Russell Mead characterizes the elites in Washington and New York as different than broad mass of American people, “who believe in honor, literal faith in God, and military institutions….America is a democracy that has a highly developed warrior ethos, making it absolutely ruthless in many of its wars. That is to a significant extent the result of the Scots-Irish and “red neck” traditions that have been more influential in our military conflicts than other, elite traditions. Mead identifies them and their tradition with the first populist, avowedly frontier president, Andrew Jackson.” In Kaplan’s opinion, the sense of honor relates to the military, and faith, trust, and reverence for the military comes from our immigrant roots. Kaplan also says that this is unique to the US among western countries. In the UK for example, military are viewed as civil servants in funny uniforms. I don’t like how he characterizes people: unhealthy and funny uniforms for example. But I wondered about my Scots-Irish heritage on my mother’s side and how that affects my propensity for fist fighting at the smallest slight.
Kaplan has a dislike of what he calls“the left” and the “intellectual elite” and gives a few interesting reasons for why he feels this way, and why many people do. This book was written before Trump won the election. While I don’t know if Kaplan predicted the win, he did describe devotion to Trump as a “primal scream” of people who feel the elite has not paid enough attention to their plight. He also describes historic markers along the highway as loaded with “honest, nuts-and-bolts sentences in plain English and their succinctly heroic, inspiring stories.” He says that the history being taught here is older, not being taught now. He says the history of the West taught in schools and universities is being “reduced to atrocity and little more”. He argues that we can’t know where to go if we can’t be inspired by the past, and that what is coming out of the academy now is too much destruction and not enough inspiration. While a colonizer-centric point, it clarifies where people who hold similar opinions are coming from. It harkens back, however, to the adage “history is written by the victor”. I am including it in strengths because it explained to me, clearly, a concept I have never understood well before. While I think the point itself belongs in the weaknesses section of this review, the strength is reading something that does not fit with my opinion, but makes me understand the opposing opinion that much more.
Finally, there is much in this book that reads like a poem. “The façade looks like a series of black eyes” (p 58). “The gas station signs jump out at you like bulging, bloodshot eyes (p90)”. The man can write.
Weaknesses.
The main weakness of this book is that the view is white, male, generational, and never explained or owned. The author seems to be purporting that the view of history he describes is right somehow. How the US came to prominence is fated and overall a good thing. It is morally right. He even makes the argument that the genocide of the indigenous people already here was somehow “necessary” for the US to rise to the position of protecting freedom in the world. While Kaplan explains that many parts of our history are not good, they cannot be viewed as bad either because of the outcome. Tell that to those displaced and murdered whose culture was decimated. I think Kaplan would be the first to argue he would be telling a different story if it was his culture that was eradicated, but I think he would say that it wasn’t. And that means something.
Kaplan says many times in this book that the US is “fated to lead” because of our history which is inextricably linked to our geography. He is almost arguing that it would be impossible to do anything other than what we’ve done, and the future is laid out in a similar way. He does not make allowance for anything other than the US military being the balancing force in the world, with particular emphasis on balancing Russian instability and Chinese military growth. He doesn’t even consider that there may be another way.
At the conclusion, Kaplan lists 39 books relevant to the text. One of the books, a book about DeVoto written in 1963, has two female authors out of four, including Wallace Stegner (of course). No other book is written by a woman, or an indigenous person (that I can tell). This fact says a lot about who Kaplan reads, who he relates with, and the entire premise of the book.
Conclusion.
“Earning the Rockies” concludes with achapter called “Cathay” and an epilogue that gave me hope that someone, somewhere, has an understanding of what is happening in the world right now. He gives a coherent (and sometimes racist) explanation of the notion that the rise of the Islamic state is related to populist tendencies, and that the US is ripe for radicalization for the same reasons Islamic fundamentalists are gaining footholds in the Middle East regularly. He also argues cogently that imposed borders destroy historical identity and are to blame for the current slew of dictators that create violent national identities from the ashes. This book is instructive for how our foreign policy currently is (and is not) developed in the US. However, I am interested in reading instructions for how to create foreign policy that rivals Kaplan’s in scope but from another perspective. Be sure to visit szaldapetree.com and leave me a message if you have a suggestion. In conclusion, I actually enjoyed this book very much, and would highly recommend it.
This has been the Book Review Radio Show from Missoula, MT, produced by KFGM Missoula Community Radio and Szalda-Petree Productions. For more information visit our website, https://szaldapetree.com. Listen to Missoula Community Radio online at 1055KFGM.org. Thank you for listening.
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