Fred M. Kaplan

How American foreign policy got so off-track in the 21st Century has been well covered in other books. Why it got so off-track is the subject of this book.

It stems from two huge misconceptions made by the Bush White House and the neo-cons. The first is that, on 9/11, the world did not change. It certainly changed in that America suddenly found itself more vulnerable than ever before. But the nature of power, politics and warfare did not change. The second is that, after the Cold War, America show more found itself as the world’s only superpower. With its superior military technology, America thought that it was now free to topple unfriendly regimes, ignore treaties and generally do whatever it wanted around the world. Now that the Soviet Union was gone as an enemy, Cold War allies no longer felt compelled to see things America’s way. An American president could deal with this new landscape in one of two ways: emphasize the military, and don’t hesitate to use American power around the world, or, emphasize diplomacy, and restructure old alliances (and create new ones) around the world.

The invasion of Iraq was supposed to be the example of Bush’s belief that, with Saddam Hussein out of the way, Iraq will suddenly turn into a democratic country, and that democracy will spread throughout the Mideast. The Pentagon cared more about the military part than about the aftermath. Turmoil in Iraq was practically guaranteed by the first two decrees issued by Paul Bremer in the early days of the occupation: disbanding the Iraqi army, and removing all Baathists from the government.

The author also looks at the Administration’s decision to abrogate the ABM Treaty with Russia, and resume deployment of Ronald Reagan’s missile defense shield, despite the fact that its operational capabilities are somewhere between questionable and non-existent.

This is a really good book, and I learned something from it. There is more than just facts and figures here; the author profiles people in the military world, some of whom do not get their names in the media. It’s worth reading. show less

275 million dead. That was the estimate of the cost in human life of a nuclear war in SIOP 62, one of the United States' first strategic plans for such an event. This plan created by the era's great military minds, and then signed in approval by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy is blood-curdling. Over the decades the technology has made the job of destroying all life as we know it a much more precise and efficient proposition. But subsequent plans don't reduce the insanity involved in show more placing all humanity in such peril. Kaplan does an excellent job of respectfully keeping politics at a proper distance as he looks at each president's views of these most dangerous weapons. He carefully, and I believe accurately, assess the strengths and weakness of each Commander-In-Chief as he comes to terms with the enormity of the destruction that lies ready at his fingertips. They each have faced two constants. No one knows what will happen, regardless of the nation, once a mushroom cloud casts its shadow over their lands. The second, 275 million dead. show less

I read Kaplan's Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and discovered it to be a very lucid explanation of the technological challenges faced by the security departments around the world. So naturally, I was anxious to check out his most recent book, courtesy Net Galley, for which I am grateful.

It's an immensely enjoyable, if a bit scary, book about the political infighting and territoriality of the armed services and policy development of nuclear weapons. There was a lot of show more jockeying between the Navy, Army, and Air Force as to who would control "the bomb". and unfortunately much of that in-fighting controlled policy. Curtis LeMay, a brilliant leader in the organization and implementation of the bombing campaigns (read fire-bombing) in Europe and then Japan, as head of the Strategic Air Command was all in favor of a virtual first strike with everything as the SAC bombers were quite vulnerable. (His philosophy was simply to bomb everything.)

The Navy, meanwhile, was eager to get funds for the development of large numbers of ballistic missile equipped Polaris submarines, arguing that if the Russians never knew where you were the deterrent effect was far greater and more valuable. The Army, on the other hand, promoted the use of smaller tactical nukes on the battlefield suggesting that a nuclear counterattack to defend Europe against Russian aggression would lead to a Russian withdrawal and peace discussions. The casual manner in which civilian casualties (not to mention military) were discussed was a bit disheartening.

The man who replaced LeMay at SAC was Thomas Power. Even LeMay thought he was excessive: "There was a cruelty to Power’s zest for bombing cities. Even LeMay privately referred to his protégé as a “sadist.” When Bill Kaufmann briefed him on the Counterforce strategy at SAC headquarters, Power reacted with fury. “Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” he screamed. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!” After a bit more of this tirade, Power said, “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!” Kaufmann snapped back, “You’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.” Power stormed out of the room. "

One surprising and note-worthy section was on how Cheney, of all people, was instrumental in reducing the huge number of weapons by half. All of the president's since have failed to reject the no-first-strike policy. Trump, himself, in his on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea didn't hesitate to wave the arsenal and threaten its use.

Kaplan describes the abyss that policy makers then and since have become trapped in. The mere idea of how many times cities (people) need to be nuked in order to assure our victory, even as we ourselves are annihilated, inevitably leads to comparisons with Alice in Wonderland.

That about sums up the insanity faced by all the presidents since Hiroshima. The importance of policy discussions and analysis worries me when I read that our current president disdains not just the briefing books, but the idea of analysis, preferring to rely on his "gut feeling" no doubt the most attuned gut in the history of the world. But then he's such a self-described "stable genius."

A good companion book to McNamara's memoir, "In Retrospect" and Ellsberg's "Secrets." Each is ostensibly more about Vietnam but each reveals much a bout how decisions are made in government. Other titles I will have to read are Kaplan's "Wizards of Armaggedon", Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine," and Bruce Kuklick's "Kennan to Kissinger" and I'm sure many others, but we only live so long. show less

1959 by Fred Kaplan is a sociopolitical history book about various events of that year that “broke the barriers” and opened up new frontiers in music, media, politics, and even sex. It was an eye-opener to me because I had never heard of any of this stuff, which occurred a few years before I was born.

The birth control pill, for example, came to be because of the efforts of two women, both independently wealthy, who saw their work only come to fruition in their old age. Margaret Sanger show more and Kathleen McCormick were both women’s rights activists; Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was the genesis of the idea, McCormick the financial backer and supporter. I didn’t think I would enjoy this chapter as much as the others, but I did, because it ran so counter to the narrative I thought I knew – of Big Pharma inventing a drug because there was a demand for it, not two women supporting research into artificial female hormones on their own dime, doing the legwork until the industry giants took an interest in it. (At first, the Pill was marketed as a relief for menstrual miseries.) This chapter was the only one to focus on the achievements of women while all the rest, usual for 1950s America, were about the accomplishments of men.

This isn’t to say, though, that women were entirely absent. The accomplishments of Peggy Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay in getting the Guggenheim Museum built are touched on as well, and in fact they did more to get it built than the man it was named after.

The bulk of the book was, in fact, about the intersection of the music and art worlds, not surprising as the writer is also a jazz blogger. It’s too easy to relate the free-form innovations in jazz music to the wild spatters of Jackson Pollock’s drip canvases; yet the boundary-breaking scales of structures of 1950s jazz also had equivalents in literature (Norman Mailer, the Beat poets) and cinema (John Cassavetes.) Kaplan speckles the chapters with anecdotes of artists, writers, and musicians moving between these worlds, hanging out in coffeehouses together, attending the same parties. The book was perhaps too heavy on jazz music (the author’s specialty) but I didn’t mind, it was interesting to me.

The book is also helped by the structure of its chapters, in which each pivotal event is presented chronologically, in the order it appeared in the year, though within each chapter time hopscotched back and forth from the event’s lead-up to its later impact. Each chapter built on the next, so, by the end when President John F. Kennedy makes his declaration to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, the reader feels that all this has been a narrative buildup to making the impossible, possible, and taking the idea of a new frontier as far as it can go.

I wonder, though, if that narrative is dated already. The book was published in 2009, still a heady, optimistic time, when boundary-smashing was seen as right and good, and still to be expected. From today’s viewpoint of 2023 I wonder if it set off an era that has gone too far, devolving into chaos, violence, and authoritarianism. Perhaps in a few years historians will look at the 1960s in a different light. show less