SUPREMACY BY STEALTH

It is a cliché these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire—different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless. It is time to move beyond a statement of the obvious. Our recent effort in Iraq, with its large-scale mobilization of troops and immense concentration of risk, is not indicative of how we will want to act in the future. So how should we operate on a tactical level to manage an unruly world? What are the rules and what are the tools?

In the late winter of 2003, as the United States was dispatching tens of thousands of soldiers to the Middle East for an invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command was deployed in sixty-five countries.

In Nepal the Special Forces were training government troops to hunt down the Maoist rebels who were terrorizing that nation. In the Philippines they were scheduled to increase in number for the fight against the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas.

There was also Colombia—the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt, and the third most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil and Mexico. Jungly, disease-ridden, and chillingly violent, Colombia is the possessor of untapped oil reserves and is crucially important to American interests.

The totalitarian regimes in Iraq and North Korea, and the gargantuan difficulty of displacing them, may have been grabbing headlines of late, but the future of military conflict—and therefore of America's global responsibilities over the coming decades—may best be gauged in Colombia, where guerrilla groups, both left-wing and right-wing, have downplayed ideology in favor of decentralized baronies and franchises built on terrorism, narcotrafficking, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and the siphoning of oil-pipeline revenues from local governments. FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), for example, is Karl Marx at the top and Adam Smith all the way down the command chain.

Guerrilla warfare is now all about business, and physical cruelty knows no limits. It extends to torture (fish hooks to tear up the genitals), gang rape, and the murder of children whose parents do not cooperate with the insurgents. The Colombian rebels take in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from cocaine-related profits alone, and have documented links to the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatists (who have apparently advised them on kidnapping and car-bomb tactics). If left unmolested, they will likely establish strategic links with al Qaeda.

Arauca province, a petroleum-rich area in northeastern Colombia, near the Venezuelan border, is a pool-table-flat lesion of broadleaf thickets, scrap-iron settlements, and gravy-brown rivers.

The journey from the airfield to the Colombian army base, where a few dozen Green Berets and civil-affairs officers and their support staff are bunkered behind sandbags and concertina wire, is only several hundred yards. Yet U.S. personnel make the journey in full kit, inside armored cars and Humvees with mounted MK-19 40mm grenade launchers.

As I stepped off the tarmac in late February, two Colombian soldiers, badly wounded by a car bomb set off by left-wing narcoterrorists (the bomb had been coated with human feces in hopes of causing infection), were being carried on stretchers to the base infirmary, where a Special Forces medic was waiting to treat them. The day before, the Colombian police had managed to deactivate two other bombs in Arauca. The day before that there had been an assassination attempt on a local politician. And the day before that an electricity tower had been bombed, knocking out power in the region. Previous days had brought the usual roadside kidnappings, street-corner bicycle bombings, grenade strikes on police stations, and mortar attacks on Colombian soldiers—using propane cylinders packed with nails, broken glass, and feces.

As we drove through Arauca's mangy streets in a Special Forces convoy, every car and bicycle seemed potentially deadly. Yet the U.S. troops there are defiant, if frustrated. The U.S. government permits them only to train, rather than fight alongside, their Colombian counterparts, but they want the rules of engagement loosened.

After a truck unexpectedly pulled out into the street, slowing our convoy and causing us to scan rooftops and parked vehicles (and causing me to sweat more than usual in the humid and fetid atmosphere), a Green Beret with experience on several continents leaned over and said, "If five firemen get killed fighting a fire, what do you do? Let the building burn? I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system."

Back at the base, Major Mike Oliver and Captain Carl Brosky, civil-affairs specialists who between them have served in the Balkans, Africa, and several Latin American countries, were spending the day chasing down two containers of equipment for Arauca's schools and hospital that had been held up in customs at the Venezuelan border.

A week earlier, at Tolomeida, several hundred miles south, I had watched Sergeant Ivan Castro, a Puerto Rican from Hoboken, New Jersey, as he patiently taught Colombian soldiers how to sit in a 360-degree "cigar formation" while on reconnaissance, in order to rest in the field without being surprised by the enemy. Later he taught them how to peel back in retreat, without a gap in fire, after making first contact with the enemy. Castro worked twelve hours in the heat that day, speaking in a steady, nurturing tone, working with each soldier until the whole unit performed the drills perfectly.

Even as America's leaders deny that the United States has true imperial intentions, Colombia—still so remote from public consciousness—illustrates the imperial reality of America's global situation. Colombia is only one of the far-flung places in which we have an active military presence.

The historian Erich S. Gruen has observed that Rome's expansion throughout the Mediterranean littoral may well have been motivated not by an appetite for conquest per se but because it was thought necessary for the security of the core homeland. The same is true for the United States worldwide, in an age of collapsed distances. This American imperium is without colonies, designed for a jet-and-information age in which mass movements of people and capital dilute the traditional meaning of sovereignty.

Although we don't establish ourselves permanently on the ground in many locations, as the British did, reliance on our military equipment and the training and maintenance that go along with it (for which the international arms bazaar is no substitute) helps to bind regimes to us nonetheless. Rather than the mass conscription army that fought World War II, we now have professional armed forces, which enjoy the soldiering life for its own sake: a defining attribute of an imperial military, as the historian Byron Farwell noted in Mr. Kipling's Army (1981).

The Pentagon divides the earth into five theaters. For example, at the intersection of 5° latitude and 68° longitude, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) gives way to PACOM (the Pacific Command). At the Turkish-Iranian border it gives way to EUCOM (the European Command).

By the 1990s the U.S. Air Force had a presence of some sort on six of the world's continents. Long before 9/11 the Special Forces were conducting thousands of operations a year in a total of nearly 170 countries, with an average of nine "quiet professionals" (as the Army calls them) on each mission. Since 9/11 the United States and its personnel have burrowed deep into foreign intelligence agencies, armies, and police units across the globe.

Precisely because they foment dynamic change, liberal empires—like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United States—create the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq.

Consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against Iraq. "Don't bluster, don't threaten, but quietly and severely punish bad behavior," says Eliot Cohen, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. "It's the way the Romans acted." Not just the Romans, of course: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was Theodore Roosevelt's way of putting it.

We can take nothing for granted. A hundred years ago the British Navy looked fairly invincible for all time. A world managed by the Chinese, by a Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned with Russia, or by the United Nations (an organization that worships peace and consensus, and will therefore sacrifice any principle for their sakes) would be infinitely worse than the world we have now. And so for the time being the highest morality must be the preservation—and, wherever prudent, the accretion—of American power.

The purpose of power is not power itself; it is the fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability; the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood.

At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of a liberal civil society. As I will argue below, the United States has acquired this responsibility at a dangerous and chaotic moment in world history.

The old Cold War system, for half a century the reigning paradigm in international affairs, is obviously defunct. Enlarging the United Nations Security Council, as some suggest, would make it even harder for that body to achieve consensus on anything remotely substantive. Powers that may one day serve as stabilizing regional influences—India and Russia, China and the European Union—are themselves still unstable or unformed or unconfident or illiberal. Hundreds of new and expanding international institutions are beginning to function effectively worldwide, but they remain fragile. Two or three decades hence conditions may be propitious for the emergence of a new international system—one with many influential actors in a regime of organically evolving interdependence.

But until that time arrives, it is largely the task of the United States to maintain a modicum of order and stability. We are an ephemeral imperial power, and if we are smart, we will recognize that basic fact.

The "American Empire" has been discussed ad nauseam of late, but practical ways of managing it have not. Even so, the management techniques are emerging. While realists and idealists argue "nation-building" and other general principles in Washington and New York seminars, young majors, lieutenant colonels, and other middle-ranking officers are regularly making decisions in the field about how best to train Colombia's army, which Afghan tribal chiefs to support, what kind of coast guard and special forces the Yemeni government requires, how the Mongolians can preserve their sovereignty against Chinese and Russian infiltration, how to transform the Romanian military into a smaller service along flexible Western command lines, and so forth.

The fact is that we trust these people on the ground to be keepers of our values and agents of our imperium, and to act without specific instructions. A rulebook that does not make sense to them is no rulebook at all.

The following rules represent a distillation of my own experience and conversations with diplomats and military officers I have met in recent travels on four continents, and on military bases around the United States.

When I asked Major Paul S. Warren, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Army's Special Operations Command, what serves as the model for a civil-affairs officer within the Special Operations forces, he said, "Read John Hersey's A Bell for Adano—it's all there." The hero of Hersey's World War II novel is Army Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian-American civil-affairs officer appointed to govern the recently liberated Sicilian town of Adano.

Joppolo is full of resourcefulness. He arranges for the U.S. Navy to show local fishermen which parts of the harbor are free of mines, so that they can use their boats to feed the town. He finds a bell from an old Navy destroyer to replace the one that the Fascists took from the local church and melted down for bullets.

He countermands his own general's order outlawing the use of horse-drawn carts, which the town needs to transport food and water. He goes to the back of a line to buy bread, to show Adano's citizens that although he is in charge, he is their servant, not their master. He is the first ruler in the town's history who doesn't represent a brute force of nature. In Hersey's words, [Men like Joppolo are] our future in the world.

Neither the eloquence of Churchill nor the humanness of Roosevelt, no Charter, no four freedoms or fourteen points, no dreamer's diagram so symmetrical and so faultless on paper, no plan, no hope, no treaty—none of these things can guarantee anything. Only men can guarantee, only the behavior of men under pressure, only our Joppolos.

One good man is worth a thousand wonks. As The Times of India wrote on July 7, 1893, the mind of a sharp political agent should not be "crowded with fusty learning." Ian Copland, a historian of the British Raj, wrote that "extroverts and sporting types, sensitive to the cultural milieu," were always necessary to win the confidence of local rulers.

In Yemen recently I observed a retired Special Forces officer cementing friendships with local sheikhs and military men by handing out foot-long bowie knives as gifts. In a world of tribes and thugs manliness still goes a long way.

The right men or women, no matter how few, will find the right hinge in a given situation to change history. The Spartans turned the tide of battle in Sicily by dispatching only a small mission, headed by Gylippus. His arrival in 414 B.C. kept the Syracusans from surrendering to the Athenians. It broke the Athenian land blockade of Syracuse, rallied other Sicilian city-states to the cause, and was crucial to the defeat of the Athenian fleet the following year.

The United States sent a similarly small mission to El Salvador in the 1980s: never more than fifty-five Special Forces trainers at one time. But that was enough to teach the Salvadoran military to confront more effectively the communist guerrillas while beginning to transform itself from an ill-disciplined constabulary force into something much closer to a professional army.

"You produce a product and let him loose," explains Sidney Shachnow, a retired Army major general. "The Special Forces that dropped in to help [the Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid] Dostum, the guys who grew beards, got on horses, and dressed up like Afghans, were not ordered to do so by Tommy Franks. These were decisions they made in the field."

Shachnow himself is a perfect example of the kind of man he describes. Hard and chiseled, he calls to mind Ligustinus, a Roman centurion who spent nearly half his life in the Army—in Spain, Macedonia, and Greece—and was cited for bravery thirty-four times. Shachnow is a Holocaust survivor. Born in 1933, in Lithuania, he endured a Nazi concentration camp as a boy; emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts; joined the Army as a private out of high school; after reaching the rank of sergeant first class attended officers' training school; and served two combat tours in Vietnam, where he was wounded twice. He rose to be a two-star general and a guiding light of the Special Forces. His success resulted from decisions made on instinct and impulse, and from an ability to take advantage of cultural settings in which he did not naturally fit—exactly the ability that U.S. trainers and commandos in El Salvador, Afghanistan, and so many other places have had to possess.

"A Special Forces guy," Shachnow told me, "has to be a lethal killer one moment and a humanitarian the next. He has to know how to get strangers who speak another language to do things for him. He has to go from knowing enough Russian to knowing enough Arabic in a few weeks, depending on the deployment. We need people who are cultural quick studies." Shachnow was talking about a knack for dealing with people, almost a form of charisma. The right man will know how to behave in a given situation—will know how to find things out and act on them.

Xenophon's Greek army cut through the Persian Empire in 401 B.C., with the troops freely debating each step. We should be mobile in the same way—get bogged down militarily nowhere, but make sure we have military access everywhere. Because we have to manage a world in which—as always—old regimes periodically crumble, disaster lies in becoming too deeply implanted in more than a handful of countries at once. Here our provincialism helps.

As Hayward S. Florer, a retired Special Forces colonel, told me, "Even our Special Ops people are insular. Sure, we like the adventure with other cultures, learning the history and language. But at heart many of us are farm boys who can't wait to get home. In this way we're not like the British and French. Our insularity protects us from becoming colonials."

Colonialism is in part an outgrowth of cosmopolitanism, the intellectual craving to experience different cultures and locales; it leads, inexorably, to an intense personal involvement in their fate. "We want an empire not of colonies or protectorates but of personal relationships," a Marine lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton, in California, told me. "We back into deployments. There doesn't need to be a policy directive from the Pentagon—half the time we don't know what the policy is. We get a message from a Kenyan or Nigerian officer who studied here that his unit needs training. We try to do it. We help decide, based on our needs in a region, who we want to help out." The U.S. military is constantly doing favors for other militaries, favors we call in when we need to. This is how we sometimes get access to places. The formal base rights that we have in forty countries may in the future be less significant than the number of friendships maintained between U.S. officers and their foreign counterparts. With that in mind, the military needs to establish a formal data system for tracking such relationships. At present the method of keeping abreast of these crucial ties is largely anecdotal.

The best tools of access are the so-called "iron majors," a term that really refers to all mid-level officers, from noncommissioned master sergeants and chief warrant officers to colonels. In a sense majors run our military establishment, regardless of who the Secretary of Defense happens to be. Up through the rank of captain an officer hasn't closed the door on other career options. But becoming a major means you've "bought into the corporation," explains Special Forces Major Roger D. Carstens. "We're the ones who are up at four A.M. answering the general's e-mails, making sure all the systems are go."

The United States has set up military missions throughout the formerly communist world, creating situations in which U.S. majors, lieutenant colonels, and full colonels are often advising foreign generals and chiefs of staff. Make no mistake: these officers are policymakers by another name. A Romanian-speaking expert on the Balkans, Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles van Bebber, has become well known in top military circles in Bucharest for helping to start the reform process that led to Romania's integration with NATO. Such small-scale but vital relationships give America an edge there over its Western European allies. One of the reasons that countries like Romania and Bulgaria supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that they now see their primary military relationship as being with America rather than with NATO as such.

In formerly communist Mongolia, U.S. Army Colonel Tom Wilhelm, a fluent speaker of Russian who studied at Leningrad State University, is an adviser to the local military. With Wilhelm's help, Mongolia has reoriented its defense strategy toward international peacekeeping—as a means of gaining allies in global forums against its rapacious neighbors, Russia and China. The planned dispatch of a Mongolian contingent to help patrol postwar Iraq was the result of what one good man—in this case, Wilhelm—was able to accomplish on the ground. I recently followed him around on an inspection tour of Mongolia's Gobi Desert border with China. We slept in local military outposts, rode Bactrian camels, and spent hours in conversation with mid-level Mongolian officers over meals of horsemeat and camel's milk. It is through such activities that relationships are built and allies are gained in an era when anyplace can turn out to be strategic.

Provincialism is the aspect of our national character that will keep the United States from overextending itself in too many causes. But owing to the wave of immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America that began in the 1970s, the United States is an international society comparable to Rome in the second century A.D., when the empire reached its territorial zenith under Trajan and, more important, was granting citizenship to elites in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. (Trajan and Hadrian, in fact, were both from Spain.)

Our military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities must now turn to our Iranian-, Arab-, and other hyphenated Americans—our potential Joppolos. At a time when we desperately need more language specialists, it is shameful that we are seeking out so few of the many native speakers at our disposal. The financial incentives we offer them are simply insufficient, and the waiting period for security clearance has become farcically long. This situation has been changing of late for the better: it needs to continue to do so.

Trained area specialists are likewise indispensable. In 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entrusted the eminent Arabist and diplomat Talcott Seelye, in Lebanon, to carry out two discreet evacuations of American citizens from that war-torn country with the help of the Palestine Liberation Organization—which we did not recognize at the time. Seelye, who was born in Beirut, may not have wholly agreed with Kissinger's foreign policy—but that didn't matter. He knew how to get the job done. The fact that Arabists and other area specialists may be emotionally involved, through marriage or friendship, with host countries—often causing them to dislike the policies that Washington orders them to execute—can actually be of benefit, because it gives them credibility with like-minded locals. In any case, such tensions between policymakers and agents in the field are typical of imperial systems. We should not be overly concerned about them.

True, comparison is the beginning of all serious scholarship, and area experts are ignorant of much outside their favored patch of ground. Their knowledge of the current reality in a given country is so prodigious that they often cannot imagine a different reality. That is why area experts can say what is going on in a place, but cannot always say what it means. Still, it is impossible to implement any policy without them, as Kissinger and others learned.

Colonel Robert Warburton, the Anglo-Afghan who established the Khyber Rifles regiment on the Northwest Frontier of British India in 1879, was one kind of person needed to manage our interests in distant corners of the world. Warburton spoke fluent Pashto and Persian, and was at home among both aristocratic Englishmen and Afridi tribesmen. The normally cruel and perfidious Afridis held him in such high esteem that he did not need to go armed among them. Warburton was less a cosmopolitan than a nuts-and-bolts journeyman, whose linguistic skills came from birth and circumstance more than from intellectual curiosity. The American equivalents of Warburton can be found among Arab-Americans posted to Central Command and Latino-Americans posted to Southern Command—people who fit into places like Yemen and Colombia, but who want only to return to their suburban American homes afterward.

Southern Command, in particular, is full of Spanish-speaking noncommissioned officers: ethnic Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. The relative shortage of speakers of Arabic and other languages in the rest of the military indicates that in the Special Forces, at least, languages may soon have to be recognized as an "occupational skill"—like weaponry, communications, battlefield medicine, engineering, and intelligence, one in which every noncommissioned officer must spend a year specializing. If each Special Forces unit had a couple of officers who were fluent in several languages spoken in the theater command (Arabic, Persian, and Turkish in CENTCOM, for example), our ability to project power would dramatically increase.

The forward basing of area commands is another strategy that would encourage area expertise and language skills. In the years to come we should consider moving Central Command headquarters from Tampa, Florida, to the Middle East, and Southern Command headquarters from Miami back to Panama, where it was until 1997. There is simply no substitute for being in the region when it comes to absorbing language and culture. As a journalist, I have found that in my profession people on location always have better instincts for the local situation than people back in the United States, even if they don't always draw the proper conclusions. Many a mid-level officer has told me that the same holds true in the military.

VERY thought provoking ... the Demon-Krats will go catatonic if we ever exercise such overwhelming "peacekeeping" and battle resolution full force. We're seeing a lot of this philosophy at work in Iraw now, I believe .. get the job done, take out the monsters. At the end of a TV appearance recently, Kaplan questioned: In Somalia .. would it not have been better for the CIA or Special Forces to provoke a coup, wherein the tyrannical leader could've been destroyed by his own instead of the tragedy that occurred... the savage murder and debasement of our finest .. the slaughter of millions of people there? I have to say I agree with him ... Somalia will always be a haunting ... the ultimate desecration and abandonment of our bravest by one of the the most depraved, degenerate worms to ever stalk this earth. That he was ever our president will be this country's cross to bear for decades.

I have a friend in Special Forces, and I know there's a big push on to increase their numbers because they're so perfectly configured for the new landscape, and they can work in small groups very effectively. I understand the Army is fighting this BIG time .. politics .. politics everywhere. Keep fighting, Rummy!! God Bless our finest .. our brave, brilliant and courageous military.

His book on Amazon.com:

Warrior Politics, Why Leadership Requires Pagan Ethos

The Description

In Warrior Politics, the esteemed journalist and analyst Robert D. Kaplan explores the wisdom of the ages for answers for today’s leaders. While the modern world may seem more complex and dangerous than ever before, Kaplan writes from a deeper historical perspective to reveal how little things actually change. Indeed, as Kaplan shows us, we can look to history’s most influential thinkers, who would have understood and known how to navigate today’s dangerous political waters.

Drawing on the timeless work of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, among others, Kaplan argues that in a world of unstable states and an uncertain future, it is increasingly imperative to wrest from the past what we need to arm ourselves for the road ahead. Wide-ranging and accessible, Warrior Politics is a bracing book with an increasingly important message that challenges readers to see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.

Synopsis

In Warrior Politics, the esteemed journalist and analyst Robert D. Kaplan explores the wisdom of the ages for answers for today's leaders. While the modern world may seem more complex and dangerous than ever before, Kaplan writes from a deeper historical perspective to reveal how little things actually change. Indeed, as Kaplan shows us, we can look to history's most influential thinkers, who would have understood and known how to navigate today's dangerous political waters. Drawing on the timeless work of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, among others, Kaplan argues that in a world of unstable states and an uncertain future, it is increasingly imperative to wrest from the past what we need to arm ourselves for the road ahead. Wide-ranging and accessible, Warrior Politics is a bracing book with an increasingly important message that challenges readers to see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.

From the Back Cover

“While Washington is filled with journalists seeking information from the military, the military seeks information from Kaplan.” –The Washington Post

“There is much to praise in Kaplan's sober realism, his genuine knowledge of the world's danger zones, and his justified contempt for liberal good intentions when they are not backed by steel and will.” –The New York Review of Books

“[A] fascinating intellectual exercise.” –Newsweek

“One of the most thought-provoking and profound books that I have recently read. As readable as it is stimulating.” –Henry Kissinger

“Kaplan draws on a rich humanist tradition to shatter the illusion of a collective, post-cold war vision of human progress. . . . [He] has become the Ayn Rand of international affairs, saying what few dare to say.” –New Statesman

“Kaplan skillfully captures the relevance of classical political theory for today’s leaders, whether they manage crises in the boardroom or the Oval Office.” –William S. Cohen, former secretary of defense

“An insightful, timely book. Citing philosophers from Sun-Tzu to Machiavelli, the author shows the value of ancient insights into human nature in formulating international policy.” –Booklist

“Warrior Politics should be read by every citizen deeply concerned about America’s role in the world.” –Newt Gingrich

“The reason I have come to admire Bob Kaplan's little book . . . is its refusal to apologize for its analogies. This is so refreshing. . . . What Kaplan is saying–and what Hobbes and Machiavelli and some of the Founders said–was that such realism is in fact more moral than idealism. Idealism in state craft is based on an abdication of responsibility — to govern the world as it is.” –Andrew Sullivan

“[Kaplan’s] comparison of the United States in 2001 with the complacent Roman Empire will be a wake-up call for many readers. His philosophical polemic is well worth reading in these anxious times.” –Library Journal

“I read Warrior Politics with fascination. Kaplan makes a persuasive case that the insights of major philosophers are relevant to modern security problems. This book will be read by scholars, but it should also be read by those responsible today for making the decisions that affect our national security.” –William J. Perry, former secretary of defense

About the Author

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the bestselling author of eight previous books on foreign affairs and travel, including Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth, The Coming Anarchy, and Eastward to Tartary. He is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

Wow .. he's from my neck of the woods .. land of my birth, Western Mass.

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