The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

A moving meditation on recent geopolitical crises, viewed through the lens of ancient and modern tragedy

＂Spare, elegant and poignant. . . . If there is a single contemporary book that should be pressed into the hands of those who decide issues of war and peace, this is it.＂--John Gray, New Statesman

＂It is tragic that Robert D. Kaplan’s luminous The Tragic Mind is so urgently needed.＂--George F. Will

Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power.

The great dilemmas of international politics, he argues, are not posed by good versus evil--a clear and easy choice--but by contests of good versus good, where the choices are often searing, incompatible, and fraught with consequences. A deeply learned and deeply felt meditation on the importance of lived experience in conducting international relations, this is a book for everyone who wants a profound understanding of the tragic politics of our time.

Robert D. Kaplan, the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, was twice named one of the world’s ＂Top 100 Global Thinkers＂ by Foreign Policy. A reporter with decades of experience writing for The Atlantic, he has written twenty-two books, including The Loom of Time; Adriatic; The Good American; The Revenge of Geography; Asia’s Cauldron; Monsoon; The Coming Anarchy; and Balkan Ghosts. He has served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel.