Eastward to Tartary

Selected reviews of Eastward to Tartary are featured below:

The New York Times

Friday, December 15, 2000
President-elect George W. Bush could do a lot worse in preparing for the foreign affairs part of his job than to read "Eastward to Tartary" by Robert D. Kaplan, a scholarly and adventurous journalist who roams the less-traveled regions of the globe and writes about them knowledgeably and with sophistication. Mr. Kaplan is the author, among other books, of "Balkan Ghosts," which achieved a certain notoriety when it was reported to have influenced the American decision not to intervene in the Balkans on the ground that savage ethnic violence there was inevitable and unstoppable. Mr. Kaplan replied that he had never intended that conclusion to be drawn.

He calls "Eastward to Tartary" a sequel to "Balkan Ghosts." Like that book, it is an effort to "anticipate the problems" that loom in an important region of the world, what he calls the Greater Middle East, where he traveled in 1998 and 1999. Mr. Kaplan took a trip from Hungary to Israel, via Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan; and another trip from Turkey to Turkmenistan, passing through the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

As always, Mr. Kaplan is intellectually bold and confident in his judgments. He is not the kind of writer to plunge by bus or train across desert and mountain and find himself perplexed by the human panorama he witnesses. He draws attention to longterm trends that other writers have little noted, like the growing power and influence of Turkey in the Middle East and Central Europe and the importance of the alliance between Israel and Turkey -- "a seismic shift," he calls it. This entire book is illuminated by an unillusioned intelligence and a steady sort of attention to deeper, longer-range trends rather than what might be called headline-news ephemera.

In at least one instance, this focus on the geostrategic reality risks ignoring another reality, that something can be of decisive importance simply because everybody thinks it is. Writing before the latest Palestinian uprising on the West Bank, Mr. Kaplan says that "the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks" is "predictable and therefore uninteresting." Still, Mr. Kaplan may be right in his longer-range vision of the Middle East, where the fate of ethnically divided countries like Syria, Iraq and Jordan may prove of more enduring significance than the fate of the Palestinian state.

"For decades I have heard that there would either be a Greater Israel or a Palestinian state," Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of the Israeli-Arab portion of his book. "It turns out that there will be both: a Palestinian ministate -- without control over its skies or main highways -- situated within a dynamic Israel that will continue to attract workers from across the border, making it the stabilizing force of historic Greater Syria, even as the current Syrian state weakens after decades of Soviet-style calcification."

Throughout, Mr. Kaplan talks to intellectuals, political leaders and people on the street; he makes observations on material conditions -- the degree of dilapidation, the stylishness of dress, the quantities of briefcases and cell phones. He stays keenly attuned to the parallels between present and past and to the influence of what might be called the deep culture, the patterns of belief and behavior that go back hundreds, or even thousands, of years.

The impression here and there is less that Mr. Kaplan makes discoveries and more that he confirms what he already knows from his previous trips, his wide reading and the bracing realpolitik philosophy that he carries along with him like volumes of law in his saddle bags.

Here is Mr. Kaplan ruminating about Stalin during a journey to Georgia, the dictator's birthplace: "To say that the Oriental influence was merely incidental to his character is to ignore its essentials. The monumental use of terror, the very grandeur of his personality cult, and the use of prison labor for gigantic public-works projects echo the ancient Assyrian and Mesopotamian tyrannies. The liturgical nature of Stalin's diatribes, which became the standard for official Communist discourse, bore the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in one of whose Georgian seminaries Stalin studied as a youth."

This is a fascinating comment, and it relates to one of Mr. Kaplan's underlying themes: of civilizations dividing on either side of the Carpathian Mountains. On one side is the Enlightenment-Reformation West, with its stress on laws, institutions and the individual. On the other is the Ottoman-Byzantine East, prone to caliph-style despotism, to tribal ties and obedience to the chief. Mr. Kaplan invokes the importance of this scheme numerous times. He uses it, for example, to explain the reasons for Hungary's relative economic success and the stagnation of Romania and Bulgaria.

But Mr. Kaplan is never guilty of simplified thinking. He has his themes -- among them the Communist heritage of poverty, organized criminality and squalor; the slow, sad substitution of narrow nationalism for the multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism of the defunct empires -- but he also appreciates the role of the individual in history, the fact that, given the individual, nothing is inevitable. His portraits of relatively unknown leaders like Emil Constantinescu of Romania, Petar Stoyanov of Bulgaria and Heydar Aliyev of Azerbaijan are shrewdly succinct, and he has a good eye for the telling detail: the look of the young men he notices hanging around with their elders at the office of a nationalist Bulgarian organization.

"It was a combustible mix," Mr. Kaplan remarks. "Bitter old men and impressionable young thugs, the mix from which Romanian fascism had emerged."

Near the end of his journey -- by bus and by trans-Caspian freighter to Turkmenistan -- Mr. Kaplan reaches Tartary itself, the historic Turkish regions of Asia. His stress is on the wild-west oil-producing areas that have been much in the news. "What Vietnam was to the 1960's and 1970's, what Lebanon and Afghanistan were to the 1980's, and what the Balkans were to the 1990's, the Caspian region might be to the first decade of the new century: an explosive region that draws in the Great Powers."

In other words, the recommendation to the next head of the greatest power of them all: read this book. If there is a better, more sophisticated and informed primer to the emerging powers and problems of the Greater Middle East, I don't know what it is. -- By Richard Bernstein

More Praise for Eastward to Tartary

"Writing in the glorious tradition of great Western travelers to the East in the last 150 years, Robert Kaplan belongs in the company of giants like Sir Richard Burton, Charles Montagu Doughty, and Dame Freya Stark. He is a national resource. Traveler, political observer, historian, modern-day Marco Polo, he reports with a novelist's flair on the Gordian knots of the future."
Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Author Of Passionate Nomad: The Life Of Freya Stark

"Kaplan is one of the two or three top travel writers of our day. He chooses important places (not merely pretty); he studies up on history, geography, and societies; and he tells wonderful stories about people. I'm a great believer in the power of anecdote, and Kaplan is a master of anecdote--not simply to entertain but to instruct. Even when I disagree, I come away wiser."
David Landes, Author Of The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations

"Kaplan is a striking and evocative writer, and the Balkans offer him all the richness of a Garcia Marquez world, where the fantastic is everyday life "
The Washington Post Book World

"Kaplan spares no individual and no nation...as he demonstrates his literary powers at their fullest."
The New York Times Book Review