A review of The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China, by Robert D. Kaplan, Random House, 2023, 400 pages. Paperback edition, 2025, 374 pages.
The Loom of Time brilliantly shows that authoritarianism (and imperialism) can sometimes be better than democracy at protecting minorities and reducing bloodshed—or at least when a softer kind of authoritarianism replaces a crueler kind.
That’s especially true in nations with no history of democracy but with a high degree of diversity, not only in terms of race but more importantly in terms of ideology, ethnicity, culture, religion, and socioeconomic status.
When there is an absence of common social and political values to transcend differences, and when there is no Bill of Rights, democracy can result in the majority abusing the minority. Autocrats have often stepped into the void to unify the polity by force and to stop society from fragmenting into anarchy.
The book’s focus is on the Greater Middle East, but lessons can be gleaned regarding domestic politics in the United States and other Western countries, where diversity seems to be morphing from a strength into a weakness. As identity politics and divisiveness have increased, the result has not been authoritarianism per se, but certainly more statism. More on this thought at the end.
Robert D. Kaplan
Robert D. Kaplan is a gifted thinker on foreign affairs and geopolitics, whose many books and articles reveal the interplay between history, geography and culture in determining a nation’s form of government and degree of state coercion. He writes in a conversational style, takes a high-altitude perspective, and often departs from the conventional wisdom about the Middle East.
Kaplan draws on his firsthand experience as a foreign correspondent and on his deep knowledge of history and the works of notable scholars in history and geopolitics, such as Arnold Toynbee, Elie Kedourie, Edward Said, Samuel Huntington, John Mearsheimer, Gertrude Bell, Oswald Spengler, and Edward Gibbon, as well as the great Arabian explorers and travelers, Charles M. Doughty and T.E. Lawrence.
Although Kaplan is Jewish and served in the Israeli military, he tells the story of the Middle East objectively without wearing his religion on his sleeve or injecting a pro-Israel bias. He is also nonpartisan in his criticism of American foreign policy. For instance, in addition to criticizing George W. Bush’s foreign policies, he finds Barack Obama’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Spring to have been naïve. Obama failed to understand that authoritarian military rule was better for Egyptians than rule by the Brotherhood.
In a similar vein, Libyan dictator Muamar Gaddafi’s rule was better for Libyans and North Africa than what followed after he was killed by rebels from the Arab Spring, with the tacit approval of France and the US.
Kaplan is far from being an apologist for authoritarianism, and he doesn’t draw a moral equivalence between it and liberal democracy. As a classical liberal, a humanist, and a cosmopolitan, he values civil liberties, pluralism, and republicanism while abhorring oppression and other injustices. But he’s also a realist who knows that the path to liberal democracy might have to first pass through authoritarianism. He also knows that hectoring and lecturing illiberal regimes about human rights is often counterproductive.
Many Middle Eastern countries are covered in The Loom of Time. Three of them are highlighted below as examples of Kaplan’s thinking: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria.
Saudi Arabia
A Saudi official told Kaplan about the differences between Saudi Arabia and the US: “We are not the same. Do not assume that we are the same. We are not a democracy and probably never will be.” The official went on to say that the government in Riyad was making progress in liberalizing society but couldn’t get too far ahead of the Saudi people and culture. He also warned that America’s moralizing nudges Saudi Arabia toward China.
The Saudis are no doubt aware of what happened in Iran when the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a US ally, got too far over his skis, so to speak. Proceeding too quickly with his economic and social reforms, and exhibiting the hubris, arrogance and corruption that afflicts most autocrats, he lost touch with the common people, particularly with religious conservatives in the slums of Tehran and in impoverished rural areas.
The US State Department and CIA were also out of touch. In August 1977, just five months before the start of the revolution that would bring Ruhollah Khomeini and his theocratic dictatorship to power, the CIA wrote a secret report, saying that “The Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s. . . . There will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.”
(The source of the above quote is an outstanding book on the shah’s rise and demise: King of Kings, by Scott Anderson.)
American and European moralizers seem to forget that liberal democracy didn’t spring up overnight in the West. It was the result of hundreds of years of social upheaval, autocracy, religious wars, and such horrific brutalities as burning at the stake and drawing and quartering. In addition, the roots of democracy and republicanism go back thousands of years to Greek dēmokratia and the Roman republic.
By contrast, Saudi Arabia has been a nation for less than a century, going back to only 1932, when Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud established the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The al-Saud dynasty goes back to 1727, but was then under the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Arabia from 1517 to 1918.
It was a spectacular military and political feat for al Saud to unify the vast and barren central Arabian Peninsula, which was home to a diversity of tribes, sheikhdoms, city-states, emirates, and kingdoms. It was a region of hard men hardened by harsh conditions. No wonder the region gave birth to cultural norms, religious beliefs, and political systems dramatically different from those in the West.
It is the height of naïveté to think that democracy can be easily transplanted to Saudi Arabia—or to Iraq.
Iraq
Kaplan’s writing on Iraq is especially poignant. Assigned to the country as a reporter when Saddam Hussein was in power, he found the dictator and his Ba’athist regime to be horribly despotic, repressive, violent, and cruel. As such, he supported George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam, but with the hope that the administration would understand the political and cultural realities of the country and not try to turn the country into a clone of the US.
Embedded with US troops during the war, Kaplan became disillusioned over what he saw, as Iraq descended into chaos and anarchy, resulting in more deaths than during Saddam’s reign, excluding the deaths in Saddam’s earlier war with Iran. Kaplan realized that the masses prefer stability and rules, even under autocrats, over the unpredictable violence and destruction of marauding religious extremists and terrorists. Seeing how wrong he had been to have initially supported the war, Kaplan returned home so depressed that he needed counseling.
Wisdom comes from making mistakes and admitting them. Kaplan is very wise.
To be fair, there is a fledgling democracy in Iraq today, and Shiites are more empowered than they were under Saddam, to the point of a Shiite being prime minister as of this writing. But the war also gave birth to ISIS, failed to appease the Kurds, brought Iraq into Iran’s orbit instead of being a counterbalance to the theocracy, and has resulted in Iranian militias being stationed in Iraq to help keep the peace. At the same time, in a case of confusing geopolitics, the US is providing aid and arms to Iraq.
Syria
Kaplan found the autocracy in Syria under Hafez al-Assad to be less repressive than Iraq under Saddam, although al-Assad could certainly resort to violence, as when he crushed an Islamist uprising led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The crackdown culminated in what is known as the Hama massacre, in which two thirds of the city of Hama was destroyed. He and his Ba’ath party ruled from 1970 to 2000, during which time al-Assad protected his fellow Alawite minorities from persecution at the hands of the Sunni majority. It was also a period of palace intrigues, regional and international geopolitical gamesmanship, pan-Arabism, and repeated attempts to defeat Israel.
Upon his death, al-Assad was replaced by his son Bashar al-Assad, who turned out to be far more ruthless. Bashar ruled from 2000 until he fled the country in 2024, when a rebel group with past ties to al-Qaida overran Syrian troops and took over the country. Time will tell if the liberators will respect human rights and protect the Alawites, the Druze, and other minority groups.
Blaming the West
It is voguish among the Western intelligentsia to claim that many if not most of the problems in the Middle East stem from Britain and France carving up the region into artificial nation states after World War I, states that tried to bring together under one flag ethnic groups with a long history of enmity between them.
Kaplan finds that too simplistic. First, drawing clear ethnic boundaries and borders was always going to be problematic, given that there are so many different competing groups in the Middle East. Second, if the European powers—and later the US—had not meddled in the Middle East, the region still would have been beset by violence and authoritarianism. Third, Iran and Egypt are not paragons of human rights and progressive government, even though they were not carved up and were the locus of ancient civilizations.
Lessons for the US and the West
It was stated at the beginning of this review that lessons could be gleaned from the book regarding domestic politics in the United States and other Western countries, where diversity seems to be morphing from a strength into a weakness.
The controversial thought is mine, not Kaplan’s, but was triggered by Kaplan’s description of Middle Eastern societies.
With respect to the US, social trust has diminished as identity politics have grown in lockstep with diversity (in the broader sense beyond race), along with a shift from Judeo-Christian values to both secularism and other religious beliefs, with growing skepticism about founding principles and capitalism, and with increasing doubts about the goodness of America.
As social trust and glue have weakened, government has grown in reach and power in order to keep order between groups, to track socioeconomic indicators by group, to enact myriad laws and programs in response to group grievances and resentments against other groups, and to distribute subsidies, favors and patronage by group, in a costly and futile attempt to achieve equal outcomes across all groups. A similar obsession with group identities pervades academia, media, industry, and other institutions.
This has not led to authoritarianism, thanks to the US being a constitutional republic. However, it has led to increased statism on both the left and the right, as well as a shift in power from Congress to the White House, where the current occupant issues diktat after diktat, a usurpation honed by him but begun in previous administrations, in order to advance the interest of favored groups over disfavored ones.
With respect to Europe, there has been a large influx of refugees and emigrants from former colonies and other countries. Many have come with values, beliefs, customs, and hatreds learned in the mother country that are incompatible with the receiving culture and with liberal democracy, thus making assimilation problematic, creating a political backlash, and weakening the social cohesiveness that underpins the European welfare state.
Main Takeaway
Kaplan may not have intended this, but a main takeaway from The Loom of Time is that the cliché about diversity being a strength doesn’t apply to most of the Middle East and is increasingly less applicable to Europe and the United States.
Mr. Cantoni resides in Tucson and can be reached at [email protected].
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