IF WE BURN: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins
THE LOOM OF TIME: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China, by Robert D. Kaplan
In early November 1914, as the storm clouds of World War I closed in on the Middle East, the American consul general in Beirut sent an urgent message to the U.S. secretary of state. “Sir,” W. Stanley Hollis wrote, “I have the honor to report that conditions are going from bad to worse here.”
I was reminded of Hollis’s notes while reading Vincent Bevins’s “If We Burn” and Robert D. Kaplan’s “The Loom of Time.” In both books, our interlocutors, recently returned from travels to some of the planet’s more intemperate zones, expound on their findings. Their frames are quite different. Whereas Bevins looks to the mass protest movements of the past decade and a half and ponders why matters went so terribly awry, Kaplan has trekked the greater Middle East in search of clues for what the near future there might hold. Spoiler alert: It seems Hollis had it pegged just about right.
As a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, Bevins spent much of the early 2010s reporting from Latin America, followed by an extended tour in Southeast Asia for The Washington Post. His first book, the critically acclaimed “Jakarta Method,” was a scathing exposé of the central role the C.I.A. played in orchestrating Indonesia’s savage 1965 anti-communist pogrom. “If We Burn” is both more ambitious and more wide-ranging.
From the Arab Spring revolts in the Middle East to the so-called Candlelight Revolution in South Korea, according to Bevins, the 2010s saw more mass protests around the world than any other similar time span in human history. “It might even be possible to tell the story of that decade as the story of mass protests and their unexpected consequences,” he writes.
If so, the tale is a decidedly sad one. Of the 10 protest movements he chronicles, Bevins identifies only one as an unqualified success, and fully seven as abject failures, with political conditions often worse than they were at the outset. “How is it possible,” he asks, “that so many mass protests apparently led to the opposite of what they asked for?”
Bevins posits that the explosion of social media has helped fuel a deepening disdain for traditional political parties in democratic countries, a contempt reflected in the protests as well as everything from the Brexit movement in Britain to the anarcho-punk underground scene in Brazil. He also points out that since spontaneous protests often lacked clearly identifiable leadership, any resulting power vacuum was quickly filled in by the state as the various components of the protest movements fell out or competed among themselves.
Both of these things may well be true in democratic nations, but Bevins is comparing apples to oranges when he carries these ideas to autocratic nations, especially those caught up in the Arab Spring. Imperfect democracies though they may be, the governments of Brazil and South Korea are ultimately answerable to the people; their instruments of repression are limited. The same has never been said of Egypt or Yemen or Syria, where dictatorial regimes have enjoyed a vast repertoire of measures to control their malcontents, up to and including machine-gunning them in the streets.
In defusing the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, for example, the authorities essentially waited out the opposition. In Syria, they dropped barrel bombs on them and reduced entire neighborhoods to ash. To the degree that any commonality exists here, it might be reduced to the cynical aphorism, “He with the guns, wins.” This seems a rather thin payoff for the extended journey we’ve taken.
And really no payoff at all for the likes of Robert Kaplan, a renowned journalist and author of two dozen books. Kaplan’s métier is how geography can shape a land’s culture and, by natural extension, its politics. His most famous book, “Balkan Ghosts,” mapped the internal fissures that lay beneath the surface of the former Yugoslavia and reputedly served as essential reading for President Bill Clinton as he tried to navigate the aftermath of the nation’s bloody collapse. On a more ignominious note, Kaplan was an outspoken advocate of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, hoping it would end “the blood-soaked totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein,” an advocacy he now regards as a colossal misstep and has been apologizing for ever since.
That said, his extensive travels through the greater Middle East have made him a hard man — although he would undoubtedly prefer the term “realist.” Not for him the fanciful notions of civic engagement or parliamentary democracy; instead, he argues in “The Loom of Time,” enlightened autocracy is probably the best the region can hope for.
“Rather than pine exclusively for democracy in the greater Middle East, we should desire instead consultative regimes in place of arbitrary ones: that is, regimes that canvass public opinion even if they do not hold elections,” he writes. “In other words, aim for what is possible rather than what is merely just.”
If anathema to liberal thinkers, there’s something to be said for such a view — just look at how well the American-engineered elections in Iraq and Afghanistan panned out — but it is in pounding this point home that Kaplan wears a bit thin.
Along with reaching back in history to assemble the usual pantheon of Orientalists — Arnold Toynbee, Elie Kedourie, Samuel Huntington — in most of the countries that Kaplan visits, he summons forth a roster of local talking heads. These tend to be a well-credentialed lot, but they are also largely indistinguishable from one another since their primary function is to agree with the author’s contentions that tyranny is always preferable to anarchy, and that the United States best get wise to that fact.
In a chapter on Egypt, his chorus decries the turmoil that enveloped the nation in 2012, blaming it on Mohamed Morsi’s short-lived government, which ended with a bloody military takeover. Kaplan asserts that most Egyptians are “traumatized still by their experience” during the Morsi era, and that “the overwhelming majority” desire “only quiet and economic security.”
This may be true of the privileged Egyptians Kaplan spoke with, but surely not for all of the 13 million voters who made Morsi their nation’s first democratically elected leader, or for the estimated 70,000 political prisoners who today languish in the most brutal dictatorship in recent Egyptian history.
Similarly, one Saudi interviewee after another rises to the defense of the rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in suspiciously similar language, following up a list of progressive measures enacted during his tenure — expanded women’s rights, a crackdown on corruption — with some version of the rhetorical question, “Isn’t that a human right?” It’s as if, prior to meeting with Kaplan, they all received the same talking-points memo from the Saudi Information Ministry. Kaplan himself allows that Prince Mohammed is prone to “ghastly mistakes,” such as the murder and bone-saw dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Undergirding all this is a not-so-hidden streak of admiration for the caudillo. While Kaplan tepidly concedes to a certain irascibility in their behavior, he clearly regards Syria’s Hafez al-Assad — he of the 1982 Hama massacre that left an estimated 20,000 dead — as the best leader that benighted nation was likely to get, while suggesting that Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (“more at ease with engineers and others who build things than he was with intellectuals”) is following the same “aspirational path” as one of Kaplan’s favorite enlightened dictators, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.
Although it is surely not his intention, Kaplan’s constant appreciation for order over disorder, joined to his estimation of the kind of governance he feels the people of the greater Middle East are capable of achieving, begins to call into question just why he had such a problem with Saddam Hussein in the first place.
IF WE BURN: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution | By Vincent Bevins | 336 pp. | PublicAffairs | $30
THE LOOM OF TIME: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China | By Robert D. Kaplan | Illustrated | 374 pp. | Random House | $30
