Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday November 22, 2010
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MONSOON: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
Robert D. Kaplan
Random House
ISBN 978-1400067466
366 pages
$28
Reviewed by Shashi Tharoor
In 1410, near the Sri Lankan coastal town of Galle, the Chinese Admiral Zheng He erected a stone tablet with a message to the world. His inscription was in three languages -- Chinese, Persian and Tamil -- and his message was even more remarkable.
According to Robert Kaplan in his new book, "Monsoon," the admiral "invoked the blessings of the Hindu deities for a peaceful world built on trade." So a Chinese sailor-statesman called upon Indian gods as he set out to develop commercial links with the Middle East and East Africa. There could be no better illustration of the cosmopolitanism of the Indian Ocean region, centuries before the word globalization had ever been coined.
Zheng He's travels 600 years ago stand as a reminder of the economic potential of the vast waters of the Indian Ocean, which wash the shores of dozens of countries, large and small, from South Africa to Singapore. These countries straddle half the globe, account for half of the planet's container traffic and carry two-thirds of its petroleum. But Kaplan is far more interested in the strategic implications. His premise is that the Greater Indian Ocean, from the Horn of Africa to Indonesia, "may comprise a map as iconic to the new century as Europe was to the last one" and "demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty-first century world." This makes the Indian Ocean "the essential place to contemplate the future of U.S. power." Perhaps that is what President Obama was doing last week as he flew from India to Indonesia and contemplated the vastness of the Indian Ocean beneath.
After laying out his thesis, Kaplan, author of famously influential books on the Balkans, the American military and the "coming anarchy" of the post-Cold War world, launches into what he most enjoys -- travel. Kaplan is a geographic determinist: For him, geography explains history, determines economics and transcends politics. As he ranges across the region from Oman to Sumatra, taking in Zanzibar, Calcutta and Sri Lanka along the way, he gives us a curious and compelling volume, part travelogue, part potted history, part journalism and part strategic analysis. It's a book that convinces the reader that what Kaplan calls Monsoon Asia is a profoundly interesting and complicated part of the world, but the various chapters don't add up to a coherent argument as to why the region should matter more in the United States than anywhere else.
Yet if you don't care about getting there, you can have a lot of fun along the way, because Kaplan tells a good story or, rather, a series of good (if not always interconnected) stories. He converses with mysterious American expat soldiers with noms de guerre like "Father of the White Monkey" and "the Bull that Swims," busy plotting freelance insurrections in Burma. A Pakistani dissident claims that India is "the role model for South Asia" and calls for open borders, while another denounces his own nation: "Pakistan is itself a breach of contract."
Amid fluent, if blandly conventional, prose, Kaplan occasionally startles with a passage of astonishing lyricism ("a sweeping, bone-dry peninsula between long lines of soaring ashen cliffs and a sea the color of rusty tap water") or passionate polemic ("poverty is not exotic, it has no saving graces, it is just awful"). There are powerful descriptions of the effect of global warming in Bangladesh and of the intersection of environment, demography and Islamism in Indonesia, as well as of the people of Burma as "victim(s) of the evil confluence of totalitarianism, realpolitik and corporate profits."
The reporter in Kaplan is well in evidence when he visits the Baluchistani port of Gwadar or Sri Lanka's new Hambantota, both being developed by the Chinese (the former, he thinks, for strategic reasons, the latter for commercial ones). Facts and quotes abound as he recounts the growth of Indian naval aspirations and China's plans to be a two-ocean maritime power; Kaplan tells us China will soon have more ships than the U.S. Navy, and by 2015 will be the world's most prolific shipbuilder.
Kaplan's breadth of travel and learning leads him to some intriguing insights, such as his argument that "like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese (in Sri Lanka) are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution." In his view Indonesia reveals both a "clash" and a "merger of civilizations"; more contentiously, global capitalism embodied by the Chinese "constitutes the real threat to Indonesian Islam."
These are all worthwhile ideas. But Kaplan too often strains to justify his own interests by a portentous claim: Sri Lanka is "the ultimate register of geopolitical trends in the Indian Ocean region," Burma "provides a code for understanding the world to come," Indonesia will be "a critical hub of world politics." Shoehorning his travels into the book makes for an uneven effect, with some surprising inclusions and omissions, and one can't help feeling that a country has been deemed to be important because he traveled there, rather than the other way around.
In addition, the geopolitical analysis is sometimes erratic, as Kaplan hedges his bets. India and China could compete on the seas, providing an opening to the United States, or their "mutual dependence on the same sea lanes could also lead to an alliance between them that ... might be implicitly hostile to the United States." A few pages later, "a global maritime system, loosely led by the Americans, with help from the Indians, and hopefully the Chinese" might evolve. By the end of the book, "leveraging allies must be part of a wider military strategy that seeks to draw in China as part of an Asia-centric alliance system."
Kaplan concludes that Washington, "as the benevolent outside power," must seize this "time of unprecedented opportunity" because "only by seeking at every opportunity to identify its struggles with those of the larger Indian Ocean world can American power finally be preserved."
Struggles? Finally be preserved? This is sketchy stuff at best, as if Kaplan felt the need to burden his reportage with an all-embracing thesis in order to justify putting a number of readable but unconnected essays between hard covers. Memo to Washington policy-makers: "Monsoon" is a book to take on a long flight to the Far East. But it won't substitute for your dossiers when you get there.
Shashi Tharoor is a member of India's Parliament and the author, most recently, of "The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS
Kevin Kelly
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022151
406 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by William Rosen
In 1802, the British philosopher and Christian apologist William Paley published a book entitled "Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature." In it, he famously propounded the notion that, just as a watch whose "several parts are framed and put together for a purpose" presupposes the existence of a watchmaker, so too does the existence of life on earth, far more complicated than any timepiece, presuppose the existence of a creator. Paley's metaphor is one in a long line of attempts to explain the organic world in the language of technology, from Plato's contention that the four primal elements were constructed from solid geometrical figures -- particles of fire were tetrahedrons; particles of earth, cubes -- to the idea, beloved of artificial intelligence researchers, that the human brain can be understood as a sort of digital computer.
In "What Technology Wants," Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine and author of half-a-dozen previous books, inverts the tradition, in a brave attempt to demonstrate that the same forces that have shaped life through the 4 billion years of its existence on earth also drive the course and substance of technology. His central argument -- that the "technium" (his word for the world of technology) deserves to be regarded as the seventh kingdom of life, along with plants, protists and animals -- is an ambitious one, but one thing that Kelly does not lack is ambition. So vast is his technium that it includes almost anything "produced by a mind," which means it includes not only steam turbines and semiconductors, but also paintings, literature, music and dance. (Actually, since his definition of mind is even vaster, he describes coral reefs, termite colonies and bird nests as "animal technology.")
One of Kelly's formative experiences was working on Stewart Brand's original "Whole Earth Catalog," and "What Technology Wants" delivers many of the pleasures of a wonderful catalog, with page after page of entries, each one more appealing than the last, assembled by someone with an insatiable curiosity: the origins of multicellular life, the nature of language acquisition and development, the geometry of protein-folding, patterns of invention in the ancient world, free will as exhibited by subatomic particles, finite versus infinite games, and the aesthetic and moral dimensions of technology. As with a catalog, the lack of a narrative structure (or even an obvious destination) is beside the point and, in any case, is more than balanced by some truly fascinating detours: from the surface of a computer chip that processes more ergs per gram per second than the sun; to the heart of an Amish community, whose relationship to technology turns out to be far more complex and revealing than generally understood; to the interior of the cabin -- and the mind -- of Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber," whose manifesto seems to Kelly one of the most acute analyses of technology ever written.
This approach isn't without some weaknesses. A catalog is, after all, written to sell you something, and the book tends, therefore, to cherry-pick those scientists -- frequently a controversial minority in their own disciplines -- who support Kelly's positions.
And -- this is not really a criticism -- he is far better at describing the technium than at prescribing any policies for managing or improving it.
Nonetheless, for most readers, Kelly's polymath erudition and infectious confidence -- he is to garden-variety technological optimists what Olympic champion Usain Bolt is to the best runner in the seventh grade -- will prove more than sufficient. Though "What Technology Wants" spends a lot of time arguing that technology has become almost independent of humanity, it doesn't really depend on the idea that a bird's wing and a semiconductor are both inevitable results of the same process. In fact, as with Paley's watch, the existence of such an exuberant book is the best possible argument for the existence of an equally exuberant creator.
William Rosen is the author of "The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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