This column appears every two months, a schedule that shouldn’t lend itself to up-to-date commentary on foreign affairs. This was not always the case. Time was when a gentleman could follow the latest war from the comfort of his study; whole evenings would be given over to updating casualty statistics over a glass of port and moving pins across maps collection while muttering things like “Those rascally Turks will never let him cross the Prut!”
The Trump administration has solved the problem for me by bombing new countries on a reliable bimonthly schedule. In my last column I anticipated the overthrow of the Maduro regime. The smart Trumpists—who do exist!—insisted that it was about limiting China’s influence in our hemisphere. As usual, the president himself seems not to have gotten the memo; he says that he looks forward to Chinese investment in the Venezuelan oil industry.
If reports are to be believed, we are now assembling the greatest naval force since the Spanish Armada in the Persian Gulf. The mullahs are, of course, the praying type, but I don’t like their chances here. Who is cheerleading this invasion? I had almost hoped that some of the people who have spent the last decade denouncing Trump as an American Hitler would trick themselves into giving peace a chance. But most longtime supporters of regime change are sticking to their guns.
One envies them their confidence. Why should we assume we know anything about current Iranian attitudes toward, say, the possible restoration of the monarchy? Polling is notoriously unreliable; if people in Iran have a clear view about what, if anything, should replace the Islamic Republic, it is unknown to all of us. But never mind surveys. What about things that could be learned from consulting an atlas or a history book? Here is a test which I invite all readers to try on their interventionist-minded friends:
1. Into how many provinces is Iran divided?
2. Name three Iranian cities other than Tehran with a population of more than one million.
3. What are the country’s principal non-Persian ethnic groups?
BONUS: How did Safavid Iran resist absorption into the Ottoman Empire?
My own experience suggests that most Americans, regardless of their political views, would be hard pressed to list the countries Iran borders or even to name the major body of water along its northern coast (assuming they know it has a northern coast!). One of the things I like best about Robert Kaplan is that he recognizes the importance not only of geography, history, and religion but even of literature for understanding foreign affairs.
Speaking of literature, a friend of mine who teaches at a public university in the Midwest reports that he has no idea how to teach a class on “Bad Art” because his students have never read a book or even seen a feature-length film. When I heard this I was reminded of one of the classic Peanuts strips, in which Peppermint Patty tells Marcy that she has just finished writing an essay on A Tale of Two Cities: “The only thing I didn’t understand were the parts about the shampoo, the soap, and the coffee.” Today of course she wouldn’t bother with anything as demanding as Masterpiece Theater; instead ChatGPT would provide her with a few thousand words of vague thematic observations, anti-summaries of unrecognizable plot points, strangely unidiomatic non-quotations from Dickens’s text, and a line or two about the tomb of Marquis St. Evrémonde in Westminster Abbey.
Just as I sat down to write this, the Washington Post announced that it was firing 300-some employees, eliminating both book reviews and the sports desk. As a friend in the publishing industry put it to me: “Okay, cut the Books section because no one reads books. And also cut the Sports section because no one—uhh—wait a second.” My heart goes out to all the laid-off staff, especially the books people. (My very first piece for this magazine—in October 2012—was a review of two reissues by Kingsley Amis.)
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Still, on strictly economic terms, it is difficult to argue in favor of books “coverage.” This is true not least because the kinds of books reviewed in the handful of magazines and newspapers that still publish them are not the ones that people actually read. If every single American interested in tracking down, say, a new 900-page biography of Martin van Buren wandered into the same Arby’s in rural Tennessee, the local fire marshal would not exactly be sweating.
What books are people buying? By now most of my readers will probably have heard of “romantasy,” which I’m told is the “fastest-growing genre” on something called BookTok. From what I gather romantasy is a polite way of saying “porn with goblins.” Imagine The Lord of the Rings except that Frodo and Sam are boinking each other in their sleeping bags (“Doner! Boner!”). I’m no expert, but if titles like Taken By The Lord of the Nocturne Court and the cover illustrations of hooded bad guys with exposed pectorals are any indication, millions of Americans who grew up reading ordinary fantasy fare cared less about the magical widget upon whose recovery and/or destruction the fate of the world or the universe rested and more about whether the Dark Lord was in possession of a decidedly corporeal and frequently erect penis.
This is not really a suitable subject for a family magazine. By way of recompense, allow me to recommend a really edifying and interesting book, one that has informed my thinking about history for more than a decade. R.C. Zaehner’s Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism ought to be recognized as a classic of modern English literature.
