I went familiar with the writings of Robert D. Kaplan through his Balkan travelogue Balkan Ghosts - part of it I translated for a feuilleton published by a newspaper I was working on, in a time when the Balkans were on interest, although deeply misunderstood - which I've largely found relativistic, sensationalist and written in a very simplistic way. It rather has the style of blog posts, at a time when there were no blogs around, written fast, to cater an audience hunger for colourful descriptions and easy explanations of century-long conflicts. Those were the times...
Kaplan is a favorite of many South-Eastern European leaders who happily invited for an insightful chat, especially when they hope to have their name mentioned in his next travelogue, wrote also about South-Eastern Asia and went embedded with US troops in Iraq. He has the knowledge and the right connections for obtaining direct reliable information but don't expect his writings to be academically insightful. You might get the shape of things, but the content must be filled with something different if looking for a solid picture.
About The Arabists, which traces the roots of the Foreign Services elites in the Middle East, I had no idea it exists, until browsing a collection of books about this part of the world. The book was written at the end of the 1980s and republished. What is fantastic about this book is the big number of references and interviews regarding various diplomatic appointees in various positions in the Middle East. Not few of them were children of methodist protestant missionaries sent by their churches to converts Arab populations to Christianism in the 18th-19th century. In some places, like in what used to be called the 'big Syria', which included Lebanon of today, those missionaries clashed with the French representatives represented by the Catholic Church. Children of those missionaries were eventually born in the Middle East, spoke Arabic, returned in the State and were included in the white Protestant elites. They entered the Foreign Service but eventually their interest decreased and went to explore other 'exotic' part of the world, like Africa.
The Protestant religious activism shaped at a great extent the political activism and Arab nationalism, including through the university network created, such as the American Universities - in Lebanon and Cairo, that still remain important institutions of high education in this part of the world. Americans themselves prefer to study there for a full immersion into the elitist version of the local societies and for improving the language. The intellectual life was developed under the Protestant spell. For instance, the first Arabic printing press in Syria was brought by American missionaries to Beirut from Malta in 1834.
But who really are those 'Arabists'. According to Robert D. Kaplan since the early 1950s onwards, there were two definitions that will exist side by side. One, for the use of the Foreign Service and the Protestant missionaries, referred to 'someone who spoke Arabic well and had substantial living experience in the Arab world'. The other one, public and according to the author embraced by the 'Jewish public' was: 'Someone who loved Arabs, often because he hated Jews'. The latter acception prevailed sometimes in the US diplomatic approaches to the Middle East peace process, including through the policies of the American embassy in Tel Aviv - very knowledgeable in Arab affairs, speaking the language, but not Hebrew (which is spoken in only one country, anyway). I might add that the current pathos of the US administration towards Israel is often based also on a religious basis, the neo-evangelical missionarism which is equally toxic and anti-Semitic in its origin.
However, that 'love' for the Arabic speaking realm has some limits, many of them. It did not have the state-building outreach of the Brits - who, like Lawrence of Arabia or Gertrude Bell were genuinely believing that they can change the course of events and the geopolitical configuration of the region. Many were just too desillusioned with their Western bubble and were looking for an exotic connection to the outside world. They pretended not only to 'understand the Arabs' but they assumed that their disgust toward the unreliable political elites and corruption would in fact help the local societies to change. More often those diplomats chose to change their location when apparently things were not following their designs.
Following the end of the Cold War, when the local - especially Republican - American elites lost their grasp of the realities as the binary US/Russia (which generously got involved in the elite building in many places in the Middle East, Syria being one of them) conflict ceased to exist. The life of the Arabists fell the victim of the 'rampant shallowness and careerism and the sterilization of embassy life. The Foreign Service, after all, mirrors the society from which it draws it recruits, and these recruits are consumed with status and advancement and less concerned with the subject of their expertise that their predecessors were'.
Robert D. Kaplan avoids making any conclusion. But it is enough to read only for one day the flows of news regarding America's adventures in the Middle East to see how low the standards sunk. It can't get any lower.
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