>In this week's Nation, William Hartung says in passing that "One of the
>more egregious examples of this new interventionism was Robert Kaplan's
>recent call for a revival of 'western imperialism' to save the Balkans and
>prevent a new East/West divide." Does anyone know what article or book
>he's referring to?
Though I have long since recycled the paper, it sounds like something he wrote in a New York Times op-ed about three weeks ago, though I don't recall the exact date.
>I thought it would be in the Atlantic Magazine, but
>while their search engine turned up a lot of articles by Kaplan that might
>imply such a position, Hartung's quotation marks give the impression that
>somewhere he came directly out and said it in so many words.
He did, in fact, though he was operating under some skewed, self-deluding definition of imperialism. As I recall he used it with some irony, putting it in quotes, the whole bit. It was greatly disapointing because a friend had just told me just a few days before how lucid and insightful his "Balkan's Ghost" book was. I had even thought of reading it, but probably not anymore.
Eric Beck