This book almost felt like a goodbye (though I’m sure Kaplan’s pen powers on). From a man who has taken us from the bizarre tropical anarchy of West Africa to Tartary and on towards America’s Empire Wilderness and back, in “The Loom of Time” he returns to where history always returns – the greater Middle East. It is here where the story started; between the Tigris and the Euphrates, climbing down off a great volcanic mountain, trekking the deep sands of Arabia — the raw energy of Israel — the ancient monarchies and modern despots and the wayward American diplomats trying (and failing) to make sense of it all.

The book is more personal, more poetic than his others. Not that Kaplan’s tremendous learning is not on full display; but he has nothing left to prove. Now he gets to tell us about how the experiences over fifty years changed him and taught him. There is something of an anxious desperation and a patient frustration this time; with America. Kaplan’s home, his land but one that never quite can figure out what is going on. Powerful from geography and the privilege of “occupying the last un-taken temperate zone” on the planet. A Ukraine, deep black earth and healthy rains and broad rivers — but with no Russias or Finlands or Polands or Turkeys to cause unending problems. A stupid brute of an empire, ignorant and elatedly so, moral hazard on full display as we withdraw time and again from failures – Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam – without really any thought to what went wrong, without any delays to our holiday parades and backyard BBQs.

“The Loom of Time” is, like I said, about the greater Middle East. About the efforts of that area, destabilized at the end of the Ottoman empire (100 years ago) and which never has been able to find stability in a world dominated by empires far away but closer due to the shrinking of the planet. It is haunting and nostalgic; filled with the failures of Europe and America but also with a certain hope that maybe in the future the region will find some measure of order. The book continues on Kaplan’s ongoing efforts to remind us that people don’t really want ideology — at least not those who are attempting to build something in a world gone mad. People want order and a certain degree of predictability. They prefer a monarch to a despot. They prefer law to elections. They would rather work than march. Life is not lived between the covers of a book from Yale University Press but instead on the dusty streets of Baghdad.

The book ends with a reminder that things change, and often times rapidly. Russia invaded Ukraine; a pandemic shut down the world; Kabul fell. When Kaplan was writing this, he knew in his heart that Israel could go back to war. It was not only possible but probable. Yet — who could have predicted October 7th? And the rapid ramifications that will have across the greater Middle East, upending the best planning of the diplomats.

We need to read more; we need more life experience; we need to be humbler and gentler with each other; and we need to hold our ideology in an open hand. Our beautiful American experiment is something none of us would change for anything else – we fight for it and many die for it. But, at the point of a spear, our democratic evangelism has caused great harm. We need to listen more; to use our tremendous goodwill and our almost limitless wealth and our remarkable safety and freedom, turning them into statecraft that is wise; knowing that likely in many places we only have bad choices — and understanding that our way is not always or even most often the right way in places as complex as Adin or as old as Asmara.