Trying to make sense of a world where great power rivalry, war and competition for resources are not ghosts of history but present realities?From the Middle East to Ukraine to the South China Sea, world leaders are confronted by complex crises with no easy solution in sight.

US journalist, author and foreign policy advisor Robert D. Kaplan thinks that we must learn to think tragically if we are to avoid or mitigate tragedy. Leaders should be neither optimists nor pessimists but realists, argues Kaplan. His book, The Tragic Mind, reflects hard-won wisdom and was written as the author grappled with his promotion, as an influential journalist and respected analyst, of the second Iraq War, the US-led military intervention that toppled Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein but unleashed further bloodshed and anarchy. Kaplan was also deeply affected by former US President Bill Clinton hesitating to intervene in the Balkans after reading Kaplan’s 1993 book Balkan Ghosts.

In The Tragic Mind, Kaplan notes that tragedy is not merely imperfection, nor is it the fact that progress is intermittent and reversible. Humans confront tragedy when they recognise that whatever they do, including nothing, some good will be lost.

For our sixth Ramsay Lecture for 2024, the Ramsay Centre is pleased to present an in-person lecture by Robert D. Kaplan titled: The Tragedy of 21st Century Geopolitics. 

After a period of deep personal reflection and exploration of the ancient Greeks and classics, Kaplan determined a tragic mindset was necessary to guide foreign policy in particular. In his talk, he explains that tragedy is not common misfortune or crime but the triumph of one good over another, and about the narrow choices we face, however vast the landscape. He discusses Ukraine, Gaza and the South China Sea as illustrations of tragedy and employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence and the burdens of what is always limited power.

Please join us for this stimulating exploration of how a ‘tragic mindset’ could guide decision making and leadership and how the classics can help inform current conflicts.