‘The Return of Marco Polo’s World’ Review: The Empires Strike Back

Most journalists of my generation, old enough to have been shaped by the 1960s, gravitated in their youth to the great struggles at home over race and poverty rather than to foreign affairs, which felt like a morally vacuous contest between two cynical and wrinkled elephants. I only began writing about the world when the Cold War gave way to the tumultuous era of humanitarian intervention, United Nations peacekeeping, nation-building. Even journalists who fancy themselves tough-minded tend to be foreign-policy idealists, applying the standards of social justice to the decisions of statesmen.

Read the full review of Robert Kaplan's "The Return of Marco Polo’s World" in The New York Times.