恶人谷

People contact Edward Luttwak with unusual requests. The prime minister of Kazakhstan wants to find a way to remove ethnic Russians from a city on his northern border; a major Asian government wants a plan to train its new intelligence services; an Italian chemical company wants help settling an asbestos lawsuit with a local commune; a citizens’ group in Tonga wants to scare away Japanese dolphin poachers from its shores; the London Review of Books wants a piece on the Armenian genocide; a woman is having a custody battle over her children in Washington DC – can Luttwak “reason” with her husband? And that is just in the last 12 months.

Luttwak is a self-proclaimed “grand strategist”, who makes a healthy living dispensing his insights around the globe. He believes that the guiding principles of the market are antithetical to what he calls “the logic of strategy”, which usually involves doing the least efficient thing possible in order to gain the upper hand over your enemy by confusing them. If your tank battalion has the choice of a good highway or a bad road, take the bad road, says Luttwak. If you can divide your fighter squadrons onto two aircraft carriers instead of one, then waste the fuel and do it. And if two of your enemies are squaring off in Syria, sit back and toast your good fortune.

But only in America was the career of Edward Luttwak possible. The perpetually renewable reservoir of naivety at the highest levels of the US government has been good for business.

“You know, I never gave George W Bush enough credit for what he’s done in the Middle East,” Luttwak continued. “I failed to appreciate at the time that he was a strategic genius far beyond Bismarck. He ignited a religious war between Shi’ites and Sunnis that will occupy the region for the next 1,000 years. It was a pure stroke of brilliance!”

The combination of scholarly prowess and machismo is a much sought-after alloy in many high offices of the world, where extreme masculinity is still the coin of the realm. (In moments that threaten to be dull, Luttwak makes a habit of looking around for lethal objects. “This chopstick is perfect, for instance,” he told me later at a hotel restaurant. “But you must remember to thrust it deep enough into the eye socket so that it punctures the frontal cortex.”)

Luttwak’s talent for mythomania relies on his sensual appetite for detail, but it also gestures towards something beyond it. He tirelessly buffs the edges of his own legend; he is competitively interesting. When confronted by anyone who threatens to second-guess him, Luttwak responds either by burying them in a welter of technical detail, or crushing them with timeless, prophetic generalities. The result is that he is nearly invincible in conversation. Everything he has ever read or heard is ready for rapid deployment.