Game Theory Gone Bonkers

Bill Thompson considers the new spy farce by Fred Kaplan, the national security writer for “Slate.”

By Bill ThompsonFebruary 21, 2025

• Fiction

• Politics

IN FRED KAPLAN’S ruefully funny novel A Capital Calamity, published last fall, the head of the aptly named Janus Corporation has carved a niche in arguing both sides of an issue for competing power brokers while banking double the pay.

Serge Willoughby’s defense consultancy specializes in separating “the analysis from the consequences” while dismissing anything bad that might happen if anyone were actually to take his advice. After decades of plying his trade with few ethical or moral qualms, he has come to regard Washington, DC, as a giant gaming venue, right up until he makes a prank call that accidentally exposes US knowledge of a Chinese spy network, implicates an innocent man, and sends two superpowers to the brink of war.

A Capital Calamity is in the tradition of such knowing political satires as Barry Levinson’s 1997 film Wag the Dog, though instead of a White House spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fabricating a war to cover up a sex scandal, it’s a romp through bureaucratic brinkmanship and game theory gone bonkers.

Kaplan is only fictionalizing a milieu he knows well as the War Stories columnist for Slate. He is also the author of six books involving national security, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (2013), each drawing on four decades plumbing the Washington scene as writer for The Boston Globe, among other places. Having earned a PhD in political science from MIT, Kaplan worked briefly as a defense policy advisor in the US House of Representatives before his segue into journalism. What he doesn’t know about maneuverings within the cabinet, Pentagon, and international intelligence community, or the manipulations of lobbyists and “Beltway bandit” consultants, he merrily deduces. The result is a slender but propulsive novel as entertaining as it is unsettling.

Willoughby’s prank call takes on a life of its own. The Chinese government comes to believe he is not a peripheral consultant but in fact the pivotal player in last-ditch negotiations to defuse a shooting war. The CIA and NSA want to maintain the illusion. Meanwhile, skirmishes have already begun between American and Chinese forces, blood has flowed, and a four-star general at the Pentagon is campaigning for a decisive strike using an untested new technology. It’s a hair-trigger affair and tempus is fugiting.

The Russians suspect a nascent Chinese American alliance and are determined to quash it before it begins. When in-person negotiations do take place, they are held, fittingly, in the third-floor apartment of a New York comedy club. It all seems a reach, but Kaplan’s plot and pacing are so brisk and involving that no one will care.

His characters are spot-on, if rather a mixed bag. Willoughby is far and away the most well developed, coming late to a conscience but relishing the second chance and accepting his emergency role despite a distaste for governmental theatrics. Taking in his first congressional hearing in years, Willoughby is struck by how things have deteriorated. “The debates may have been phony in his days on the Hill, but at least there were debates. Then again,” Kaplan writes, “maybe the good old days were worse; maybe the new era of shallow dogma and naked self-interest was better. There was a lack of pretense, a shameless transparency that, in a certain mood, he might have found refreshing. But at the moment, he was merely dispirited.”

Other characters, especially the principal women—a CIA director (formerly a Willoughby paramour) and a plugged-in political blogger—can seem almost interchangeable. But this is not to say they are thinly drawn. It’s that so many people from DC’s central casting feel likewise homogenized.

Apart from the novel’s protagonist, the most amusing character is Secretary of Defense James Weed Portis, an old-school official in the Cold War mold. He is a corporate chieftain from an elite family, born to power and with little patience for wheel-spinning or prevarication.

In its own understated way, the novel hews to a moral compass. It also has some trenchant things to say about real-world geopolitics and the army of mediocrities in high places.

But its chief proposition is that we are living in a far more precarious and unstable world than we were during, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, with pivotal players who may see the risks they take in much the same light as Willoughby does, until the destruction of his career and the likelihood of prison time seem imminent.

Kaplan, also known for his jazz reviews for Tracking Angle, crams a lot into a small package, not least of which is a nostalgic tour of Greenwich Village’s old jazz haunts and comedy clubs and their modern-day analogues. Willoughby considers the calculated art that is stand-up as “a sort of science, a verbal ballet of precision rhythm. A micro-beat shift in timing, or a half-decibel accent of emphasis, could mean the difference between a laugh and cricket silence, between killing an audience and bombing,” writes Kaplan. “The acts—the good ones—seemed completely spontaneous, but they’d been thoroughly developed, endlessly practiced, meticulously refined.”

In A Capital Calamity, Kaplan manages a similarly deceptive and seamless feat.