He’s a notorious world conqueror, barely able to conceal his lust for empire behind a facade of altruistic spreading of Kagan-style democracy throughout the benighted world. And he seems to see America as his alter ego, created to do his bidding. America is Superman, destined to save the world from itself and mold it into…into…what? A nice back yard?
He blessed us with his vision on Sunday in the Los Angeles Times in a piece of militaristic slavering headlined We’re still the world’s caped crusader.
The Times is more than a little dishonest not to identify Robert Kagan as also one of the founders of the Project for a New American Century, the neo-con group from whose stable of militarists who don’t themselves fight in wars came the designers of the Iraq War and whose advice George Bush bought. That’s the advice we and the Iraqis are paying for now.
It’s curious to me – suspicious, really – why the Times didn’t include this connection along with identifying him as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Oh wow! a reader might think. International Peace! This guy is cool, and since he’s for peace at the same time he’s saying we’re Superman he must know something I don’t know!
And maybe that was the Times’ purpose: to disguise the fact that an op-ed columnist who works at one of the leading peace-oriented institutions is also one of the prime architects of the policy that gave us the Iraq War, aka Bush’s War (in 1998 Kagan wrote in the New York Times – well, the title says it all: Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough).
Although it is the L.A. Times, after all, it’s not likely that the editorial page editor could have been ignorant of Kagan’s background (though if he was ignorant, he’s also incompetent). Nor could he have thought that it was unimportant for the readers to know; it explains the premise of his article. Isn’t the only remaining possibility a deliberate choice to conceal?
But why? I mean, the guy’s in Wikipedia. And what he wrote is obviously the antithesis of the “Peace” part of his bio. Whatever the reason for hiding the rest of his bio, it’s not a good one. It’s vital that readers know who Kagan is, for what he says is more of the delusional thinking that led us into this war and is still in power in the White House. Bush and Cheney are true believers; Bush leads the messianic faction, Cheney the corporate faction.
There are a couple of true things in Kagan’s piece. It’s true that with the end of the Cold War came the Global Market, nurtured and led by America (with a lot of help from Europe). I believe it’s true that America can still be the hope of the world. But that’s about as much truth as I can find in Kagan. It’s false that we are the “Caped Crusader.” What Kagan calls the Bush Doctrine – preemptive or preventive war, overthrowing foreign governments, and unilateral action – may be America’s traditional behavior, but it’s no excuse for continuing that behavior.
Kagan writes:
In the 1990s, under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, American strategy was aimed at building a post-Cold War order around expanding markets, democracy and institutions — the triumphant embodiment of the liberal vision of international order.
But it was all something of a mirage. We now know that both nationalism and ideology were already making a comeback in the 1990s.
And as examples of nationalism and ideology he cites Russia’s slide toward authoritarianism, the rise of China and the onslaught of Islamism. He seems blind to the possibility that American foreign and economic policy could have had something to do with these developments. Could globalization have planted the seeds of conflict?
For many poorer and weaker nations, globalization has meant vastly increased wealth for a few and much less for the many. It’s meant the exploitation of natural resources on a scale even exceeding the plunder preceding globalization. Kagan acknowledges globalization’s “backlash,” but he can’t seem to connect this to the possibility that our attitudes towards other nations, and our focus on increasing corporate wealth, might be a problem that needs fixing.
One example of his foggy vision:
Historians will long debate the decision to go to war in Iraq, but what they are least likely to conclude is that the intervention was wildly out of character for the United States.
Not wildly out of character? I knew I could find another truth somewhere. And he’s correct here, too:
Since the end of World War II at least, American presidents of both parties have pursued a fairly consistent approach to the world. They have regarded the U.S. as the “locomotive at the head of mankind,” to use Dean Acheson’s phrase. They have amassed power and influence and deployed them in ever-widening arcs around the globe on behalf of interests, ideals and ambitions both tangible and intangible.
Understatement of the Bush Era. The list of our amassing and deploying is endless, littered with bodies and drenched in blood. And Kagan seems to find nothing wrong with all this, from Iraq on back, except where we lost. Tell us, Robert, what some of those “interests, ideals and ambitions both tangible and intangible” were. I have the feeling that most were pretty darn tangible. Not all can be laid at the feet of containment of communism. Most had to do with corporate access to and control of foreign riches. And we didn’t hesitate to deploy our power and influence to destroy the self-determination of millions upon millions of people.
And despite the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan – well, Kagan calls them “difficult interventions” – we’re still Number One, Kagan says happily. Here is his proof:
The world’s failure to balance against the superpower is the more striking because the United States, notwithstanding its difficult interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, continues to expand its power and military reach. The American defense budget currently comes in at roughly $500 billion a year, not including supplemental spending totaling more than $100 billion on Iraq and Afghanistan.
…a superpower can lose a war — in Vietnam or in Iraq — without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance.
…This is a good thing.
Ah, the Martha Stewart of World Dominance! He even puts a Martha Stewart smile on it:
it should continue to be a primary goal of American foreign policy to perpetuate this relatively benign international configuration of power.
Benign. If that isn’t a Martha Stewart smiley-face, I don’t know what is.
Oh, I know, Kagan’s a hard realist. It’s all about power and wielding it. But if Kagan ever considers that there’s a different way to wield power, he doesn’t display it here. In case any other country has any delusions about having a say in how the world is run, Kagan has news for them:
The future international order will be shaped by those who have the power to shape it. Its leaders will not meet in Brussels but in Beijing, Moscow and Washington.
I wonder how this goes down at NATO headquarters. His wife, Victoria Nuland, the former deputy national security advisor to Dick Cheney, is the U.S. ambassador to NATO. But I’m sure Robert’s brother likes his style. A lot. Fred Kagan is another neo-con “thinker,” resident “scholar” (oh how the English language has become debased!) at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the AEI’s Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq – a document which alone should satisfy the DSM-IV’s requirements for a diagnosis of psychosis.
It’s true that more and more of the world has grown into democracy. I think that is the good thing, and of course it’s a long-term project. But Kagan’s idea of how to help the spread of democracy is counterproductive. He’s wrong to link the number of democracies today to the power games played by every American administration since Truman. If democracies have gained, it’s despite people like Kagan, not because of him. And the number of nascent democracies we have destroyed is evidence of the amoral barrenness of Kagan-think.
We can accomplish more by setting a good example, which would mean, among other things, refusing to subvert foreign governments and refusing to make war for corporate profits and easy access to foreign natural resources. What Kagan calls “America’s responsibility” – “to use its power to prevent a slide back to the circumstances that produced two world wars and innumerable national calamities” – is in direct conflict with the way we’ve carried out that responsibility. The fact he even says this shows a kind of sociopathy. We have been responsible for “innumerable national calamities,” and we continue this destructive pattern, thanks to the callous, power-mongering, myopic philosophy of the likes of Robert Kagan.
Edited to change title and lede, and add information about Kagan’s NYT article and about Fred Kagan.
I find the LAT’s penchant for dueling article titles baffling. Most readers here will only see the web title of Kagan’s article, which is the one you drew on: “We’re still the world’s caped crusader: / The United States is the best hope to help steer nations through dangerous times.”
In the print version, the title is “Old World Order: Those who believed in the end of history were wrong. Nationalism and ideology are back.”
To my eye, the print title is much blander, less incendiary, and thus — more of a mask of where Kagan is headed?
Since I don’t see the print version of NYT or Washington Post, I have no idea if this is now common practice in all the big papers: Make your web title an alternate one to the very same article in the print version. Curious.
Upon first read of Kagan’s piece, I thought of the BBC documentary “The Trap” [which Weldon alerted us to] and especially the 3rd of its 3 parts, focusing on the concepts of “negative liberty” and “positive liberty” … It’s too much to do justice to synthesizing here but those who haven’t seen it can find it on the web. Or you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_documentary_series%29
Kagan strikes me as trying to reinflame the worst of “positive liberty,” which was defined by Isaiah Berlin in his coining of the two concepts as a messianic vision of a better world, one driven inevitably by a conviction in a “right way” and insistence that others “discover” the rightness of it … and, in Berlin’s view, inherently leading to autocracy and worse in the conviction of its adherents, revolutionary or otherwise.
The series shows how “negative liberty” is now — after the ‘experiments’ of the 1990′s in Russia and elsewhere, to which Kagan alludes — realized to have the serious drawback of not being FOR a better — more equitable — world but rather too much a laissez faire world where lack of constraint is presumed to equal and promote maximal liberty).
The end of the “The Trap” (SPOILER ALERT) suggests that in fact negative liberty itself has proven rife for excesses of power and abuse and that Isaiah Berlin was wrong to think there’s no way to keep “positive liberty” from becoming abusively crammed down others’ throat, come hell or high water or both.
Kagan, defiant in the face of rampant failure, seems to be still exemplifying what Isaiah Berlin had already seen of neocons in his lifetime and had given him so much pause in his hopes for “negative liberty,” that it would be a more modest and thus more peace-inducing path. Instead he’d seen the neocons’ propensity to power-mongering, falling prey to the absolutist conviction in their own theories and thus just as much a threat to mankind and history as were the more overtly dictatorial and expansionistic espousers of “positive liberty.”
The stigmatizing character trait of both forms of liberty is when they begin to rationalize “any means to their end” — deceiving, lying to their populace, making up facts to support their ‘missions’ to ‘save’ others…
And what is missing in Kagan’s piece, especially, to me, is any recognition of the horrible price we pay — and Bush more than anyone blindly bungling into it — when we rationalize any means to an end.
Where, in a phrase, has been the struggle for “hearts and minds”? Bush learned nothing from Vietnam. (How could he?) When Kagan says, as you quoted, “…a superpower can lose a war — in Vietnam or in Iraq — without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance” he seems to totally ignore the vast populaces underlying governments and what our actions in Vietnam and now in Iraq have done to, blow by blow, erode any real depth to the notion of “superpower.”
Kagan seeks to exonerate Bush (in fact, it was hard to tell what Kagan was trying to actually accomplish with his piece besides exonerating Bush) from blame on the grounds that he was merely following the necessary (and, Kagan would have us believe, beneficent) model of his predecessors and ‘retrieving’ it from the 10 Rip Van Winkle years which Kagan depicts the 90′s as having been.
But Bush was the one who chose not to learn from Vietnam or any other lesson of his predecessors about “hearts and minds.” And Kagan ignores all the Pew polls internationally which show that the esteem of the US has dropped to unprecedentedly low rankings by peoples of the world. That matters. Kagan is content to suggest that because diplomatic level policies toward the US haven’t changed much, and other nations’ leaders still must and do deal with the US, that that is enough to characterize us as still “supreme” and carrying on the “good mission.”
As you point out emphatically, Kagan does all this in the name of rationalizing his own complicity — and obvious ongoing bias — in favor of Bush’s going-down-in-flames crusade.
I think Kagan needs a good, full dose of “The Trap.” If he were to do so, and hear and see the full power of itshistorical message, I believe he would have to concede that your first sentence of your concluding paragraph is indeed the path to realizing the lesson of history that “The Trap” would have us learn.
Re: your last graph: I think he’d have to be administered a substantial dose of ayahuasca and guided gently but firmly towards sanity while he watches The Trap.