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.