McCain adviser Robert Kagan preaches on foreign policy and feminism.
By BEN NAPARSTEKRobert Kagan book 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)The Return of History and the End of Dreams
By Robert Kagan
Knopf
128 pages; $19.95
'This whole idea that only a certain elite foreign policy community can be trusted with American foreign policy is false. I trust the average American to make better decisions about many of these issues'
There's a view of neoconservatives as a cabal of shadowy figures - cloistered in Washington think tanks, vastly influential but accountable to no one - who connived to hoodwink a dim-witted president into invading Iraq.
Robert Kagan, the movement's most eloquent spokesman, has a different conspiracy theory, in which the ideologues are victims. They were scapegoated, he alleges, by a public ashamed of having cheered on the invasion. "A war which had overwhelming American support, and was voted 77-23 in the US Senate, suddenly became a plot by six or seven people," says Kagan.
Not that the neocons - whose pinups include Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol - have had it too rough.
After the American debacle in Vietnam, the war planners were shunned by their colleagues, savaged by the commentariat and booed at public debates. But the architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom generally escaped such opprobrium.
Indeed, Kagan, at 50, is a man in his prime. A monthly columnist for The Washington Post and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment think tank, he is one of the chief foreign policy advisers to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. He was named as one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals in this year's Foreign Policy/Prospect survey.
He is, in many ways, a typical neoconservative - in his moral clarity and conviction that America should be prepared to unilaterally declare war to uphold its values. But the label is meaningless to Kagan, who argues that there is nothing "neo," or new, about his philosophy. Instead, he places himself within a long tradition of foreign policy makers - encompassing the likes of Dean Acheson, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan - who stress the importance of American global leadership.
For all his bellicose rhetoric, he's surprisingly congenial. Physically large but baby-faced, with a slightly unnerving wry smile, he wears an open-necked shirt and introduces himself as "Bob." The bookshelves of his office in Washington DC are empty: He's just returned from three years in Brussels, where his wife, Victoria Nuland, a former adviser to Dick Cheney, served as US ambassador to NATO.
Does it concern him that McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, has seemingly little knowledge of the world beyond her state? "She has at least as much foreign policy experience as some of McCain's other potential vice presidential choices," Kagan retorts, "but because they were men, no one was raising any questions."
So ignorance about foreign policy is the norm among McCain's inner circle?
Kagan flashes his sardonic smile. "This whole idea that only a certain elite foreign policy community can be trusted with American foreign policy is false. I trust the average American to make better decisions about many of these issues."
That's the McCain votary speaking, not the foreign policy mandarin - the latter is quick to tar Barack Obama as a foreign-policy naïf.
"McCain has been engaged in national security issues for decades, whereas Obama has only been in the Senate for a few years, and he did not make foreign policy the No. 1 topic of his public persona. There have been times when he's said, 'We should talk to Iran,' then he's said, 'We shouldn't talk to Iran without preconditions.' He's talked about bombing Pakistan, and then about how the United States shouldn't behave that way any more. You can hear anything you want to hear in Obama's foreign policy."
IN HIS 2006 book Dangerous Nation, the first of a projected two-volume history of American foreign relations, Kagan attempted "to disprove the idea that America is traditionally an isolationist nation that only occasionally heads off into the world." Some reviewers, however, charged him with revising history to legitimate the neocon vision of an imperialist America.
Gore Vidal once said of Kagan that he is "in the grip of a most unseemly megalomania, speaking for no one but political hustlers within the Washington beltway." But his muscular prose and deft analysis of geopolitical trends regularly draw plaudits from his political adversaries.
Henry Kissinger, whose realist outlook is often opposed to the values-based vision of neocons, has called Kagan's 2003 book Paradise and Power a "seminal... discussion of European-American relations."
As the world's lone superpower, the US naturally favors an international order where might prevails, Kagan argued. By contrast, European countries - militarily weaker, more geographically exposed to the risk of war and shadowed by the memory of World War II - push for diplomatic solutions over military action, seeking regulation through international cooperation rather than the anarchy of nations.
"Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," Kagan wrote, offering a ready-made sound bite at a time when the transatlantic relationship was imploding over Iraq. Paradise and Power became an international best-seller and was distributed by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana to every EU ambassador. Though just 100 pages, it drew comparisons to such epoch-defining texts as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations.
KAGAN HAS ignited fresh debate with his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, in which he outlines his proposal for a global league of democracies, a cornerstone of McCain's foreign policy platform. For Kagan, the resurgence of China and Russia as great-power autocracies calls for a forum where the world's 100-odd democracies can meet to advance their shared values.
The title alludes to Fukuyama's hypothesis that history in the form of ideological struggle ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain and was replaced by inexorable market capitalist democracy.
"When we started the post-Cold War period, we thought that there wasn't a challenge to democracy, that it was just an issue of fostering economic development," Kagan says. "But we have in the world two powerful autocracies that seem pretty well entrenched, not undergoing this anticipated evolution based on economic growth. Democracies need to begin acting together in a more concerted fashion, whether it's dealing with problems like Zimbabwe and Burma, or showing solidarity against the resurgent ambitions of Russia."
For a man of fighting rhetoric, Kagan can be surprisingly sensitive, as foreign affairs analyst Kurt Campbell discovered at a dinner in May when he made the mistake of cracking jokes about neocons in Kagan's presence. It has been said, Campbell mused, that neocons are vampires - except whereas a silver bullet can kill vampires, neocons are immortal. Nor, Campbell continued, are neocons werewolves, since whereas werewolves are sane during the day, neocons are crazy around the clock. Kagan was unimpressed, and refused to share a podium with Campbell at a conference the next day.
Few would agree with Kagan that he belongs "very much in a bipartisan mainstream." Nonetheless, it's true that neocons cannot be neatly identified along party lines. In the 2000 presidential election, Kagan voted for Al Gore against George W. Bush's pledge to scale back America's international commitments.
"I spent much of the '90s fighting against the Republican Party, which was opposed to intervention. It's only later that people have revised this history and created this fiction of a neoconservative movement distinct from liberal interventionism, which has been the mainstream policy since the Cold War."
After September 11, 2001, Bush reversed his foreign policy, and Kagan, who had long pressured the Clinton White House to force regime change in Iraq, was suddenly in white-hot demand. As were Kagan's father, Yale historian Donald Kagan, and brother, Frederick, who in 2000 co-authored While America Sleeps, calling on Washington to increase its defense budget. Robert Kagan says that his father's 1995 book, On the Origins of War, helped shape his conviction that "nations that want to preserve the peace have to be strong enough to do it and can't count on the goodwill of others."
KAGAN WAS a teenager during the Jimmy Carter years - "such a down period for America," he says. "We heard all about the limits of American power and how the United States was in decline and fading."
Kagan recalls that when Reagan came to office in 1980, he admired the new president's "refusal to accept that the Soviet Union was in a state of inevitable ascension and that there was no hope for the democratic world."
After completing a degree from Yale, he worked in the State Department for much of the '80s, while watching the fall of Augusto Pinochet and Ferdinand Marcos and cracks appearing in the Soviet edifice. "That was the period when we shifted from a policy of pretty blindly supporting dictatorships to supporting more moderate and centrist democratic forces in both Latin America and Asia, with really some quite astonishing successes. It's one of the reasons I don't share the general skepticism that there's anything we can do to support democracies in countries where there isn't democracy at this moment."
He remains optimistic about the possibility of a democratic future for Iraq following last year's troop surge. "When they finally changed strategy after four years, we're seeing the results. What was assumed to be an inevitable civil war between Shi'a and Sunni was in fact the product of our failure to provide security."
Asked about the challenges McCain would face reviving US legitimacy on the world stage, Kagan says: "Most nations act according to their interests, and their interests are not necessarily affected by who's president of the United States. The behavior of governments in the international system is not fundamentally anti-American."
Asian countries increasingly look to the US for protection against rising China, he says, adding that America enjoys much closer relations with Europe than two years ago. The attempt by France and Germany to counterbalance American power by embracing Russia failed, Kagan contends, under pressure from the new Eastern and Central European EU member states, countries whose anxieties about the Kremlin have increased since its military action in Georgia.
So what of his idea that Martian Americans and Venusian Europeans have irreconcilable worldviews? "I don't think that the things that make Americans and Europeans different have changed. But international circumstances are driving Europeans and Americans closer together again, as we see the rise of two great autocratic powers."
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