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Of Power and Bunk

Of Power and Bunk

The estimable Robert Kagan, senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brooking Institution has a new book, The World America Made (Knopf). Because Kagan is the most formidable of the neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals, and because he reputedly has the attention of both the Obama administration and the Romney campaign, a condensed version of the book that recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal has got wide attention–and wrongly so.
For the sake of brevity, I shall confine myself to Kagan’s more glaringly questionable major assertions:
“In a genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies.”
Why? Europe, collectively the world’s foremost economic power, hardly represents autocratic values, and nor do its major powers, Germany, France and the UK. As Kagan himself concedes, there are many other emergent democracies of considerable weight–not just Turkey, Brazil, India and South Africa, but Mexico, Argentina, South Korea and so on. Actually, there are just two important authoritarian states–China and Russia–and while it would be an overstatement to say their days are numbered, their days are surely not unnumbered.
“The balance in a new , multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democracies . . picked up the slack from declining U.S. Yet not all off them have the desire of the capacity to do it.”
What slack? Cannot Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico tend to the preservation of liberal democratic values in Latin America; Japan and its neighbors in East Asia; India and its neighbors in South Africa, and so on? The various European powers always have been more engaged and active in Africa than the United States, and increasingly this is the case in the Middle East as well. (With large North African and Turkish populations, and enormously much more dependent on Gulf oil than the United States, they cannot afford to be unengaged in the Middle East, whereas the United States actually can; our involvements are a matter of choice.)
“The creation and survival of a liberal economic order has depended, historically, on great powers that are both willing and able to support open trade and free markets. If a declining America is unable to maintain its long-standing hegemony on the high seas, would other nations take on the burdens …?”
Is Mr. Kagan seriously suggesting that if the United States were to eliminate its navy, it would be the end of oceanic free trade?
“. . .the rules and institutions of international order rarely survive the decline of the nations that erected them. They are like scaffolding around a building.”
Actually, as historian Kagan must know, since 1648 and the doctrine of sovereignty, international institutions have proved much more durable in the long run that the particular sovereign nations that created them.
“… international order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others–in America’s case, the domination of free-market and democrtic principles….”
Has Kagan actually forgotten that through the Cold War and beyond American power was often used to prop up authoritarian right-wing governments, some of which could be described as fascistic? Isn’t he overlooking that the Arab spring is an uprising against old friends of the United States as well as old enemies?
You really have to be a figure of Kagan’s stature to get certain statements past a major newspaper’s top editors: America’s dominance has been generally welcome because we are “like the mobster Hyman Roth in ‘The Godfather’ “; Francis Fukuyama’s doctrine about the “end of history” has “retained its appeal” though it’s been “discredited by events.” Huh?
Tellingly, the word “Europe” appears nowhere in Kagan’s lengthy Wall Street Journal essay. Surely this is no accident. Kagan is of course best known for his short and brilliantly provocative book, Of Paradise and Power, in which he described Europeans as from Venus and Americans from Mars. Because Kagan so overemphasizes the effectiveness and importance of hard power (as Michiko Kakutani rightly observed in her scalding New York Times review), he doesn’t seem to see all the places and all the ways in which it’s soft power that’s actually getting the job done.
All this might be merely academic were it not for a new report that appeared at the beginning of this week, saying that the U.S. chief of special operations is seeking a freer hand to operate everywhere in the world. In spirit, that request is of a piece with Kagan’s notion that everything good in the world emanates from the United States. In fact, as Kakutani also pointed out, the United States is widely viewed as a bully (even to a great extent by our European allies)–and that is one reason why some countries are still seeking what they see as the great equalizer, a weapon of mass destruction.

 

Author

William Sweet

Bill Sweet has been writing about nuclear arms control and peace politics since interning at the IAEA in Vienna during summer 1974, right after India's test of a "peaceful nuclear device." As an editor and writer for Congressional Quarterly, Physics Today and IEEE Spectrum magazine he wrote about the freeze and European peace movements, space weaponry and Star Wars, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. His work has appeared in magazines like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The New Republic, as well as in The New York Times, the LA Times, Newsday and the Baltimore Sun. The author of two books--The Nuclear Age: Energy, Proliferation and the Arms Race, and Kicking the Carbon Habit: The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy--he recently published "Situating Putin," a group of essays about contemporary Russia, as an e-book. He teaches European history as an adjunct at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College.