The talons make the hawk

Robert Kagan, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and monthly columnist for the Washington Post, is one of America’s finest commentators on issues of foreign policy. He writes elegantly, has an excellent command of history and consistently demonstrates superior intelligence and insight. He ranks with Ronald Steel, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Fareed Zakaria and his sometime collaborator, William Kristol, among analysts whose work must be read. And the appearance of this book could not have been more timely, as “old Europe” and the United States diverge over the necessity for war with Iraq.

Last summer Kagan published an essay, “Power and Weakness,” in the journal Policy Review that startled foreign policy elites in Europe and the United States. He argued that Americans and Europeans no longer shared a common view of the world, particularly about the use of power in world affairs -- that Europeans imagined themselves entering a Kantian paradise of perpetual peace while Americans still perceived international relations in anarchic Hobbesian terms. For Europeans, military power was no longer relevant. To Americans, it was still a jungle out there, filled with villains who responded only to force. The line most often quoted from the essay was “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” This book is an expansion of that essay.

Although Kagan continues to argue that the U.S. can manage its imperial responsibilities no matter what Europeans choose to think or do, the difference in titles between the essay and the book hints at a slight modification of tone. Kagan softens the essay’s emphasis on European weakness ever so slightly by suggesting that the state the Europeans find themselves in is a paradise, a “blessed miracle,” to be celebrated, “cherished and guarded.” It is, he reminds us, a miracle made possible by the use of American power to protect Europe during the Cold War and against the threat of rogue states since. But Americans are not resentful that Europeans have entered paradise without them. They are proud of their power and the role their country has played. He insists that a Europe at peace is a tremendous strategic asset to the United States, presumably one less part of the world to police.

His principal explanation for the difference between American and European attitudes toward power is relative strength. The United States acts as militarily powerful nations do, unwilling to be constrained by rules and conventions created for the protection of the weak. In the early years of the republic, when it confronted superior European powers, it insisted, usually with minimal success, that they abide by international law. Today, Europe, lacking in military power, seeks a world in which the actions of all nations, weak as well as strong, will be governed by law or international institutions. Power has shifted across the Atlantic -- and so has the unwillingness to be restrained in its exercise.

Kagan also points to historical experience to explain the current European discomfort with military power. The peoples of Europe suffered terrible losses in two world wars. After World War II, they lost their empires. During the Cold War, they were content to rely on American military power for their security. As their great-power status slipped away, Kagan sees them changing ideologically, rejecting geopolitics, unwilling to contemplate a chaotic world in which the strong prey upon the weak. They prefer a scenario in which resorting to force is never necessary.

Like most American foreign affairs analysts, Kagan is quite comfortable with his country’s preeminence. He firmly believes that the United States does more good than harm in its actions abroad, that the world is a better place with the United States as the dominant power, a benign hegemonist. He is less troubled than some by American unilateralism, insisting that the United States must refuse to abide by international conventions that prevent it from acting effectively. Aware that the Bush administration is criticized for its Lone Ranger tactics, its disregard for the sensibilities of its allies, he blurs its differences with its predecessor. He points to the Clinton administration’s rhetorical shift from the “assertive multilateralism” of its first term to the concept of the United States as the “indispensable nation” of which Madeleine Albright spoke as secretary of state. There is no denying that many Americans learned during the Bosnian crisis that Europe lacked the will to use force to stop evil. Enter Uncle Sam, the reluctant sheriff.

When Kagan focuses on the tensions between the United States and much of Western Europe over the appropriate means for dealing with Iraq, he finds the Europeans unable to perceive the threat that seems so obvious to Washington. He concludes that European tolerance of Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction and evasion of U.N.-ordered inspections stems from weakness. Unable to act, Europeans tolerate Iraqi transgressions. Their incapacity leads them to deny the existence of a threat. And he is pained by indications that many Europeans are more troubled by George W. Bush than by the likes of Saddam Hussein.

Clearly, the Western alliance is in trouble. Kagan is too subtle an analyst to blame it all on the Europeans, much as he would like to defend the Bush administration. Sounding like Nye in “The Paradox of American Power,” he warns Bush’s aides against arrogance. He insists on the need to respect the sensibilities of friends, to demonstrate generosity of spirit, to have a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” He probably choked at Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s dismissal of “old Europe.” He leaves no doubt that the Pentagon’s initial reluctance to accept NATO’s proffered aid in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was a gratuitous insult that has contributed mightily to Europe’s dissatisfaction with American leadership.

Nonetheless, Kagan concludes that the United States can move the world toward a liberal international order based on free markets, democracy and respect for human rights without Europe. He hopes that Americans will be less dismissive of their European friends and that Europeans will continue to appreciate what Americans have done for them in the past and are trying to do for them now. But he is relatively sanguine about the outcome in any event. I am not.

Although Kagan has written a superb book, there are important issues that he fails to address. He is dissatisfied with “realists” such as Colin L. Powell, James A. Baker III, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, whose presumably narrow conception of national interest precluded preemptive action against the Bosnian Serbs in the closing months of the elder Bush’s presidency -- and who have evinced skepticism about unilateralism in the Middle East. Unquestionably, Kagan would expand national interest to include the “idealism,” the values-based policies, he remembers from his years in the Reagan administration. But he ignores potentially vital interests relating to the environment, drug trafficking and the AIDS epidemic that demand international cooperation, not least from the Europeans we are pushing away. And I know that he is not blind to the enormous contribution Europe can make in the war against terrorism -- and Iraq’s reconstruction.

And finally, I must confess to being deeply troubled by Kagan’s unwillingness to confront the domestic consequences of the American imperium in which he clearly delights. He ignores the collateral damage being done to the very institutions that he and I, with our shared sense of our country’s mission, would like to see spread across the globe. Although he currently lives in Europe, he is doubtless aware of the degrading of civil society in America that has accompanied the war against terrorism. I hope he would agree that ruling the world is not adequate compensation for the civil liberties of which we are being deprived by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.