Power and weakness in “American Power in the 21st Century” by Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan is a neo-conservative American scholar and political commentator. He was born on September 26th 1958 in Athens. After graduating from Yale University in 1980, he earned a Masters from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a PhD from American University in Washington.

Robert Kagan is the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (where he is director of the US Leadership Project). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1983, Kagan was foreign policy advisor to New York Representative and future Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp. Then, he worked at the State Department from 1984 to 1988 and was a speech-writer for Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1984-1985). He has also been foreign-policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney.

[...] In 2002, many states didn’t share the French and German point of view and supported the US in its decision to invade Iraq. It was the case for Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, but also for the new member-states like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (although they did it for different reasons). This example shows that, in terms of foreign policy, there’s no unanimity in Europe neither in America. Then, Kagan seems to ignore facts that contradict with his conclusions. [...]

[...] Today’s reality Kagan’s thesis is based on the idea that although Europeans often criticize the American way of dealing with international threats and conflicts, it’s because the US behave that way that the Kant’s world is made possible for Europe. More generally, the whole “miracle” of the European integration since the end of World War II has appeared thanks to the United States. In other terms, if Europe has today gone power by building the EU and rejecting the power politics of the earlier centuries, this was from the very beginning built with American help. [...]

[...] Europeans, by building the EU and by their integration, entered a “Kantian world” of “perpetual peace” and prosperity, a “post-modern paradise” as Kagan calls it, whereas the US remained “mired in history, exercising power in a ( ) Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order” depend on military might. As we can today see it, this was followed with years of incomprehension, mistrust and tension between both sides of the Atlantic, Europe seeing America as unilateralist and unnecessarily belligerent and America seeing Europe as spent and weak. [...]