[Reader-list] Robert Kagan "Power and Weakness"

[Rana Dasgupta]

See the essay at this URL:

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan_print.html

It was slightly long to paste.  As the NYT says about it:

>> Every now and again, American thinking about foreign affairs is
galvanized by an essay that seems to explain the confusing and disparate
phenomena of a changing world -- a sort of unifying theory that, whether
accepted or rejected, cannot be ignored. Such were George Kennan's ''X''
article in 1947, which set the strategy for the cold war; Francis Fukuyama's
''End of History'' article in 1989; and Samuel Huntington's 1993 essay ''The
Clash of Civilizations.''

>> These days, the loudest buzz is over Robert Kagan's ''Power and
Weakness,'' an essay that appeared in the June-July 2002 issue of Policy
Review. It presented the provocative notion that America and Europe are
fundamentally different and are becoming more so as the United States
amasses extraordinary military might while the Europeans seek to supplant it
with international cooperation.

The article has just led to a book.

It's interesting to read these kind of strategic commentators.  They are
like Marxists, except that the underlying "base" that explains everything
else is military power.  In Kagan's view, the European instincts for
diplomacy and moral complexity (as against American ones for force and moral
simplicity) are simply the result of the fact that (1) Europeans aren't
strong enough to determine the outcome of situations through force anyway,
so diplomacy is all they have left, and (2) Europeans have the luxury of
knowing that America and its military force are there if anything gets
really out of hand, and can therefore remain secure in their post 1945 ethos
of peace and tolerance.

The essay is fairly crude (as most of these "What Washington is reading"
essays seem to be).  There is a thinly-veiled delight in being stronger than
everyone else that comes across in so much American writing on this subject.

But I think the essay throws European attitudes into light in some
interesting ways.  And i also think it's very interesting to see how
watertight this kind of language is: it talks about the might of nations
across great historical periods, it sees those nations as naturally in
conflict, and peace as a kind of exception or "miracle", it makes no
reference to intellectual or organisational frameworks within which force
would not be the all-determining factor except to debunk them as the
pipedream of the weak.  It is a clean picture of the world into which most
of the kind of discussions that happen here about this war - legal
frameworks, human costs etc - cannot enter.  And in particular, since the
only concept of the nation that is interesting to such a discourse is the
government that runs it and has a monopoly on military power, there is no
complexity about the nature of nations: no talk of divisions within the
nation (except when there are rebel forces that can be counted on as allies,
in which case the nation becomes binary), no acknowledgment of those things
that make the integrity of the nation messy (e.g. Kurdish aspirations, and
the will of various governments to quash them).

I think the reason these kind of things are so popular amongst a certain
class of person is that their unflinching acknowledgement of the importance
of military power in our world, and their hard-nosed analyses of where the
currrent balance of power is taking us, seem to "cut through the crap" of
international diplomacy and provide hard reality - a reality upon which a
"strategy" - perhaps a "Bush doctrine" - can be built.  of course this essay
is also going to be much more popular in washington than in Paris because it
tells americans what they would love to hear - that europeans are not more
morally sophisticated than them, simply weaker (and probably jealous).  this
seems like a very useful - and sophisticated - way of dismissing any kind of
moral argument and getting on with the hard but important work of liberating
the world.

R