The “Thoughtful Superhawk”
By Callimachus | Related entries in Foreign Policy, History, The War On Terrorism, The World, WarWhenever Robert Kagan sits down with a good interviewer, the result usually is worth reading. This chat from Australia is no exception:
INTERVIEWER: There’s a line in Paradise and Power where you note that ‘America did not change on September 11, it only became more itself’. What exactly did you mean by that?
ROBERT KAGAN: It sounds like a more provocative statement than I meant it to be. What I wanted to emphasise was the degree of continuity in American foreign policy. There’s a tendency to believe that when we have a change of president, or when we go from Democrat to Republican, we have a brand new foreign policy, but if you look back across 200 years of American foreign policy you see a great deal of continuity. I find the unilateralism charge overdone because America has always been a fairly unilateralist country.
Similarly, there are very good historians like John Lewis Gaddis who have pointed out that the idea of preventive or pre-emptive action is not new in American foreign policy. The desire to be the most powerful country is not a new phenomenon and the desire to promote democracy overseas is very old. So what I meant by the United States becoming more itself is that when America is struck, as it was in Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on September 11, 2001, these already strong tendencies in American foreign policy�acting in ways that are more aggressive, unilateralist, ideological, etc.�are magnified.
Already, by this point in the interview, Kagan has elaborated on his famous “Mars-Venus” image of the difference between modern America and modern Europe.
To simplify an already simplistic argument, Europeans and Americans differ specifically on the use of military force and its utility, the legitimacy of power and, more generally, on the question of international order and the role of international institutions and international law. These differences have two main sources. The first is the vast disparity in military capability. It is inherently true that nations which have greater military power tend to use it more, and believe in its legitimacy more, while nations which are weaker tend to believe less in military power and less in its legitimacy, and seek to use mechanisms to constrain those who have more military power.
When I think back to the late 18th century, it’s easy to see the roles were reversed. America’s early statesmen spent a lot of time talking about international law and commerce as the real engine of diplomacy while the Europeans talked about power, realpolitik and raison d’etat. The greatest advocate for international law on the high seas and rules governing the behaviour of navies in the late 18th century was the United States while the greatest opponent of any kind of international legal regulation was Britain, the hegemon of the seas in those days. So it’s not surprising that when the roles are substantially reversed some 200 years later, attitudes towards power are also reversed.
Second, disparities in power lead to different threat assessments. Nations that perceive they have the capacity to deal with threats are less tolerant of them than those that perceive they don’t have the capacity. That’s actually a more controversial point that few people have taken me up on. Americans were less tolerant of Saddam Hussein because we felt we could do something about it; Europeans were more tolerant because they felt they couldn’t do much about it.
Oh, and there’s been a lot of loose talk these days about John Quincy Adams. RK sez, knock it off, you knuckleheads.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 and is filed under Foreign Policy, History, The War On Terrorism, The World, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
