“The world has not been transformed, however,” Kagan says. “Nations remains as strong as ever, and so too the nationalist ambitions, the passions, and the competition among nations that have shaped history.” The world still boasts only one superpower, but other “great powers,” such as Europe, Russia, China, and Iran, continue the competition for influence and predominance. “Struggles for honor and status and influence in the world,” Kagan says, have long served as one of the principal motivating forces of history, and they “have once again become key features of the international scene.” And the fundamental struggle that is once again moving and defining history is the one that moved and defined the history of the 20th century.
Ideologically, it is a time not of convergence but of divergence. The competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up, as in the past, along ideological lines.
On one side of this ideological divide stand America and Europe. But America and Europe are in the midst of their own ideological dustup concerning the best instruments to use in the conflict, present and to come, with those terrorist and autocratic nations on the other side of the ideological divide. Europe is convinced that those nations can be engaged with and transformed by means of the instruments of reason, especially diplomacy and trade. America, though, knows better. Those terrorist and autocratic nations are motivated by irrational drives for status, prestige, and respect, for power and for honor, irrational motives that have driven the conduct of nations throughout history and that will continue to drive and shape the history of the coming century. Only one instrument exists and has ever existed to tame the behavior of nations driven by such irrational motives: military power.
In his 2003 book, Of Paradise and Power, Kagan argues that the gap in military power that has opened between Europe and America is responsible for the political rift that has opened between them. America, militarily the world’s predominant power, still adheres to military power as an essential tool in foreign relations. Europe, far less militarily powerful than America, has renounced military power as a tool in foreign relations and has substituted the tools of reason: diplomacy, trade, multinational alliances, and multilateral action.
It is clear, though, that Europe’s renunciation of power is not so much a practical one as an ideological one. Europe has the resources to become a great military power if it wanted to do so. But its experience in the first half of the twentieth century has shown Europe the ultimate futility of power as an instrument in international relations. Its experience in the second half of the twentieth century has further shown it that the substitution of reason for power conduces to both peace and prosperity. It is small wonder then that Europe chooses no longer to participate in a politics based on military power. It is also small wonder that it casts a cold eye on American military might and is even somewhat contemptuous of America’s tendency to strut its militaristic stuff on the world stage.
True, America might annoyingly strut now and again, but America also knows that the ideological divergence currently at work in the world is real and its implications troubling. On one side of the ideological divide, the liberal side, stands Europe. On the other, the absolutist or autocratic side, stand China, Russia, and Iran. And America stands on the border, resolute and strong, determined to protect the liberals from the absolutists and terrorists.
America knows that it must remain committed to that lonely but honorable stance. The terrorists and autocrats will not forever be content to stay on their side of the ideological divide. Inevitably they will seek to accrue and consolidate ever larger areas of dominance and power. They might for a time deem it wise to expand only their economic and political spheres of influence by means of diplomacy and trade. But, as history has repeatedly shown, autocratic and absolutist nations will finally resort to military force in order to expand their dominance territorially. As long as such nations still exist and seek to enlarge themselves, as long, that is, as terrorist and autocratic nations remain recalcitrant and power-hungry, at least one democratic and freedom-loving nation must retain military power as a tool of foreign policy and show the will, when necessary, to use it. For the better part of a century, because of its military might, America has served as that “indispensable nation.” And, because of its military might, it retains that role now and will retain it into the foreseeable future.
But Europe, so Kagan argues, in its ideological renunciation of power and celebration of reason, is driven by motives that are not wholly rational, that are, quite the contrary, manifestly irrational. With one such irrational motive Kagan is in sympathy, even though he thinks that Europe’s way of expressing it is misguided. Europe, he tells us, in its reaction against power has committed its political and economic energies wholeheartedly to a goal it is convinced it can achieve: the establishment of a worldwide realm of perpetual peace based rationality and rules.
Just as Americans have always believed that they had discovered the secret to human happiness and wished to export it to the rest of the world, so Europeans have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace. (61)
Such a mission is transparently an idealist one and one that, should it prove successful, would forever entitle Europe to humanity’s esteem and honor. For Kagan, the desire to excel, to gain honor and glory, is an irrational one, but throughout history this desire has driven individuals and nations to strive for goals that, when achieved, have benefited humanity enormously. Both America and Europe are now striving to achieve a laudable goal—the distribution of freedom, peace, and prosperity throughout the world—though they differ on the best means to achieve it. But Europe’s missionary impulse, Kagan suggests, though undeniably honorable and laudable, is wedded to yet another irrational impulse, one connected to that which Europe has so recently left behind and cannot forget: its past.
1. Spreading the Word
“This is what many Europeans believe they have to offer the world: not power, but the transcendence of power” (59-60). Now that they have found the one true way to transcend power, Kantian reason, Europeans are understandably eager to share it with those nations that have not yet seen the Kantian light and that still toil in the Hobbesian darkness of anarchy and war. “Europe’s experience of successful multilateral governance has, in turn, produced an ambition to convert the world,” Kagan says, a passion to reproduce “the European experience on a global scale” (60).
Such a goal might seem impossibly ideal, but why should Europeans not believe that they can reproduce their realm of peace “on a global scale”? For centuries England and France and Germany, in various and shifting alliances, warred against one another. Indeed, these great civilized nations were not content to confine their anarchy and conflict within the borders of Europe. They exported their nationalistic mayhem throughout the world as they competed against one another in the glorious and honorable game of global empire.
But now these nations who have for so long sought power and dominance at one another’s expense have renounced the weapons of war and have taken up the great weapon of peace, reason. They have created from out of the carnage of their past a way to peace and mutually sustained security. And if these nations that had for centuries been given to war and Hobbesian competition for power can achieve peace, so too can such anarchic and autocratic nations as Iran and Iraq and North Korea attain to a state of Kantian civilization. These nations might be “evil,” as America declares, given to a fanatic quest for power and for regional if not global domination. But so too were England, France, and Germany once “evil.” Just as all nations have a potential for irrationally destructive behavior, especially autocratic nations, so too all nations, even autocratic ones, have a potential for rationally constructive behavior, if that potential is appealed to diplomatically, with tact and care. That they still exist in the Hobbesian realm of anarchy and espouse the Hobbesian methods of power and domination does not mean that they must be dealt with, as America assumes, only according to the methods of military might.
Europe has thus found its new postmodern purpose in the world. It will henceforth appeal tactfully and diplomatically to the potential for reason that dwells in the heart of even the most autocratic of nations. “The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice,” as Kagan puts it (61).
But America knows that these nations still in the grip of the Hobbesian quest for power will not be so easily won over. Terrorists and autocrats will not suddenly and spontaneously see the light and renounce their quest for prestige and domination because Europe urges them to do so and presents to them, oh so seductively, the case for rationality and rules.
And it is here, in this ideological difference, that we find the true source and origin of the current spat between the great transatlantic allies. Europe knows full well that America’s military power and its will to use it constitute no threat to European security and peace. But that strength and will constitute a different sort of threat, a fundamental threat “to Europe’s new sense of mission.” America’s willingness to use its power, alone and unilaterally if it has to, against those nations that still stubbornly insist on abiding by the laws of the Hobbesian jungle “is an assault on Europe’s new ideals, a denial of their universal validity,” a repudiation of the claim that Kantian reason can be applied to those nations that occupy the Hobbesian jungle. And, Kagan says, speaking as an idealist himself, “Americans ought to be the first to understand that a threat to one’s beliefs can be as frightening as a threat to one’s physical security” (62).
Indeed it can. Nations throughout history have been motivated by their beliefs and assumptions about the world, by their ideals: ethnic ideals, political ideals, religious ideals, nationalistic ideals. To attack a nation’s ideals is to attack its core sense of itself, its national identity. And when a nation sees that its ideals are being denigrated and abused, when it sees them being attacked and, perhaps, threatened with annihilation, it will fight to maintain and secure them. Nations have never, do not now, and never will live by material interests alone, however “vital” those material interests are. Nations live also by those core principles and beliefs that define them as nations, and a nation will fight for its principles and beliefs and ideals because on their continued integrity depends its very sense of itself as a distinct and effective actor on the world stage.
Europe is now engaged in a fight with America because it feels its new identity as the embodiment of reason thwarted and threatened by America’s insistence that power, not reason, is still the most important instrument of policy in world affairs. The fight is a friendly one, to be sure, between allies that are at bottom liberal, but it is a fight nonetheless, and the impetus for the fight is coming from an irrational source: Europe’s ideal of itself as the true source of international wisdom. Certain of its priorities and sure of its position, Europe has gone forth on its mission and has cast America in the role of its ideological opponent, the source not of wisdom but, because of America’s adherence to power, of carelessness, of impulsiveness, and, potentially, of folly.
There is, however, another motive, equally irrational, spurring Europe’s behavior. For all its idealistic espousal of rationality and the rule of law, Europe is not being completely candid, either to itself or to its friend across the Atlantic, about the motives pushing it on its mission to convert the world to reason. Europe sees in the world outside its gates a mirror image of itself, a world susceptible to the lures of reason and peace. What Europe avoids seeing, what it actively suppresses from recognition, is that the world outside its gates is indeed a mirror image of itself, not as it now is but as it once was and can be again.
2. The Past Resurgent
Europe’s demeanor of rationality is disturbed by a troubling thought. If the Kantian method of rationality and rules is not applicable to all nations on earth, or applicable only at the point of a gun, “wouldn’t that suggest that Europe itself may eventually fall short of a solution, with all the horrors this implies?” (62) In other words, Europe is impelled on its mission of peace because it fears that the ghosts of its past have not been fully exorcized and laid to rest. “If international law does not reign supreme, is Europe doomed to return to its past?” (63) The impulse for power that the great European nations so destructively manifested may not be dead but only dormant. And that which still lives but is only asleep can be reawakened, however deep its current slumber.
There is, after all, in Europe itself a nation that has not been included in Europe’s Union of reason and law, Russia. Russia is becoming increasingly autocratic and though it is no longer the military giant it once was, it has the potential to become such a giant again. The presence on its border of a powerful autocratic giant can conceivably prompt Europe—or certain nations in Europe, such as Russia’s traditional enemy, Germany—to take up again precisely those instruments of foreign policy that, supposedly, they have renounced forever—the instruments of power. Europe’s “mission, if it has a mission beyond the confines of Europe, is to oppose power,” Kagan says (68), and not only in order to bring its rule of reason to those nations still at war, but also to prevent its own slide back into the Hobbesian realm of anarchy out of which it has so recently emerged.
Thus, in a manner almost compulsive, Europe reacts against and opposes in other nations what it fears may again rise up in itself—the impulse to power and competition and war. Its reaction and opposition takes a reasonable form: it tries to seduce away from the use of power such rogues and outlaws as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It also tries to chasten and tame the fractious will of that nation whose power so transcends its own—America. But beneath the façade of reasonable argument is a deep-seated anxiety about its past, a past it cannot forget and may not have overcome.
3. Manning the Ramparts
Thus Europe’s renunciation of power, Kagan argues, stems if not exclusively, at least significantly from irrational motives. But from whatever motives Europe’s current renunciation of power derives, that renunciation has put America in the difficult boundary situation it now occupies in world affairs, protecting itself and all other good international citizens from the outlaws—the terrorists and the autocrats—intent on disrupting the peace and breaking the law.
Because it occupies this boundary position, America is committed to an international “double standard” of behavior. When dealing with those nations on the liberal side of the boundary, America abides by rationality and rules. But when dealing with those nations on the autocratic and absolutist side of the boundary, nations that abjure rules and act only according to their own autocratic and even fanatic self-interest, America readily uses those tools that are effective in the Hobbesian world of ruthless competition and war: “force, preemptive attack, deception” (74).
What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise [of rationality and rules], and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter the paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving most of the benefits to others. (75-6)
This is America’s destiny, a destiny heroic and even tragic: to keep watch on the wilderness, to repel those who attack the ramparts of freedom and peace, even to sally outside the gates and preemptively attack those that are preparing to scale the walls. America need not take on this role of democracy’s defender and freedom’s promoter. It is a hard and thankless task. If it wanted, America could climb down from the ramparts, rest comfortably in the court, and only sally outside the gates to engage in a little barter and diplomatic smalltalk.
That would be the realistic and the rational thing to do. But, as Kagan knows, nations do not act according to reason alone. Nor do they always act according to a realistic calculation of their so-called “vital interests.” Nations have always, do now, and always will act according to those core principles and ideals that define their very identities as nations. Indeed, what “interest” is more “vital” to America than its ideals, its identity, its very sense of itself as a nation still “stuck in history,” as Kagan puts it.
Yes, Kagan affirms, America is still stuck in history, and that is not only America’s role but its destiny: to engage in history in order to shape it and define it according to the ideals that shape and define America itself. History has not ended. History is continuing to be made, and the honorable thing for America to do is to make history according to the ideals that define it: freedom and democracy. The dishonorable thing for America to do would be to disengage from the struggle and to leave the field to the autocrats and the terrorists who aspire to nothing other than the eradication of freedom from history. But America remains strong and resolute. It will honor its destiny and will faithfully protect and promote its ideals until history concludes in a worldwide empire of freedom and perpetual peace.
At this point in his discussion, Kagan launches into a peroration on America’s role in world history, and I’ll return in a few weeks to his grand vision of America’s pivotal and “dangerous” place in the history of nations. But first a little elucidating is in order. Kagan has been using two key ideas to structure his argument: Kant’s concept of perpetual peace and Hobbes’ concept of the war of all against all. And so I’m going to pause and take a look at those two ideas and see in what way and to what extent they are applicable to Kagan’s argument. First I’ll examine Hobbes’ vision of a world without government, the world of nature in which people and nations struggle not just for power and domination but also for that attribute on which Kagan places such a distinct ideological emphasis—honor. I’ll then examine Kant’s vision of perpetual peace and that which produces it, a federation of nations governed by a set of specific moral imperatives: freedom, equality, and solidarity.
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