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June 8, 2003
REVIEWS: Continental drift
While extolling the virtues of American imperialism, the central thesis of Robert Kagan’s recent bestseller, Of Paradise and Power is that the “power gap” between the US and Europe is now so vast that there is “little use in thinking of them as partners in the new world order.”
This manifesto-style slim book is an expanded version of an essay originally published as “Power and weakness” in Policy Review, the right-wing Hoover Institute’s bi-monthly magazine. Kagan, a conservative think-tanker, is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment and is the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua. He lives in Brussels.
Before and during the just concluded Iraq war, this book has generated much heat and controversy in the US. It is now on the bestseller list. Some conservative foreign policy mavens have compared it to George F. Kennan’s 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs advocating containment of the Soviet Union. Kissinger has called it a “seminal treatise,” but liberals like Gore Vidal describe Kagan as “being in the grip of most unseemly megalomania, speaking for no one but political hustlers within the Washington beltway”.
In his book Kagan writes, “It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power, American and European perspectives are diverging.” According to him, Europe is moving “beyond power” into a “self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation”. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace, what Kant called “Perpetual Peace”.
The United States, meanwhile, adds Kagan, “remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might”. That is why on major international questions today, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less.”
Kagan says that this Euro-American split is not transitory - the product of one American election of a conservative President or one catastrophic event like 9/11. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure.
According to Kagan it was the demise of the Soviet Union and the birth of the “unipolar moment” that made United States more willing to use force abroad. He denies that 9/11 is at the heart of America’s aggressive posture. He points out that whereas the combined military budgets of all European countries is around 150 billion dollars, USA’s annual military budget is already $450 billion and climbing.
No wonder, therefore, the 1990’s saw the French coin the term “hyperpuissance” or hyperpower to describe the American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be called merely a superpower. And this process, says Kagan started not with Bush but during the Clinton presidency when Europeans began to complain about being lectured by the “hectoring hegemon”.
According to Kagan, therefore, Europeans have a deep interest in devaluing and eventually eradicating the brutal laws of an anarchic, Hobbesian world where power is the ultimate determinant. This is no reproach, writes Kagan. It is what weaker powers have wanted from time immemorial.
It was what a weak America wanted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the brutality of a European system of power politics run by the global giants of France, Britain, and Russia left Americans constantly vulnerable to imperial thrashing. It was what the other small powers of Europe wanted in those years, too, only to be sneered at by Bourbon kings and other powerful monarchs, who spoke instead of raison d’itat.
In other words, shorn of euphemisms and obfuscation, Kagan’s justification for the use of overwhelming force against an impoverished country like Iraq by the United States is that since Europe in its glory days indulged in colonialism and pillage of weaker powers, so too should America today. His conclusion is dumbfounding: “Europe should let us do what we must to keep the peace, recognizing that we have just entered a long era of American hegemony.”
Fortunately, wiser heads in America have challenged these dangerous imperial delusions. Farsighted Americans like former President Carter, George McGovern or Daniel Ellsburg not only opposed the Iraq war, but expressed views that are indistinguishable from Kagan’s Europeans.
Secondly, Kagan’s singular focus on the military foundations of power is truly troublesome. He fails to understand that brute force never results in lasting security. The more America resorts to force, the more it will be disliked, the weaker it will become politically. “Regime change” through force is relatively easy; what is difficult, as time will tell, is “nation building”. History teaches us that Mr Big always invites his own demise. That is what happened to Napoleon, to Hitler and to Stalin. One of the oldest rules of history is that power begets superior counter-power.
Thirdly, in America’s war against terrorism, it should be remembered that terror will not be defeated with drones, F-16s and smart weapons. It will be defeated with justice, humility, compassion, friendship, respect for cultural diversity, reverence for world faiths and love for humanity and international law.
In his forthcoming brilliant book, The Unconquerable World, Jonathan Schell writes: “The days when humanity can hope to save itself from force with force are over. None of the known international structures of force — not the balance of power, not the balance of terror, not empire — can rescue the world from brutality and annihilation. Only the cooperative structures of power based on diplomacy, economic welfare and international law offer hope.”
Needless to say, having suffered two world wars and millions of dead, Europe, which has now chosen the cooperative structures of power for itself, offers a more rational approach to world order. Contrary to what Kagan preaches, it is Europe that is ideally placed to be a model of peace and democracy for the world in the 21st century.
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order
By Robert Kagan
Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN 1-4000-4093-0
103pp. $18
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