Robert Kagan: Paradox and power: the philosopher of a world in turmoil

Come the hour, come the book. So wrote the former US ambassador to London, Raymond Seitz, in a review of the slim volume that has become the most talked-about thesis of the past year. For Of Paradise and Power, by Robert Kagan, offers a prescient insight into why such a chasm of mutual incomprehension has opened up between Europe and America over the issue of war on Iraq.

In recent days it has been almost impossible to pick up any of the endless think-pieces written on the looming conflict without seeing in it a reference to Kagan's theory. It has only been published a couple of weeks and already it looks set to take its place alongside Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations as a landmark text for our times. Henry Kissinger has described it as "a seminal treatise" and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, has distributed a copy to every European ambassador – with orders to read it as a primer to the thinking of the Bush administration. It is already a bestseller.

Kagan's message is that what faces us is not a George Bush problem, but something far more deep-seated. Here are the opening sentences of the essay from which his book was developed. It appeared last year in the influential US quarterly, Policy Review: "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 – the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power – American and European perspectives are diverging.

"Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it 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 and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's 'Perpetual Peace'.

"The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might."

All this grows from a simple contrast: militarily the US is strong and Europe is weak. Once the European nations were great military powers, but the terrible wars of the 20th century bred a determination on the continent that war should be no more. It was one of the founding impulses for the European Union.

But the weak and the strong see the world through different eyes. The weak want a world where strength doesn't matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed rules of behaviour. They place emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy and commercial ties.

By contrast, America has the characteristics of the strong. It has the power to force quick solutions so it prefers coercion to persuasion, punitive sanctions over inducements, the stick over the carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: they want problems solved, threats eliminated. They are less inclined to work through institutions such as the United Nations or international courts, which they fear are traps set by the weak to constrain them.

Americans also resent that it is the external security which they provided for the free world during the Cold War that enabled Europe to proceed with its internal programme of building a peaceful "paradise" – and the huge cuts in defence spending that allowed.

Kagan has a vivid way of putting things. On major strategic and international questions, he says: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus" – leaving the British, one assumes, stuck in an interplanetary void somewhere in between. On "the psychology of weakness," he suggests that a man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger since "hunting the bear armed only with a knife is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks," whereas a man with a rifle will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk.

On those critics who damn George Bush as a cowboy, he concedes that the US does act as an international sheriff – "self-appointed but welcomed nevertheless" – but says that Europe, by the same Wild West analogy, is the saloon keeper: "Outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloon keepers. In fact, from the saloon keeper's point of view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws."

All of which explains why, since the end of the Cold War, the US made interventions pretty much wherever it chose – Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, several of them under Bill Clinton. This tendency has only been reinforced by 11 September. "America did not change on 9/11," says Kagan. "It only became more itself." And more open in embracing Bismarck's "Might goes before Right" maxim.

Obviously, a good deal of truth resides in Kagan's central observation. Americans continue to play by the old rules while the Europeans have taught themselves new ones, arguing bitterly over agricultural subsidies rather than invading one another. But Kagan's demand that the rest of us must "readjust to the reality of American hegemony" has a new brutalism about it.

You get some inkling of why when you consider his career. After college in Yale, and then a master's in public policy and international relations from Harvard, Robert Kagan went straight into Republican politics. After a start in journalism, as assistant editor at the right-wing journal Public Interest, he became foreign policy advisor to the conservative Republican Congressman, Jack Kemp. Next he joined the State Department's policy planning staff and became principal speechwriter to Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz.

In 1997 he teamed up with the doyen of neo-conservatism, William Kristol, and joined the Carnegie Endowment think-tank to direct the US Leadership Project, which aims to shape America's role as the world's lone superpower. It was a hard-right circle, which the US liberal Gore Vidal has characterised as "living in a world that never really existed outside the movies or American political rhetoric".

Tracking the emergence of Kagan's political opinions throws some light on the crucible in which his current thesis was forged. Among the opinions his writings reveal are that, in Nicaragua, the Contras were the good guys after all, that Arafat is a terrorist and that China needs to be contained not mollified. On the morning after 11 September, he declared in The Washington Post: "We are at war now." Indeed, he has endorsed the US defence doctrine that America must remain prepared to fight two wars at once, and has listed as possible targets: Iran, North Korea, China and terrorists in central Asia and the Philippines.

On Iraq, he states: "Whether or not we remove Saddam Hussein from power will shape the contours of the emerging world order, perhaps for decades to come. Either it will be a world order conducive to our liberal democratic principles and our safety, or it will be one where brutal, well-armed tyrants are allowed to hold democracy and international security hostage."

Kagan admits: "I've been arguing for removing Saddam from power for seven years now." And elsewhere adds: "It is a tough and dangerous decision to send American soldiers to fight and possibly die in Iraq. But it is more horrible to watch men and women leap to their deaths from flaming skyscrapers."

There is a clue in all this. For all the sophistication of his breadth of analysis, something crude underlies his thinking. It is evident in the way he uses Hobbes and Kant to polarise the world. Hobbes, it is true, thought that the state of nature was a state of war in which everyone has a natural right to whatever he can get and keep. But he tried to hold rationalism and fear in balance; he insisted it was reason not might which defined morality and spoke of the necessity of "modesty, equity, trust, humanity, mercy", and suggested that it was by consent that individuals gave up these "natural rights" to a sovereign who maintains order by force. Likewise, Kagan oversimplifies Kant, who certainly advocated a federation of free states bound by a covenant forbidding war, but also recognised the possibility that this could produce the most horrible despotism.

Kagan's thinking omits those things that do not fit his thesis. There is the sense of "manifest destiny", which another important book, Chosen People, by Clifford Longley, traces to a certain kind of American messianic born-again Christianity, which brings a Manichean quality to the political debate. There is the objection of the East European scholar Timothy Garton Ash, who has asked Kagan: "Do Europeans dislike war because they do not have enough guns, or do they not have enough guns because they dislike war?" There is the question as to why the Europeans, in particular the British, were more eager than the US to deploy ground troops in Kosovo? There are questions about other kinds of power than the military – economic and cultural.

At the end of his book Kagan tries for an emollient conclusion. American power need not just be the handmaiden of naked US national interests. Instead, it can be "a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilisation and a liberal world order".

It is a line of argument that may convince Americans. But then he adds: "American power, even deployed under a double standard, may be the best means of advancing human progress". When those of us in Europe, not to mention the rest of the world, hear things like that, a shiver down the spine is, understandably, the immediate response.

Life story

Born

28 September 1958 in Athens, Greece

Family

Married to Victoria Nuland. Two children, Elena, 7, and David, 5. Lives in Brussels

Education

Yale and Harvard

Career

Foreign policy advisor to Congressman Jack Kemp, 1983; Policy Planning Staff at US State Department and principal speechwriter to Secretary of State George P Schultz, 1984-88; senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 1997, where he directs the US Leadership Project

Writings

A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (1996); edited, with William Kristol, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (2000); Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003); columnist for The Washington Post

He says

"American hegemony is the only reliable defence against a breakdown of peace and international order."

They say

"One of those seminal treatises ... which will shape discussion of European-American relations for years to come."
Henry Kissinger

"[He's] in the grip of a most unseemly megalomania... and speaks for no one except energetic political hustlers within the Washington Beltway."
Gore Vidal