He who hesitates is lost, or so the proverb goes, and I am living proof. It’s one reason (of many) why I would make a lousy reporter. For the past two weeks, I’ve been working intermittently on a post about Robert Kagan’s article in the Feb. 2 issue of the New Republic, which pushes back against the notion that America is a nation in decline. While this myth of decline is peddled by politicians and foreign policy experts on both the left and the right, Kagan’s argument most powerfully (and ironically, considering his own history as a neocon) refutes the conservative narrative of an Iran-appeasing, military-guttting President Obama. He frames the decline myth as an exercise in nostalgia, which strikes me as particularly appealing to Republicans wistful for a bygone Leave-It-To-Beaver era. But if I were writing for a newspaper, I would have been dismayed to see yesterday’s article in the Times: “Obama Buttresses Case for U.S. Resilience with Book from Unusual Source.” The unusual source, of course, is Robert Kagan. “The president has brandished Mr. Kagan’s analysis in arguing that the nation’s power has waxed rather than waned,” reporter Mark Landler writes. He describes it as “a delicious coincidence for the White House” that Kagan is “a neoconservative historian and commentator who advises Mr. Romney.”
Well, then. Maybe it’s just sour grapes, but if I’d pointed out Kagan’s relevance two weeks ago, at least I’d have the satisfaction of feeling prescient. That Obama has been reading Kagan’s forthcoming book, “The World America Made,” comes as no surprise to anyone who heard his Jan. 26 State of the Union address, in which he announced that “anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Anyone, of course, was a clear reference to Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential field. Romney repeatedly accuses Obama of “apologizing” for America, and said last month that the president aims to “appease or accommodate the tyrants of the world.” Kagan himself makes a point of telling the Times that he disagrees with aspects of Obama’s foreign policy, and he makes the bland observation that, when it comes to the idea of American decline, “sometimes he has fought hard against it, and sometimes he has unwittingly contributed to it.” It is a strikingly more amenable tone than he has taken in other fora. When asked by the magazine Foreign Policy to grade Obama’s accomplishments, Kagan criticizes the total pullout of troops from Iraq as “a disaster . . . one of the gravest errors of Obama’s first term, for which either he or his successor will pay a high price.” Cuts to the defense budget — which Kagan fails to note are part of the deficit-reduction agreement passed with Republican support — are “irresponsible” and “will go a long way to undermining the U.S. position in the world.” Despite Kagan’s neoconservative leanings, it’s interesting to note (though the Times does not) that he is married to Victoria Nuland, the spokesperson for the U.S. State Department. I don’t imagine Kagan thinks much of Hillary Clinton’s much-vaunted “soft power” approach to diplomacy.
The excerpts of Kagan’s book, which appear in TNR under the title “Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline,” are a refreshing change from the constant drumbeat of negativity on the Republican campaign trail. From a persistently high unemployment rate to rising powers ready to eat the United States’ lunch, the general consensus seems to be that America ain’t what she used to be. The intransigence of countries like Iran and North Korea plays into the narrative of American powerlessness; at home, the Republican candidates speak with one voice about the erosion of traditional “values” and the encroachment of President Obama’s “secular-socialist” entitlement state. Newt Gingrich claims to be “restoring the America we love,” and the super PAC supporting Rick Perry goes by the name “Making us Great Again.” Both slogans intimate that the U.S. has lost something it needs to get back, just as conservative foreign policy hawks long for the brash, go-it-alone adventurism of the Bush administration.
While Republicans seem to take pleasure in decrying how far America has fallen, Kagan sees declinism as little more than a recession-fueled fad. It has become trendy to insist that the U.S. has lost its edge. Kagan’s essay is notably non-partisan, especially for a neoconservative like Kagan, who never met a war he couldn’t get behind. An allergy to defense cuts overrides any real political loyalty; when Obama committed an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, the president was “gutsy and correct,” but when he announced a timeline for withdrawal this summer, Kagan lambasted the decision as “appallingly cynical.” Though Kagan does not specify the political origin of the decline myth his essay refutes, he suggests that it is bipartisan. But despite name-checking prominent liberal hand-wringers like Thomas Friedman, it quickly becomes clear that the scenario he rejects is one constructed primarily by Republicans. Deliberately or not, Kagan’s essay lays bare the differences between the conservative and liberal fears of America’s future. The media tends to conflate the two strands of fatalism, lumping together concern over offshoring and rising poverty with fears that a rising deficit will imperil Pentagon budgets.
The argument with which Kagan so vehemently disagrees is a conservative one, peddled most recently by Republican presidential contenders trying to outflank each other on support for Israel and willingness to unleash America’s military might on Iran. All the candidates twist the president’s words to suggest that he denies the “exceptionalism” of the United States; by extension, only a hard-charging conservative like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich can return the nation to the “exceptional” values that are slipping away. Obama, they imply, is responsible for endangering the shining city on a hill. Framing the problem in such existential terms conveniently raises the stakes for the 2012 elections, which Gingrich calls “the most important election of our lifetime.” Unless reversed, this slouching toward a European welfare state will translate to permanent decline. Kagan agrees that “the present world order . . . reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline with it.” The key word here, however, is if. Like Romney and Gingrich, Kagan believes a world with a weakened America would be an undesirable place. Unlike the Republican establishment, however, Kagan sees such a world as unlikely. He includes the obligatory caveat — American strength will diminish only if we choose not to maintain it — but spends the bulk of the essay refuting the idea that the country enters 2012 in a fallen state. There can be no utopia lost if there was no utopia to begin with. Gingrich may claim to look at the world from a historian’s perspective, but a true historian would recognize the narrative of an unrivaled superpower for the fantasy it is. Kagan writes “against the myth of American decline,” but he rejects another myth as well: the myth of American peak power.
Those who decry the weakening of the United States cite myriad foreign policy setbacks to justify their position: a deadlocked peace process in the Middle East, an Arab spring that has replaced malleable dictators with unpredictable populists, and most significantly, a rising communist China that has pulled third-world African states as well as rogue nations like Iran into its orbit. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, John Hannah — Dick Cheney’s former national security advisor — writes that “growing doubts about U.S. reliability and resolve only add fuel to the fire” of instability in the Middle East. “The resulting strategic vacuum is an open invitation for miscalculation and conflict — Iran’s recent threats in the Strait of Hormuz being Exhibit A.” Kagan’s response to these gloomy predictions would be to point out that such doubts are hardly new and probably not growing any faster than usual. Miscalculation and conflict have been hallmarks of American foreign policy for decades. In some regards, the pessimism of the chattering class is a self-fulfilling prophecy. He writes that, “with this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of he United States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression.”
Kagan’s response to the peddlers of such an impression? He argues, essentially, that ’twas always thus:
Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted to do.
“Not Fade Away” tracks the failures and uncertainties of U.S. foreign policy from World War II to the present, with particular focus on the Arab world that has caused so much consternation of late. The failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been a slow-motion disaster since its inception. Republicans point to the Obama administration’s insufficient ardor for Israel as the root of America’s reduced leverage, “but in 1973 the United States could not even prevent the major powers in the Middle East from engaging in all-out war.” Kagan applies the same logic to the century’s other global struggles, noting that “only in retrospect can the Cold War seem easy.”
Much of history looks easy in retrospect. Hindsight may be 20-20, but Kagan demonstrates throughout the essay that contemporary viewers saw the situation differently. It has become popular to answer laments about the decline of western civilization with the observation that even the Romans bemoaned the callow youth of the next generation, and Kagan applies the same logic to the rise of American power. Before Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history, the longevity of capitalism and democracy was hardly a sure thing. Far from looking to the U.S. for moral and economic guidance, many nations spent the Cold War “attracted to the state-controlled economies of the Soviet Union and China, which seemed to promise growth without the messy problems of democracy.” Indeed, if the past were truly a utopia of American hegemony, neither the space race nor the arms buildup designed to close the supposed “missile gap” would have taken place. Americans in 1950 did not see themselves as untouchable arbiters of world order, and Kagan marshals ample quotations from contemporary historians whose predictions of American decline failed, decade after decade, to pan out. From Douglas MacArthur’s 1952 lamentation on the Soviet Union’s rise and “our own relative decline” to Henry Kissinger’s statement in the 1970s that the U.S. had “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations,” history is rife with doomsday prognosticators.
Though Kagan turns a judicious eye toward the theory of American dominance, he would not deny that the last hundred years have been an American century. When he compares the United States to the Roman empire, he does so favorably; unlike Cullen Murphy, whose 2007 book posed the question “Are we Rome?”, Kagan is thinking of an empire in its prime, not its decline. “The point is not that America always lacked global influence,” he writes. Yet, “if we are to gauge accurately whether the United States is currently in decline, we need to have a reasonable baseline from which to measure.” The greatest fault of the conservative argument for decline is that it sets no reasonable baseline, instead indulging in the gauzy fantasy of an omnipotent, infallible America to which no present-day nation can compare. When John Hannah writes that “No good can come from the perception of the United States in retreat,” he conflates multi-lateralism — Obama’s notorious strategy of “leading from behind” — with retreat. Hannah assumes that the past is filled with the same go-it-alone adventurism that prevailed during the Bush administration, yet forgets that the U.S. did not write the history of the 20th century alone. Instead of a coalition of the willing, the alliance that fought the second World War was an alliance of the barely willing. Neocons like Hannah idealize an era in which America stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Stalin against the Nazi threat, yet see obsequious fealty in Obama’s “reset” policy with Putin’s far less autocratic Russia. Hannah accuses the president of making the country “a willing accomplice in the dismantling of a regional order — Pax Americana — that has been the linchpin of Mideast security for decades.” Given the OPEC-induced oil crisis of the 1970s and the fall of Iran’s pro-American shah to the mullahs in 1979, Kagan would likely argue that American influence produced a rough and contentious “Pax” indeed. Though Kagan does not mention it, I would add that what looks safe and quiet from an outsider’s perspective may hardly feel peaceful to an Israeli or Arab on the ground. Hannah’s vaunted “regional order” was order imposed from above, by dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who brutally suppressed their own people. Neoconservatives are all for democracy — but so long as that democracy is in the best interests of the U.S. Once newly empowered citizens vote the wrong way (e.g. for the Muslim Brotherhood), Mubarak suddenly starts to look awfully good.
The most powerful revelation of Kagan’s article is one that he does not explicitly address. By framing the myth of decline as “based on a nostalgic fantasy,” Kagan offers astute insight into the power such a myth wields over the Republican party. Nostalgia is the driving force behind much of conservatism, an ideology famously prepared to “stand athwart history yelling ‘stop.'” The fantasy of an omnipotent America dovetails perfectly with the fantasy of a moral, Judeo-Christian society. Both appeal to people like Rick Santorum, who see everything since the 1960s as a coarsening and degradation of a Pleasantville utopia. Both, however, are equally as mythological. Just as American hegemony was never absolute, American society was never as homogeneous and traditional as the Santorums of the world believe. Reuters columnist Jack Shafer notes acidly that
When campaigning, Republican presidential candidates tend to build their own little Dementiavilles, cherry-picking what they consider the best of the 1950s as they call for the return of cheap energy, U.S. industrial and military hegemony, a more business-friendly economy, and respect for authority . . . . Yes, it was a wonderful decade for some, but it doesn’t take a McGovernite to point out that Jim Crow, segregation, Little Rock, and the mistreatment of women and homosexuals should strike those years from the utopia registry.
The two-headed narrative of social and militaristic decline is also a convenient one, as it allows conservatives to blame liberals and Democrats for America’s woes. The standard bête noirs of the right — secularism, feminism, minority rights — undermined the old order just as President Obama’s supposed denial of American exceptionalism weakened the strong fist of American power. It brings to mind Michael Oakenshott’s definition of conservatism: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant.” Though Oakenshott was himself a conservative, the line is quoted by liberal author Corey Robinson in his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” Robinson offers a definition of the ideology that explains even more neatly — if trenchantly — the GOP’s decline fetish. “For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Whether that power manifested itself in overseas imperialism or rigid social mores, conservatives seek to win it back through militaristic foreign policy and top-down restrictions on “undesirable” behavior. I imagine Robin would find it no coincidence that the preponderance of both defense hawks and anti-immigrant/anti-abortion crusaders are old, white men.
Kagan’s choice to go on record as opposing the Republican narrative of decline is a strange one; even stranger is his choice to do so in the pages of the liberal New Republic. Along with his brother Frederick and his father Donald, the noted Yale classicist, Kagan forms a neoconservative triumverate of defense hawks whose outspoken support for the Iraq war and increased military spending have influenced decades of foreign policy. His opinion pieces run regularly in The Weekly Standard, the right-wing equivalent of the New Republic, where he takes a far sharper conservative line on President Obama’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan:
It is a peculiar kind of wisdom that can only see the problems and costs of today and cannot imagine the problems and costs of tomorrow. There is something appallingly cynical, however, in this president suggesting that the American fiscal crisis required overruling his military leadership and ordering a more rapid and therefore more dangerous drawdown in Afghanistan—this, after two and a half years of proposing spending on domestic programs that dwarfs the cost of the surge.
It is important, therefore, not to confuse Kagan’s rejection of the decline myth with an endorsement of the president’s policies. Kagan may not be as radical as John Bolton, Mitt Romney’s most prominent foreign policy adviser, but the general thrust of Romney’s critique of Obama’s “massive defense cuts” is Kagan through and through. In his New Republic essay, Kagan is clear in his view that the 21st century is America’s to lose. While he strays from the Republican party line in his confidence that the United States is not yet in decline, he seems to differ from John Hannah only in a matter of degree. By the end of the essay, Kagan is vehemently making the case for maintaining the current level of defense spending. As in the Weekly Standard article, he dismisses the need for “nation-building at home” as a dangerous canard, even going so far as to insist that the Pentagon’s budget is “cheap by historical standards.” Kagan leaves no question as to where he stands on the issue, writing that “If the decline of American military power produced an unraveling of the international economic order that American power has helped sustain . . . it is not too far-fetched to imagine that these costs would be far greater than the savings gained by cutting the defense and foreign aid budgets by $100 billion a year.” It is the same argument made in the Weekly Standard, except in more neutral language and in the passive voice.
The difference in tone provides a striking example of an author tailoring his message to a publication. Kagan is a master at dialing down the Rick Santorum level of militarism required by the Standard to the more cautious liberalism of the New Republic. Though TNR is more hawkish, especially concerning Israel, than Mother Jones or The Nation, it would hardly publish an Obama-bashing screed. It’s not that Kagan abandons his suspicions about Obama’s plan to downsize the military; he simply avoids the subject, tip-toeing around it by criticizing isolationism without pointing to the leader doing the isolating. Is Kagan a hypocrite? Journalists are always reminded to know their audience: A freelancer who writes an anti-Keystone manifesto for the Sierra Club newsletter will pen a more sedate climate change article for the Times. But Kagan is not a journalist, and he was not hired by the New Republic to report objectively. In the table of contents, “Not Fade Away” is set apart from the features and clearly labeled an essay. There may be nothing unethical about tempering his views to appeal to a more liberal audience, but a reader unfamiliar with Kagan’s background is left with an odd and incomplete picture of the man. The brief biography appended to the essay identifies him as a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post. Is it a coincidence that the magazine cherry-picked the most left-wing affiliations from Kagan’s resume? An unsuspecting reader would never guess that the author is a Max Boot-type neocon who founded a public policy think tank with William Kristol. The other publications Kagan writes for, from Commentary to Foreign Affairs, are far more in line with his philosophy. One wonders, in fact, what motivated the New Republic to offer him a soapbox. Would it be too cynical to write him off as the token conservative, a la David Brooks or Ross Douhat of the Times? Kagan’s protean nature seems disingenuous at best.
Ironically, it is President Obama, whom Kagan so roundly criticizes in other forums, who mounts the best defense of America’s sustained power. While Republicans accuse the president of “appeasement” and hawkish editorial pages (what has happened to the Post lately?) lament the “disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century,” Obama himself refutes the idea of a nation in decline. Unlike the utopian, nonexistent America to which Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney would return, Obama’s reality is more, well, realistic. In an interview with Time Magazine, he says his administration “recognizes the rise of countries like China and India and Brazil,” and that 2012 is “not the exact same moment as existed post–World War II.” He seems to have lifted a line straight from the Kagan playbook: “I think that there is a strong belief that we continue to be a superpower, unique perhaps in the annals of history, that is not only self-interested but is also thinking about how to create a set of international rules and norms that everyone can follow and that everyone can benefit from.” Of course, Kagan would probably denounce the president’s pivot toward Asia and drawdown in the Middle East as policies as inadequate to maintain superpower status.
Obama’s conversation with Time’s Fareed Zakaria touches on aspects of American decline that Kagan fails to address in his essay. “Not Fade Away” confronts conservative fears of American inadequacy, but it is unconcerned with the domestic issues that liberals would place at the heart of the dilemma. “Our whole foreign policy has to be anchored in economic strength here at home,” Obama says. His lengthy explanation is a less polished yet more candid version of his Jan. 25 State of the Union speech:
And if we are not strong, stable, growing, making stuff, training our workforce so that it’s the most skilled in the world, maintaining our lead in innovation, in basic research, in basic science, in the quality of our universities, in the transparency of our financial sector, if we don’t maintain the upward mobility and equality of opportunity that underwrites our political stability and makes us a beacon for the world, then our foreign policy leadership will diminish as well.
With the possible exception of Newt Gingrich, who believes the U.S. should be colonizing the Moon, conservatives rarely wring their hands over such parochial issues Wall Street transparency or crumbling infrastructure. They have faith, albeit unjustified, in the private sector to keep America successful — if only big government would just get out of the way. And Republicans would certainly never cite “upward mobility and equality of opportunity” as criteria for 21st century dominance. They equate equality of opportunity with equality of outcome and reason away the growing income gap as a liberal invention. Heritage Foundation scholars are fond of pointing out that America’s poor can’t really be poor if they have air conditioners and television sets. Does Kagan likewise discount income inequality and an outdated education system as threats to American strength? He certainly doesn’t deem them important enough to warrant discussion — though, to be fair, his essay and expertise is indeed in foreign policy. Yet there are risks to tunnel vision. Focusing on literal threats to national security can distract at from the more subtle threats that eat away at the country from within. Despite name-checking Thomas Friedman’s “That Used to Be Us,” Kagan never tackles the problems posed in Friedman’s book. Friedman and co-author Michael Mandelbaum maintain that strength abroad is inextricably tied to strength at home. In an adaptation of “That Used to Be Us” in Foreign Policy, they write that “the global governance the United States has provided, from which the rest of the world has derived enormous benefit, has rested on a vibrant economy and the national unity and confidence that have arisen from it.”
Like Kagan, Friedman and Mandelbaum profess qualified confidence in the future of America. If the correct policies are chosen — a big if, as all three admit — America can prosper. It’s worth asking, however, whether the foreign policy prescribed by Kagan and the domestic policies recommended by Friedman and Mandelbaum are entirely compatible. Kagan claims that America is not as “overstretched” as some, mostly on the left, assert when they argue for “nation building at home.” But Obama’s blueprint for downsizing the military is not the complete withdrawal from the world stage that Kagan implies. Even after the $500 billion in defense cuts outlined by Leon Panetta this week, the defense budget will only decrease by 1.6 percent by 2017, according to the Times. The AP reports that Pentagon is slated to buy 2,443 F-35s in upcoming years, at a cost of $385 billion. That’s more than the planned purchases of all other countries combined. The UK, a distant second, has ordered 138 planes. It is entirely possible that a continued full-court press abroad cannot be reconciled with an aggressive redevelopment program at home. To maintain what Friedman and Mandelbaum call “the best infrastructure, the most dynamic schools, the most open economy . . . and the best rules to promote risk-taking and prevent recklessness,” a degree of retrenchment may be unavoidable. The defense budget that Kagan believes is necessary to prevent decline and the policies recommended Friedman and Mandelbaum may be mutually exclusive. If the U.S. is to thrive, its international role may have to be more proscribed, its foreign-policy muscle exercised more strategically. Unless we are willing to change our definition of American strength — and shift to what Kagan would call a halfhearted commitment to dominance — we may lose that strength altogether.
It is curious, in a way, that President Obama is such a fan of Kagan’s. An armchair psychoanalyst might wonder if he is looking for reassurance that Version 2.0 of a faster, smarter military will turn out better than Donald Rumsfeld’s earlier experiment. Foreign policy, however, seems to be one front on which Obama is fairly confident. It’s hard to believe that he buys into the feeble Republican criticism, most of which is based on things (i.e. the “apology tour”) that never actually happened. The president’s real weakness lies in the areas that Kagan does not address: the sluggish economy, stagnant income growth, a dispirited Democratic base. Those are the things, despite all the bluster from Romney and Gingrich about foreign policy failures, on which the next election will hinge.
. . . So Well Read. . . 