Present at the Re-Creation

If a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, as Irving Kristol once said, what is a neoconservative who gets mugged yet again? A realist.

So, at least, one might conclude from reading Robert Kagan's The Return of History and the End of Dreams. Over the past two decades, Kagan has emerged as the neoconservative movement's chief foreign policy theorist. The author of numerous opinion pieces and a signatory of manifestoes of the neoconservative organization the Project for the New American Century, he has also written serious books. Notable among them is the 2006 Dangerous Nation, the first volume of an ambitious two-part project that recasts the entire history of American statecraft as an affirmation of neoconservative ideals and aspirations. Yet in this latest rumination on international politics, Kagan largely eschews neoconservative theology and instead sounds themes reminiscent of the great American realists Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. Kagan once professed to believe that "there is something about realism that runs directly counter to the fundamental principles of American society." But now he deploys realist principles to explain the world.

Or at least most of the world. Amid the great outpouring of recent books on U.S. foreign policy, The Return of History stands out in one particular respect: it all but ignores the ongoing debacle that is the war in Iraq, a war that neoconservatives such as Kagan so passionately supported in 2003. To be fair, neoconservatives did not concoct the war; it was George W. Bush who chose to invade Iraq, and the chief responsibility for all that has ensued since is his. Yet Kagan was among those lobbying for the war, chiding as "nervous nellies" those people who had the temerity to suggest that overthrowing Saddam Hussein might prove unwise. Now, instead of reflecting, forthrightly and with humility, on all that has gone awry since March 2003, the chief foreign policy theorist of the neoconservative movement has chosen to put the war in his rearview mirror. While American soldiers remain stuck in Iraq, Kagan is moving on to other things.

DREAMERS

Kagan moves on by looking into the past, primarily concerning himself with what came before Iraq. And he primarily concerns himself with ideas, taking his cue from Kristol, the founding father of neoconservatism, who once observed, "What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived." During the decade between the end of the Cold War and the attacks of September 11, 2001, commentators eager to chart the future course of U.S. foreign policy produced a plethora of such ideas -- or "dreams," according to the title of Kagan's book -- including the defective notion that the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry heralded a fundamental change in the international order.

But "what reason was there to believe," Kagan asks with evident exasperation, "that after 1989 humankind was suddenly on the cusp of a brand-new order?" According to Kagan, no such thing was ever in the cards. "People and their leaders longed for 'a world transformed,'" he writes, derisively quoting the title of George H. W. Bush's 1998 memoir. "But that was a mirage. The world has not been transformed." Instead, the iron laws of history and politics have remained intact, and "struggles for status and influence in the world have returned as central features of the international scene." Competition among great powers will define the twenty-first century, Kagan asserts, "producing alliances and counteralliances, and the elaborate dances and shifting partnerships, that a nineteenth-century diplomat would recognize instantly." In other words, geopolitics is back.

Kagan does not identify the silly people who deluded themselves and misled everyone else with visions of a world transformed. He contents himself with dismissive allusions to nameless figures who peddled naive illusions of "nation-states growing together or disappearing [a jab at Jessica Tuchman Mathews?], ideological conflicts melting away [a kick to Francis Fukuyama?], cultures intermingling [remember those ubiquitous Benetton ads?], and increasingly free commerce and communications [Bill Clinton borrowing from Thomas Friedman?]."

Kagan's catalog of the ideas that surfaced during the heady days after the Soviet Union's fall is nothing if not selective. To be sure, the big ideas that wowed members of the American policy elite in the 1990s look the worse for wear today. But blaming the likes of Mathews, Fukuyama, and Friedman for the United States' present predicament is like blaming Harriet Beecher Stowe for the American Civil War; it lets the real culprits off the hook. The ideas that have really mattered are those that influenced the National Security Strategy of 2002 and Bush's second inaugural address, which articulated Bush's "freedom agenda" and his doctrine of preventive war, the intellectual bases not only for the invasion of Iraq but also for the global war on terrorism. Of those ideas, which are covered with the neoconservatives' fingerprints, Kagan says strangely little.