Present at the Re-Creation

Above all, Kagan fails to mention his own contribution to the promotion of fin-de-siècle illusions. Writing in Present Dangers with the commentator William Kristol about a decade ago, he was among those who expressed great certainty that with the end of the Cold War, "the world had indeed been transformed" -- and transformed, at that, "in America's image." He and Kristol argued that with the disintegration of the Soviet empire, the United States had achieved a position of preeminence "unmatched since Rome dominated the Mediterranean world" -- an ascendancy, they added, that "undergirded what President George Bush rightly called 'a new world order.'" To sustain this uniquely advantageous position, U.S. policymakers simply needed to shed any lingering reluctance to exercise what Kagan and Kristol called "benevolent global hegemony."

The Kagan of old thus had little patience with realists, who endlessly cited John Quincy Adams' warning against the dangers of going "abroad in search of monsters to destroy." After all, Kagan (and Kristol) maintained, the United States possessed more than sufficient "capacity to contain or destroy many of the world's monsters, most of which [could] be found without much searching." Keen to put that muscle to work, Kagan encouraged in the 2000 book a broad strategy of regime change, "in Baghdad and Belgrade, in Pyongyang and Beijing, and wherever tyrannical governments acquire the military power to threaten their neighbors, our allies and the United States itself."

For Kagan, the marriage of American power with American values after the Cold War rendered geopolitics obsolete. What was imperative was keeping faith in the American mission. Given that "the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, 'self-evident' truths," as he and Kristol put it in a 1996 essay for Foreign Affairs, taking on monsters became a duty of sorts; shirking that duty, on the other hand, was like succumbing to "a policy of cowardice and dishonor." Mounting a final offensive against the world's last pockets of illiberalism was to "relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic" -- the heroic having been lost, according to Kagan and Kristol, when the Cold War era ended.

ROBERT THE REALIST

In The Return of History, Kagan offers a decidedly different view. Having once denounced realists as "professional pessimists," he now allows that "the realists had a clearer understanding of the unchanging nature of human beings." The collapse of communism, he now writes, produced "not a transformation but merely a pause in the endless competition of nations and peoples." In a statement to which Morgenthau and Niebuhr would surely have subscribed, he even concedes that "it is not so easy to escape history."

If the old Kagan expressed considerable optimism about the United States' capacity to spread freedom, democracy, and other principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the new Kagan encloses "universal values" in quotation marks, as if to distance himself from Thomas Jefferson's claims. Kagan dismisses outright the notion that the advance of democracy reflects "merely the unfolding of certain ineluctable processes of economic and political development." In fact, he acknowledges, "We really don't know whether such an evolutionary process, with predictable stages and known causes and effects, even exists." This is a bit like a senior Vatican official expressing skepticism about whether Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Cribbing from the realist tradition, Kagan outlines the contours of the great-power competition he expects will define the twenty-first century, with China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and, of course, the United States as key players. In the process, he engages in considerable oversimplification and more than a little hype. To justify Japan's making the cut, for example, Kagan claims that Tokyo today "displays great power ambitions" and even plays a "global military role." Yet Japan's military spending has actually declined in recent years; the country's top national security priority is not power projection but ballistic missile defense. As a participant in global military affairs, Japan lags well behind Canada.

Kagan views a rising China and a resurgent Russia as potential problems: both are authoritarian states whose ambitions could threaten international stability. In response, he calls for the formation of a "league of democracies," led by the United States and including European states, that would hold "regular meetings and consultations among democratic nations on the issues of the day." (Headline: "Mars and Venus Announce Plans to Marry!") That he now advocates creating a talking society shows how far Kagan has traveled since the days when he was touting the benefits of the United States' global hegemony. It is hard to see what this league would accomplish apart from providing sinecures for large numbers of second-tier government officials and civil servants. In all likelihood, it would be a new NATO without the clout or the cohesion of the old.

How does violent Islamic radicalism figure in this vision of the twenty-first century? For Kagan, the threat turns out not to be so great after all. Refreshingly devoid of inflammatory references to "Islamofascism" or World War IV, The Return of History does not foresee a new caliphate seizing control of the Muslim world and attempting to impose sharia on the West. Kagan sees the Islamist cause as doomed to fail. He describes political Islam as a "hopeless dream," believing (correctly, in my view) that "in the struggle between traditionalism and modernity, tradition cannot win." Thus, for Kagan, mounting an all-out global assault against terrorism no longer ranks as a top priority.