[Peace-discuss] Policy intellectuals

[C. G. Estabrook]

["...none of the professional flacks, functionaries and pocket intellectuals of the 
think-tank world will ever be denied a job because they helped start a 
devastating war; if anything, as with Kissinger and Brzezinski, the more 
catastrophic the outcome, the more grise the éminence...."]

   New Left Review 58, July-August 2009
   MAX GASNER
   THE RIVALS

It is rare for a magazine article to spawn an entire counter-genre of polemic 
pamphlet literature, but American policy intellectuals have not yet tired of 
announcing the end of The End of History. [1] If anything, the pursuit has 
gained in popularity as the signs of a post-unipolar twenty-first century have 
become more insistent. Thus Robert Kagan, whose The Return of History and 
the End of Dreams—its cover festooned with a self-consciously anachronistic 
Punch cartoon, complete with Russian bear and pig-tailed Chinaman—argues 
that ‘the world has become normal again’. The fall of the Soviet Union had 
briefly held out the utopian vision of a world without enemies, in which all 
significant conflict over grand strategy and ideology had come to an end. 
Globalizing commerce, multilateral institution-building and seamless 
communications technology were to have eroded the foundations of the 
nation-state and so the stakes of international competition. European 
bureaucrats dreamed that Russian acquiescence to capital account liberalization 
and NATO expansion would melt the Eastern frontiers away and forever banish 
the spectre of land war in Germany. Americans saw a chance to assume a 
kinder, gentler leadership: the US as global sheriff, enforcing the definitive 
replacement of war by isolated police actions in backwards provinces.

Twenty years on, the ‘tantalizing glimpse’ of a world beyond conflict has 
vanished and the ‘normal tendency’ of great powers to emerge has reasserted 
itself. Driven by atavistic but legitimate passions—fear for their supply lines, 
paternalist or imperial concern for their hinterlands, desire for recognition or 
prestige—the rising powers, here Russia, China, Japan, India and Iran, are 
following in the footsteps of Venice and Persia, the ancient Egyptians and the 
Franks. They are making their presence felt in ways that had grown unfamiliar 
even during the Cold War, a long, aberrant interlude of bipolarity in 
international affairs. We face instead a ‘new nineteenth century’ of great-power 
rivalry and conflict, in which autocracies again challenge the pre-eminence of 
democratic government, and competing claims to regional spheres of influence 
stand in the way of the construction of a single, liberal-interventionist 
international order. In the face of this only half-comprehended threat, Kagan 
calls for a ‘Concert of Democracies’: as only their combined efforts can 
preserve the hard-won fruit of history, which never comes to an end.

A signatory of the notorious 1998 Project for the New American Century letter 
that called on President Clinton to pursue a unilateral policy of regime change 
in Iraq, and best known for his 2003 Paradise and Power, a short and 
provocative essay on European and American self-perceptions, Kagan is no 
outsider to Washington policy circles. Born in 1958, his degrees are from Yale, 
the Kennedy School and American University in DC. After cutting his teeth as 
an advisor to Jack Kemp and a speechwriter for George Schultz, he worked in 
the second Reagan administration at the State Department’s Latin American 
desk. Kagan is on the roster of the Council on Foreign Relations and the 
Carnegie Endowment, and writes regular columns for the Washington Post, 
Commentary, the New Republic and, with Bill Kristol, for the Weekly Standard. 
His wife was the US permanent representative to NATO from 2005–08, their 
sojourn in Brussels doubtless the source of the cosmopolitan touches with 
which Kagan occasionally tempers his brisk Atlanticism—‘as an American living 
in Europe’, etc. His father, Donald, is a conservative historian at Yale and 
translator of Thucydides; his brother, Frederick (Yale, and then Yale), is a 
resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of its 
refutation of the Iraq Study Group’s report.

But there are grounds for taking Kagan more seriously than many of his 
Beltway peers. Besides displaying a capacity for forthrightness in his columns 
and popular writing, he is the author of two scholarly works setting out a 
subtle and equivocal vision of foreign relations—one on US intervention in 
Nicaragua, the other on American foreign policy since the birth of the Republic. 
The first, 1996’s A Twilight Struggle, is a scrupulously documented, 800-page 
history based on primary sources and interviews with key figures on all sides of 
the conflict. Of course Kagan does not repudiate his work for Reagan; but he is 
lucid and sobering about the unenviable consequences for both parties when 
US military interference becomes a routinized fact of domestic political life in a 
small country. And although he rejects the ‘realist’ interpretation of foreign 
policy decisions, he is candid about the ways in which the US’s ideological aims 
in Latin America were always subject to the shifting tides of political capital and 
congressional advantage—not just under Reagan and Carter, but also Taft, 
Wilson and Roosevelt.

In Paradise and Power, written during the altercations over the 2003 invasion of 
Iraq, Kagan turned to tackle European and American self-perceptions. While 
Europe had embarked on the postmodern path towards ‘a self-contained world 
of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation . . . a post-
historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity’, the US remained ‘mired in 
history’, and in a power politics increasingly repugnant to European 
sensibilities. But both were suffering from a mutual misunderstanding about 
the relation of democratic government to power. On the one hand, Europe 
flatters itself that its decision to abjure war is fully conscious and enlightened, 
rather than the result of its increasing inability to fight. On the other, 
Americans flatter themselves that they are a pacific people, and that the wars 
they fight are forced on them by circumstance. This double delusion falsifies 
Americans’ and Europeans’ shared ends—and sharply unequal means. For the 
strong naturally rely on strength to achieve their aims; the weak naturally 
pursue the strategies of weakness. If the EU were a military force on a world 
scale, capable of projecting power across two oceans, the compass of its 
external policy would necessarily expand; it too would become more assertive 
about the shape of the world in which it is embedded. Yet for Kagan, ‘the 
caricatures do capture an essential truth’: after centuries of brutality and 
violence, Europe has broken out into something like the Kantian realm of 
perpetual peace—with the Second World War figuring as Europe’s war to end 
war, and Schuman and Monnet as the unlikely agents of the final state of 
Kant’s essay on world history ‘which, like a civil commonwealth, can maintain 
itself automatically’. It is the burden of Paradise and Power to raise the stakes 
of force in maintaining an international order that it is much more comfortable 
to consider as acting ‘automatically’: Europeans revile the sometimes messy 
protection afforded by their less lucky but more powerful ally only at the risk of 
their heretofore uniquely privileged way of life.

In 2006, Kagan produced the first instalment of a projected two-volume history 
of America’s position in the world system. Dangerous Nation, which runs from 
1600 up to the Spanish–American War of 1898, is as unflattering to the 
prejudices of mainstream American conservatism as its title suggests. It is an 
admirably frontal assault on many of the sacred cows of American 
historiography. Instead of denying or evading the harsh criticisms of the anti-
imperialist, and occasionally socialist, tradition running from Charles Beard and 
William Appleman Williams through to Howard Zinn, Kagan rather proudly 
admits the charges. The Republic’s imperial ambitions date to its very 
beginnings, and Americans deceive themselves when they claim to be a 
peaceable people who have, unfortunately, occasionally found the role of 
apostles of freedom to the world thrust upon them. He has no time for the 
hoary old conservative defences: for instance, the timeless wisdom of 
Washington’s famous farewell address, with its admonitions on ‘our true policy 
to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world’, is 
deftly resituated within the domestic political disputes of the time. No one 
reading those lines in 1796, Kagan argues, could have failed to understand that 
they were aimed against Republican Francophiles and intended to sway opinion 
towards the Federalists in the coming election. From this dismaying beginning 
he then dwells on such topics as Jefferson’s private war on the Barbary Coast, 
the place of Polk’s invasion of Mexico in the ambitions of Southern slaveholders 
and the American occupation of the Philippines. The Founding Fathers are 
portrayed as wealthy landowners driven as much by concern for their real-
estate holdings as by their republican beliefs.

It is a thought-provoking exercise in demystification which aims to uncover the 
role of myth-making in enabling and conditioning the nation’s reach and 
policy. The argument about democratic self-awareness, or the lack thereof, 
sketched in Paradise and Power is here put to a more stringent test. 
Expansionism, Kagan wants to say, is for a rising nation—the young United 
States as much as the newly independent and self-assertive China—an 
essentially avowable and legitimate aim; for America to deny its expansionist 
tendencies can only make it more difficult to understand the history and future 
of its presence in the world. And there is something especially expansionist 
about the American flavour of political liberalism: a society that sees itself as 
the ‘city on a hill’ will naturally pursue a foreign policy that is expressive of a 
certain vision of the world remade.

Kagan has no truck with the notion that American policy was ‘hijacked’ by a 
neo-con cabal after September 11. There is nothing either new or conservative 
about Americans making war for ideological reasons: the footnotes to The 
Return of History enumerate fifty years of bipartisan adventures in aerial 
bombardment, invasion and regime change. From Eisenhower’s ‘CIA-inspired 
coups in Iran and Guatemala’ to Kennedy’s ‘conniving’ against Ngo Dinh Diem 
in Vietnam and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, from Nixon’s 
‘meddling’ in Chile to Carter’s in Nicaragua—‘every American administration in 
the last half century has attempted to engineer changes of regime throughout 
the world’. In the process, the US has flouted the United Nations, its allies and 
international law whenever these became obstacles to American objectives:

To pick just a few recent examples: the Reagan administration sought no 
international authorization for its covert wars in Nicaragua, Cambodia, 
Afghanistan and Angola, and it sought neither United Nations nor OAS support 
for the invasion of Grenada. The administration of the first President Bush 
invaded Panama without UN authorization and would have gone to war with 
Iraq without UN authorization if Russia had vetoed it. The Clinton 
administration intervened in Haiti without UN authorization, bombed Iraq over 
the objection of United Nations Security Council permanent members, and went 
to war in Kosovo without UN authorization.

Nor does Kagan assign any special importance to the war on terror, rather 
dismissing Al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism as phenomena with no 
future. The new nineteenth century, like the last, is a world of states, though 
Kagan’s whirlwind tour of the rising powers is surprisingly fleshless. Japan is 
given cursory treatment, its increasing defence budgets and resurgent 
nationalistic impulses more evidence of a ‘return to normalcy’. India, ‘a prime 
example of success’ in a globalizing world, is driven by belief in its ‘impending 
greatness on the world stage’. Iran is ‘a proud and ancient civilization’ 
pursuing nuclear-weapons status as ‘a question of honour’, and to establish 
itself as a great power in the region.

It is Russia and China that engage Kagan’s attention most fully. For Russia is 
‘where history has most dramatically returned’—having most dramatically 
ended there two decades ago. The country’s vast reserves of oil, gas and coal 
give it strategic leverage over European governments, which has helped 
embolden the Kremlin to act in its ‘near abroad’ without fear of retaliation from 
the West even as high energy prices served to fund both its growing military 
and its reviving confidence. Russian discontent with second-rate status has 
driven the resurgence of interest in Stalin, the Orthodox Church and the old 
empire; the openings and liberalizations of the 1990s are now increasingly 
resented, seen as unwelcome concessions forced on the nation in a time of 
weakness. Putin’s government, which Kagan calls ‘czarist’, has chosen to follow 
a model of ‘sovereign democracy’, and indeed has provided so well for its 
people that it has enjoyed the highest levels of popular support for any Russian 
government since the fall of the Soviet Union.

This dissatisfied former great power presents the European Union with the old 
‘Eastern problem’ it thought had been dispelled by German reunification and 
Russian economic liberalization—and which erupted last August in South 
Ossetia. Kagan was thrilled, writing in the Washington Post that the Russian 
invasion of a sovereign, democratic nation on its borders marked ‘a turning 
point no less significant’ than the fall of the Berlin Wall; the diffidence of the 
European Union’s response was taken as a sign that Europe is not ready to 
‘bring a knife to a knife fight’ (were German jets supposed to scramble to 
defend Tbilisi?). But victory over the 10,000-strong Georgian army does not a 
military power make. Russia has the third-largest defence budget in the world 
in much the same sense that Iraq, on the eve of the US invasion, had the fifth-
largest army. Even if it were properly maintained, Moscow’s arsenal—not to 
mention its top-heavy command and control structure, ultimately more 
important—belongs to a previous age; among Russia’s military 
accomplishments in Georgia was its first proof-of-concept of the planned 
move to an all-volunteer army (and away from a system in which young 
conscripts are routinely beaten to death by their fellow soldiers). In any case, 
the war in Georgia—like that in Chechnya, and the more dramatic 
proclamations of Russian nationalism—was surely meant first for domestic 
consumption, a satisfying demonstration of national strength, rather than as 
groundwork for a multipolar future.

And though Kagan is not much for the economic interpretation of Russia’s 
recent history, it is hard to see how else to understand its shifting fortunes on 
the world stage. The fall of the Soviet Union precipitated the biggest economic 
catastrophe of the twentieth century: Greater Russian nationalism could not pay 
salaries in the Yeltsin years; and were it not for that period—and the dramatic 
banking collapse of 1998—Putin’s achievements would not appear so 
significant, either domestically or abroad. Kagan’s book was published before 
the crash of September 2008, when a number of more or less unbiased eyes—
not least estate agents in Mayfair—might well have assessed Russian power 
more favourably. But since then, the RTS and MICEX have crashed, energy 
prices have sunk below the break-even levels built into national budget 
planning, and European banks have demanded billions of dollars of collateral 
on their loans to the oligarchs. The Russian government has once again 
intervened to support the banking system, while capital has flown out of the 
rouble. Gazprom no longer looks like much of a force in German foreign policy. 
‘Comprehensive national power’ cannot be built on the shaky foundations of oil 
wealth, kleptocracy and casino capitalism. There are fewer people in Russia 
than in Uttar Pradesh; the country’s economic gains over the past decade were 
massively concentrated in the hands of a small, powerful stratum at the top, 
and seemed impressive above all compared to the catastrophic 1990s. With 
wages once again in arrears and Europe’s most virulent xenophobia loose on 
the streets, it faces severe internal problems.

The case is harder to make for China, whose leaders have studiously avoided 
the appearance of belligerence during the country’s precipitous economic rise. 
There are exceptions to the general tone of conciliation:Beijing can still take 
umbrage over Taiwan, despite recent signs of eased relations, and more so 
over Tibet, where it has a freer hand. But China’s concessions look more 
significant in every respect. Despite US hostility to Chinese attempts to build 
stakes in American companies such as Unocal and 3Com, its sovereign 
investment funds have remained placid buyers of US Treasuries, agency bonds 
and bank debt through the unfolding economic crisis. Indeed, the PRC 
leadership has been hesitant to build any but passive leverage out of their 
massive trade surpluses, while hiring Western investment bankers as part of 
their bid to construct regulatory, financial and legal structures meeting 
international standards and sufficient to the needs of foreign direct investment. 
The hands-off policy towards Hong Kong, the eagerness to cooperate as a full 
member of Washington Consensus institutions, even the Olympic pageant—
choreographed by Zhang Yimou to the highest standards of global spectacle, 
with nary a hint that the East is or ever was Red—all tend to counter the notion 
of a Chinese leadership inclined to use force to pursue its ascendancy.

That ascendancy there will be there is no doubt; and Kagan is reduced to 
gestures at a kind of aesthetic of the sublime to show what is baleful about the 
prospect. The usual maunderings over the Middle Kingdom as the centre of its 
own universe, ‘the only advanced civilization in a world of barbarians’, make 
their appearance, though he does not in turn preface his analysis of Chinese 
attitudes towards America with the observation that, for Mandarin speakers, it 
is the Beautiful Kingdom. Kagan deploys the Qin Dynasty slogan fuguo 
qiangbing—‘wealthy nation, strong army’—to illustrate the longstanding, 
indeed imperial, roots of China’s military build-up. But as long as the latter is 
limited to buying more hardware from the Russians, we are probably justified in 
remaining sceptical about its consequences. Even if the Chinese government is 
engaged in what must be the largest build-out of secondary education ever 
attempted in human history, a military-industrial complex such as that which 
assures US military supremacy is the work of decades: a Lockheed or a Boeing 
cannot be summoned out of thin air in a country without even a civilian 
aerospace industry to speak of.

Some of Kagan’s specific observations are overblown. His assertion that the 
autocracies’ wealth allows them to ‘keep a grip on internet traffic’ ignores the 
richness of Chinese new media. Behind the Great Firewall lies what appears to 
be nothing so much as the birth of a public sphere—an unpredictable, active, 
diverse and critical world beyond the control of any human authorities yet 
devised. (When the censors’ algorithms proved too good at picking out 
objectionable strings of text—a harder task in a language so given to 
homophony and visual punning—enterprising forum users started posting texts 
that looked like gibberish to the robots but which were readable in columns, 
like the classical language, by the human eye.) Netizens can prove an unstable 
factor in the calculations of the bureaucracy even when they are being properly 
nationalistic, as evidenced by the anti-Carrefour movement and boycotts of 
French products that sprang up almost overnight in the spring of 2008. Beijing 
seems recently to have realized that news blackouts are doomed to fall before 
the power of the internet: Xinhua now aims to report contentious news as 
quickly as possible, in order to start spinning it before anyone else. Apparent 
openness, the Chinese authorities are beginning to understand, is often the 
surest technique of control—no news to Western societies of the spectacle.

Nor is China immune from economic shock. The degree to which its economy 
is dependent on exports remains an open question—and it is certain that in the 
long run Chinese capital can be repurposed to produce for domestic 
consumption. But in the short run, export-oriented industries directly employ 
tens of millions of workers in the coastal cities. Even a marginal shock to 
growth could have major consequences. Civil unrest—what the authorities call 
‘mass incidents’—is on the rise, with every day bringing new scenes of workers 
besieging abandoned factories or CCP offices to claim wages owed them by 
enterprises forced into bankruptcy. Against this backdrop, it is easy to see why 
Beijing is forced by circumstances into pursuing a more sober and responsible 
course than Russia’s siloviki, and why tools for managing the surplus 
population—the household registration system, ‘black jails’ for unregularized 
migrant workers, semi-legal ‘urban management’ forces that systematically 
harass the marginal populations of big cities—are key to maintaining order in 
China.

These particularities are lost in Kagan’s account, which is a shame; for it is 
refreshing to see an American policy intellectual write with such approval of 
other countries’ national sentiments, and of their peoples’ legitimate desire for 
prestige and recognition. In this sense, The Return of History represents a 
welcome move to reinstate the connection between Innen- and Außenpolitik, 
dismissed by International Relations realist orthodoxy, as an explanatory crux 
of nations’ behaviour. Ultimately, however, Kagan seems only to be replacing a 
simplistic realism with an equally vacuous romanticism: the basis for a state’s 
self-assertion is seen as completely generic, ungrounded in economic 
contradictions or internal politics, unconditioned by social divisions. In his 
rendering, the foreign policies pursued by governments are expressive of the 
form of their domestic polities, which come in two kinds: democracies and 
autocracies. Kagan contends that the Chinese and Russian leaderships are the 
prime examples of the latter. They share an orientation to an alternative 
modality of rule, coherent enough to constitute a serious challenge to that of 
liberal-capitalist democracy. Their legitimacy rests on ‘the implementation of 
the popular will’, striking the tacit bargain that their citizens will refrain from 
political protest so long as the government is able to deliver prosperity and 
stability. In Kagan’s view, these are not merely pragmatic compromises: the 
leaders of Russia and China ‘are not just autocrats; they believe in autocracy’—
in other words, that continued economic growth, protection from foreign 
domination and domestic tranquillity all require a strong hand on the tiller.

The notion of an authoritarian, ‘Confucian’ capitalism as a challenge to the 
Western model had been canvassed in the mid-1990s discussion on the ‘Asian 
values’ of Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad. In fact, with their firmly 
ensconced ruling castes, limited franchises and stern official morality, the new 
Asian Tigers had not a little in common with Victorian Britain, as observers 
pointed out. In a wider historical compass, successful catch-up economies 
governed by placid parliamentarism have been the exception. Meiji Japan, the 
Prussian Zollverein or the Second Empire provide the general model, not 
Nehru’s electoral technocracy. Kagan touches on the question of whether 
capitalism leads ‘naturally’ to democratic government, or whether indeed there 
is an active contradiction between the two, working to break up or hollow out 
any lasting settlement between them. But to fully grasp the issue would require 
him to acknowledge the tension between democratization—which in any 
substantive sense would aim at popular determination of macroeconomic and 
geo-strategic goals—and the ‘diminished sovereignty’ accepted by the limited 
partners to the Atlantic order of perpetual peace.

The circle is squared by Kagan’s rather weak criteria for democratic 
government. The formal political freedoms of assembly and publicity represent 
real advances, of course, as does the possibility of the electoral rejection of 
sitting governments. But much in Kagan’s description of ‘autocracy’ could be 
applied to any contemporary capitalist nation. Public pieties aside, on the level 
of governmental practice the substantive democracy envisioned by most 
Western policymakers amounts to little more than an opportunity for ‘input’ by 
the ‘consumers’ or end-users of government services and a soothing 
‘responsiveness’ to any outbursts of public anger. Official Chinese ideology—
Deng Xiaoping theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific Development 
Concept—effectively reproduces the tacit assumptions underlying the 
governments in a majority of advanced capitalist countries. Some of the most 
brutal strategies adopted by Kagan’s autocracies—the Russian war on 
‘terrorism’ in Chechnya, Chinese repression in Xinjiang—are modelled directly 
on the example of his democracies. As for the liberal side of things, recent 
events have banished any illusion that regimes supposedly committed to free 
markets would not resort to dirigisme at the first sign of economic danger.

Kagan is not in fact willing to claim that the ideological legitimacy of 
contemporary autocracies is on par with that of the nineteenth century’s 
monarchies. As Fukuyama has pointed out, the evolutions of parliamentary and 
plebiscitary ritual retain enough prestige to be aped by many of the most 
repressive dictatorships on the planet. The true danger for the democracies lies 
not in the absolute appeal of the alternative but in their own delusions and 
internal divisions: Europe affecting to be above the bloody necessities that 
make the world of cellphones and EasyJet possible; America claiming that each 
war is forced upon it, to uphold the greater good and against its non-
interventionist nature. Thus confused and disarrayed, Kagan argues, the 
democracies may find themselves ceding ground to Moscow and Beijing, 
without ever entering into open conflict with them. This is the point at which 
Immanuel Kant and Zhang Yimou, the philosopher of liberal cosmopolitanism 
and the impresario of imperial fantasy, finally coincide: without a hegemonic 
guarantor, no peace. Kagan’s warning of a ‘new nineteenth century’ suggests 
that the persistence of such a guarantee is at best unstable. The ‘blessed 
miracle’ of European integration and disarmament would then be a brief 
utopian interlude in the endless conflict of peoples. But if a twenty-first 
century Concert of Democracies could take the place of the nineteenth-century 
Congress of Vienna, a kind of benevolent katechon might be instituted under 
which the idea of civil order actually realized in the EU (and that has ultimately 
guided the main line of American policy thought since Wilson) would enable 
the West to ride out the shocks of the inevitable—and entirely necessary—
ascent of the Asian powers to their rightful status in the world.

The establishment reaction to The Return of History has fastened onto the 
perceived contradiction between Kagan’s realism about great-power rivalry and 
his commitment to a neo-idealist agenda of democracy-promotion. McCain’s 
call for a League of Democracies and his proposal to exclude Russia from the 
G8 seemingly exemplified the danger of this approach, which risks 
antagonizing the excluded powers, who would be better coaxed into liberal 
ways through a gradual integration into the world market and the institutions 
of global governance. The objection simply elides the larger stakes of Kagan’s 
study—the place of force in a peaceful world order, and the place of myth in 
the use of force—wagering, in essence, that consumer goods will do the trick.

Kagan’s are the right questions, but asked for the wrong reasons. For his vision 
rests on a fatally ahistorical account of history: a nineteenth century without 
Peterloo or the Paris Commune. The liberal intelligentsia of the 1790s shared 
with that of the 1990s a profound faith in commerce as the gentle civilizer of 
nations. Kant may indeed have been too rigorous not to recognize the martial 
conditions of world trade; but what he could not see—and none of his 
contemporaries saw, even Adam Smith, caught up in comparisons between the 
‘opulence’ of maritime Britain and imperial Rome—was capitalism. If today we 
face a new nineteenth century, it is because that epoch too was a period of 
unprecedented technological change, in which both the extent and the 
intensity of the capitalist market expanded geometrically; a period of social 
unrest driven by the destruction of traditional ways of life, the constitution of a 
massive new class of workers, its periodic immiseration and its recurrent 
demands for a reforging of the social settlement. ‘Democracy’ was indeed the 
bugbear of Europe’s autocratic regimes—but it was substantive, not procedural. 
And it was not the absence of a sovereign power, but the inner contradictions 
of unemployment and inequality that drove their conflicts. From this 
standpoint, Kagan’s neglect of the details of Russian, Chinese and Indian social 
formations takes on a new significance: it means his account is doomed to 
miss the ways in which the modalities of government change to accommodate 
the demands of epochal shifts in economic organization, and the ways in which 
those changes in the form of the state rebound on the inter-state order.

Such deficiencies are all the more disappointing because, to judge by Kagan’s 
previous work, we might have expected more. But he is of course far from 
alone in neglecting the specificities and deeper dynamics of the states he 
discusses. The general run of geo-strategic literature emanating from the US 
has a strangely disembodied quality, at once oversimplified and over-
intellectualized. It is a genre that almost prides itself on its impunity, delighting 
in such phrases as ‘boots on the ground’ while remaining disconnected from 
operational realities, and seemingly little concerned with the domestic agenda 
of the country whose power it is busy projecting to the far corners of the world. 
It is the product of a stratum distinguished above all by its unaccountability: 
none of the professional flacks, functionaries and pocket intellectuals of the 
think-tank world will ever be denied a job because they helped start a 
devastating war; if anything, as with Kissinger and Brzezinski, the more 
catastrophic the outcome, the more grise the éminence. The threat this 
disjuncture between the formulation of policy and its upshot poses to the 
rational measurement of means to ends, and to the effective deployment of 
American power, should arguably be of just as much concern to the US elite as 
any ‘association of autocrats’. But in this regard, Kagan’s omissions are 
symptomatic of a broader blindness—not to the resurfacing of nineteenth-
century great-power relations, but to the particularities of the present.



[1] Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Atlantic Books: 
London 2008, £12.99, hardback, 116 pp, 978 1 84354 811 9.

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