# Posted 6:31 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Two weeks ago, I announced that OxBlog would begin to post in-depth commentaries on landmark articles from the past decade. I had hoped to post the first commentary the day after making the announcement, but things got in the way. Now, however, I am in a position to make good on my word. So, without further ado, here is the first installment of Robert Kagan's "The Case for Global Activism", published in the September 1994 issue of Commentary magazine.

FUTURE historians will record--perhaps in astonishment--that the demise of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of American worldwide engagement and armed intervention unprecedented in scope and frequency. Despite a widespread conviction that, in a post-cold-war world, the American role would diminish, in a brief four years the United States has: launched a massive counteroffensive against the world's fourth largest army in the Middle East; invaded, occupied, and supervised elections in a Latin American country; intervened with force to provide food to starving peoples in Africa; and conducted punitive bombing raids in the Balkans.

Perhaps even more surprising than the fact of American intervention in the post-Cold War era was the purpose of it: defending international law while promoting democracy and human rights. Lord Acton once observed that whereas power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. If so, how can one explain the fact that once the United States triumphed over the Soviet Union and became the dominant force in world affairs it increased its commitment to ethical action abroad?

Nor is this all. The United States has sent troops on another humanitarian mission in Africa, and volunteered troops to serve as peacekeeping forces in the Middle East and in the former Yugoslavia. It has worked in the UN Security Council to enact punitive sanctions against at least a half-dozen international scofflaws. It has seriously considered extending military protection to several important nations of Eastern Europe that have never before been part of an alliance with the United States. And it has interceded in disputes among the former republics of the Soviet Union.

How is this increased activity to be explained? The answer is rather easily found in the new relations of power in the post-cold-war world. The fall of the Soviet Union removed restraints on foreign leaders unhappy with the order imposed by the cold war and unleashed new struggles for power in areas hitherto under the former superpower's thumb. Some would-be challengers of the old order were encouraged by the belief that the United States would not step in. The United States, however, itself freed from the restraints of the cold war, began to fill the gap left by the absence of Soviet global power and continued a historical tradition of using its influence to promote a world order consistent with its material needs and philosophical predilections.

Kagan is being somewhat evasive here. The real question is to what degree one can expect America to prioritize its material needs over its philosophical predilections as it often did during the Cold War. This evasiveness, however, points to an important development in Kagan’s thought that would become apparent over time: his belief that nations will always seek to maximize their own influence while reducing that of others. Whether the expansion of such influences is a force for good or evil depends on the character of any given nation.

But if the course America has followed has been natural enough, to many American strategists, policy-makers, and politicians it seems also to have been unexpected--and unwelcome. Today, a scant two years after the intervention in Somalia, three years after the Gulf war, and four years since the invasion of Panama, foreign-policy theorists continue to write of the need for a 'global retrenchment" of American power. Before and after each venture abroad, they have argued that such high levels of American engagement cannot be sustained, politically or economically, and that a failure to be more selective in the application of American power will either bankrupt the country or drive the American public further toward the isolationism into which, they warn, it is already beginning to slip.

Looking back from the present, Kagan’s assertion that most experts opposed an activist American foreign policy strikes one as the hysterical warning of a superhawk. Even before September 11th galvanized popular support for an activist foreign policy, there was a definite consensus among the experts that America had consolidated its position as the “lone superpower” in a “unipolar” world. Yet in fact, Kagan’s characterization of expert opinion circa 1994 is fully accurate. Despite the almost self-evident dominance of the United States in material and ideological terms, scholars insisted that this was nothing more than a “unipolar moment”. Kagan’s recognition of American strength at such an early date has become the foundation on which reputation as an leading thinker rests.

This political judgment has found intellectual buttressing in the so-called "realist" approach to foreign policy, which asserts that the United States should limit itself to defending its "core" national interests and abandon costly and unpopular efforts to solve the many problems on the "periphery." During the cold war, realists fought against efforts by Presidents from Truman to Kennedy to Reagan to equate American interests with the advancement of a democratic world order. In the post-cold-war era, they have gained new prominence by again recommending a retreat from such ambitions and the definition of a far more limited set of foreign-policy goals.

Kagan’s characterization of realist prescriptions for American foreign policy is essentially fair. Nonetheless, one should note that his efforts to establish Truman, Kennedy and Reagan as representatives of a common idealist approach to foreign affairs is both a conscious choice as well as a misleading one. Its conscious purpose is to link the controversial Reagan to two other presidents whose legacies have been embraced by both Democrats and Republicans. In short, it is an effort to erase the memory of the Iran-Contra scandal and Reagan’s terrible record on human rights. From the perspective of the historian, the selection of Truman, Kennedy and Reagan as paradigmatic idealists is misleading because it neglects the intense idealism of Lyndon Johnson. The motive behind this selection is clear: Kagan wants to dissociate idealism from Johnson’s failure in Vietnam as well as avoiding the unpleasant fact that within the community of experts, only self-professed “realists” opposed American policy in Vietnam before 1967-68.

Yet the realist view remains inadequate, both as a description, precisely, of reality--of the way the world really works--and as a recommendation for defending America's interests, either on the "periphery" or at the "core." When Americans have exercised their power in pursuit of a broad definition of interests--in pursuit, that is, of a more decent world order--they have succeeded in defending their "vital" interests as well. When they have sought to evade the dangers of global involvement, they have found themselves unexpectedly in a fight for national survival.

Again, this borders on the polemical. Kagan’s words were prescient in that they anticipated the resurrection of Truman’s reputation as the architect of American victory in the Cold War thanks mostly to John Gaddis’ 1997 work, We Now Know. Nonetheless, realists such as Eisenhower and Nixon promoted the national interest more effectively than idealists such as Johnson or Carter.

THROUGHOUT this century, the United States has faced the problem of its expanding power--and has responded with ambivalence. Americans are perhaps more suspicious of power than most people on earth, but just like others they have nonetheless sought it, guarded it, and enjoyed its benefits. As products of a modern, nonmartial republic, Americans have always tended to cherish the lives of their young more than the glories to be won on the battlefield; yet they have sacrificed their young for the sake of honor, interest, and principle as frequently as any nation in the world over the past 200 years. Again, as the products of a revolution against an imperial master, Americans have always abhorred imperialism; yet where their power was preponderant, they have assumed hegemony and have been unwilling to relinquish it.

Kagan accurately describes America’s strange habit of first approaching power with suspicion, then embracing it unself-consciously. For Kagan, this habit constitutes evidence on behalf of his more general assertion that no nation can resist the temptation of exercising power. Also note the use of the word ‘hegemony’ with no apparent negative connotations.

The common view of American foreign policy as endlessly vacillating between isolationism and interventionism is wrong: Americans in this century have never ceased expanding their sphere of interests across the globe, but they have tried to evade the responsibility of defending those interests, until they had no choice but to fight a war for which they were unprepared. The American conception of interest, moreover, has always gone beyond narrow security concerns to include the promotion of a world order consistent with American economic, political, and ideological aspirations.

Although Kagan doesn’t mention it, the “common view of American foreign policy as endlessly vacillating” is a product of realist principles applied to American diplomatic history. Whereas such interpretations were dominant in the first decades after the Cold War, they have begun to suffer a serious loss of legitimacy. This changing interpretation has not had much impact yet on either political scientists or Washington analysts with an interest in US foreign policy. At the moment, Kagan is working on a book that exposes the dominant role of ideology in American diplomatic history.

It was Theodore Roosevelt, paradoxically a President admired by realists for his shrewd understanding of power politics, who first grafted principled ends to the exercise of power. Roosevelt insisted that it was America's duty to "assume an attitude of protection and regulation in regard to all these little states" in the Western hemisphere, to help them acquire the "capacity for self-government," to assist their progress "up out of the discord and turmoil of continual revolution into a general public sense of justice and determination to maintain order." For Roosevelt, American stewardship in the Western hemisphere was more than a defensive response to European meddling there; it was proof that the United States had arrived as a world power, with responsibilities to shape a decent order in its own region. When Woodrow Wilson, the quintessential "utopian" President, took office later, his policies in the hemisphere were little more than a variation on Roosevelt's theme.

Kagan attaches special importance to Roosevelt’s foreign policy because it demonstrates that America exercised its power in service of ideological ends long before the Cold War began. Realists have traditionally asserted that America did not commit itself to internationalism until the Soviet threat became too great to ignore. Roosevelt is also significant for Kagan because of the similarities between his ruthless use of force and that of Reagan.

The same mix of motives followed the United States as it reached out into the wider world, especially Europe and Asia. Growing power expanded American interests, but also expanded the risks of protecting them against the ambitions of others. After the 1880's, America's navy grew from a size comparable to Chile's to become one of the three great navies of the world. That increase in power alone made America a potential arbiter of overseas conflicts in a way it had never been in the 18th and 19th centuries. Greater power meant that if a general European war broke out, the United States would no longer have to sit back and accept dictation of its trade routes. It also meant, however, that the United States could not sit back without accepting a diminished role in world affairs.

Nor could Americans escape choosing sides. Although German- and Irish-Americans disagreed, most Americans in the 1910's preferred the British-run world order with which they were familiar to a prospective German one. Wilson's pro-British neutrality made conflict with Germany almost inevitable, and America's new great-power status made it equally inevitable that when the German challenge came, the United States would not back down.

It was the growth of American power, not Wilsonian idealism and not national interest narrowly conceived, that led the United States into its first European war. A weak 19th-century America could not have conceived of intervening in Europe; a strong 20th-century America, because it could intervene, found that it had an interest in doing so.

Again, Kagan seeks to emphasize that growth in American power led inevitably to greater involvement on the world stage. Regardless of the historical merit of the idea, it is especially noteworthy because it brings Kagan very close to realist interpretations of international politics which insist that the changing balance of power determines each nation’s role on the international stage. Because Kagan’s support of an aggressive and ideological foreign policy has earned him a solid reputation as an idealist and hawk, no one has yet to notice this important realist strain in his thinking.

After World War I, Americans recoiled from the new responsibilities and dangers which their power had brought. But they did not really abandon their new, broader conception of the national interest. Throughout the "isolationist" years, the United States still sought, however half-heartedly and ineffectually, to preserve its expanded influence and the world order it had fought for.

Although they refused to assume military obligations, Presidents from Harding to Franklin Roosevelt tried to maintain balance and order in Europe and in Asia through economic and political agreements. In Central America and the Caribbean, the Republican Presidents found themselves endlessly intervening, occupying, and supervising elections only so that they might eventually withdraw. (Only FDR decided that the best way to be a "good neighbor" in the hemisphere was to allow dictatorship to flourish.)

Kagan is on very strong ground here, opposing standard interpretations of American foreign policy in the interwar era as isolationist. While realist political scientists still take for granted that isolationism was dominant in interwar America, historians have shown that America embraced activist and even expansionist policies on almost every international front with the exception of great power relations in Europe.

To be continued...
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