# Posted 12:06 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

AMERICA THE DANGEROUS: Robert Kagan has a new book out. I've known for seven years it was going to be a good one. I worked for Kagan as a research assistant right after I graduated from college and had the privilege of reading some early drafts of his chapters on the age of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison.

I believe this will be the book that establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kagan is the kind of original thinker who transcends partisan or ideological labels. I believe that Dangerous Nation will be the kind of book that liberals don't just read because they want to know what conservatives are thinking, but because it is a book that can educate any reader, political disagreements aside.

At a moment when 'neo-conservative' has become something of a slur on both sides of the aisle, it is especially fitting for a book to come out that demonstrates not just how powerful neo-conservative thinking can be, but also how subtle -- or dare I say "nuanced"?

Yes, that is the right word. That nuance is on display in the cover story of the October 23 edition of The New Republic, which is Kagan's four-page digest of his book's main argument. The essay's sub-title summarizes its purpose quite effectively: "Against the myth of American innocence."

Earlier this year, Peter Beinart constructed an entire book around the premise that the most dangerous thing about conservatives is their inability to recognize America's moral failures. Yet a recognition of such failures is at the very heart of this work by Kagan, arguably the most important neo-conservative thinker today on the subject of foreign policy.

If the byline were removed from Kagan's essay in TNR, it might be mistaken for a polemic from the far left. Kagan writes:

Far from the modest republic that history books often portray, the early United States was an expansionist power from the moment the first pilgrim set foot on the continent; and it did not stop expanding--territorially, commercially, culturally, and geopolitically--over the next four centuries. The United States has never been a status quo power; it has always been a revolutionary one, consistently expanding its participation and influence in the world in ever-widening arcs. The impulse to involve ourselves in the affairs of others is neither a modern phenomenon nor a deviation from the American spirit. It is embedded in the American DNA.

More unusual is Kagan's paying attention to what Europeans think of the United States -- not now, but 200 years ago:

From the beginning, others have seen Americans not as a people who sought ordered stability but as persistent disturbers of the status quo. As the ancient Corinthians said of the Athenians, they were "incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so." Nineteenth-century Americans were, in the words of French diplomats, "numerous," "warlike," and an "enemy to be feared." In 1817, John Quincy Adams reported from London, "The universal feeling of Europe in witnessing the gigantic growth of our population and power is that we shall, if united, become a very dangerous member of the society of nations."

This passage begins to suggest how a straightforward reckoning with American history can serve as the foundation for a conservative worldview rather than a liberal one. It was not the well-behaved, mythical America that rose from obscurity to greatness. By extension, the often arrogant and ideal-driven unilateralism of today won't bring down the "postwar international order".

One all-important reason that Kagan's writing transcends the partisan divide is that he is capable of seeing things from a perspective often reserved for liberals. (The same is true of Max Boot.) It isn't just that Kagan can recite his opponents' talking points, but that he can focus their interpretive lens on American history. For example, Kagan writes that:

By expanding territorially, commercially, politically, and culturally, Americans believed that they were bringing both modern civilization and the "blessings of liberty" to whichever nations they touched in their search for opportunity. As Jefferson told one Indian leader: "We desire above all things, brother, to instruct you in whatever we know ourselves. We wish to learn you all our arts and to make you wise and wealthy." In one form or another, Americans have been making that offer of instruction to peoples around the world ever since.

Yes, even in Iraq. How many critics of the occupation wish that they could have discovered that Jefferson quote for themselves in order to highlight some of the brutal ironies of our democracy promotion efforts?

Yet Jefferson's words also point to the less common conclusion that we have become far more humane in the pursuit of liberty. Native Americans feared white Americans. But Shia mainly fear Sunni, and Sunni, Shia. You won't hear Democrats say it, but we really are fighting for a noble cause in Iraq, however ineffectively.

But isn't there still a profound hypocrisy at the heart of an effort to promote democracy that entails horrors such as Abu Ghraib? Kagan's history provides insight into that question as well:

John Quincy Adams had noted with pride that the United States was the source of ideas that made "the throne of every European monarch rock under him as with the throes of an earthquake." Praising the American Revolution, he exhorted "every individual among the sceptered lords of mankind: 'Go thou and do likewise!'"

A Russian minister, appalled at this "appeal to the nations of Europe to rise against their Governments," noted the hypocrisy of Adams's message, asking, "How about your two million black slaves?" Indeed. The same United States that called for global revolution on behalf of freedom was, throughout its first eight decades, also the world's great defender of racial despotism.

As Kagan further illustrates, some Americans fiercely opposed Quincy Adams' zealousness, sensing the dangers of an ideological crusade:

The conservatives of the slaveholding South were the great realists of the nineteenth century. They opposed moralism, rightly fearing it would be turned against the institution of slavery. As Jefferson Davis put it, "We are not engaged in a Quixotic fight for the rights of man. Our struggle is for inherited rights. ... We are conservative."

To the chagrin of Mr. Davis, the moralists won out. And the lesson to be learned from this brand of aggressive idealism?

The result has been some accomplishments of great historical importance--the defeat of German Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet communism--as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the disappointments, derived from the very qualities that often make us queasy: our willingness to accumulate and use power; our ambition and sense of honor; our spiritedness in defense of both our interests and our principles; our dissatisfaction with the status quo; our belief in the possibility of change.

I look forward to a very impressive book. (13) opinions -- Add your opinion