Power, Wealth and Wisdom

Power, Wealth and Wisdom

Mini Teaser: Is the United States really as strong and wise, and "Old Europe" as weak and wooly-headed, as many American foreign policy pundits and practitioners think? Another way to read Transatlantic realities.

by Author(s): David Calleo

In so self-important a field as international relations, it is rare to come across an exuberant page-turner of high quality. Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order is such a book--short and very readable, with a gift for capturing elusive arguments in striking phrases. The author scatters his broad learning liberally, and other people's as well. He also provides a vigorous defense for George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy. But in a debate that has grown dangerously rancorous, his tone is amiable and fair-minded. The book is well worth reading, not least for insight into what the intelligent and civilized American neo-conservative thinks about the world. Taken in the right spirit, it should greatly advance Transatlantic discussion about the world order of the future.

Kagan's argument unfolds like a rocket, with several phases along the same trajectory. The starting point is that America and Europe have fundamentally different worldviews. The United States imagines itself in a Hobbesian world of ceaseless, egotistical conflict, where only superior force can keep order--a world where Mars is King. Europe imagines itself in a world where conflicts are settled by reasoned bargaining among neighbors who eschew the use of force against one another. In Europe's vision, it is Venus who presides. Europeans, celebrating their advanced, pacifist habits, relish a well-developed sense of moral superiority over the Americans. But Europe's enjoyment of its visionary world, Kagan argues, depends on the bellicose habits of the Americans. It is America's power and enthusiasm for using it that insulate Europe from its Hobbesian surroundings. It is Mars that protects Venus' lifestyle.

Kagan goes on to explain why this Transatlantic difference exists. Why do Americans exult in "hard power" and Europeans shun it? Europeans disapprove of military power because they do not themselves possess it. They favor "soft" civilian power, because they have it in abundance. But why do Europeans allow themselves to be so weak militarily? The bigger European states have huge financial and technological resources and long histories of marshalling military force. Kagan's answer is that two world wars of unmatched ferocity have created a new European mentality. In their crowded cockpit of a continent, Europeans have decided that force used among themselves is ruinous for all. European states have gone on to create a political miracle where cooperative reasonableness has exorcised the old demons.

Kagan acknowledges the moral grandeur of Europe's achievement but argues that it has left the continent dangerously weak. Europeans, he decides, are not really confident about the durability of their Union. If their grand experiment proves not universally applicable, they worry it may not endure long in Europe itself. This worry turns them against America. Just as the weak American Republic of the early 19th century tried to isolate itself from the Machiavellian contaminations of monarchical Europe, so today's "Kantian" Europe tries to distance itself from martial America, lest America's way of thinking be imported back into Europe's own internal relations.

Kagan goes on to argue that America's current world predominance has been developing for decades, indeed "for the better part of four centuries." Conscious expansion in "ever-widening arcs . . . has been the inescapable reality of American history." And now, despite the end of the Cold War, "the United States . . . clearly intends to remain the dominant strategic force in East Asia and Europe." The gap between America's military might and Europe's has grown too large, Kagan believes, to be closed in the foreseeable future. As the gap persists, so will the different views about the need for force in the world. Kagan's advice is that Americans and Europeans should recognize and accept their differences. Americans should appreciate what Europe has accomplished and be grateful that peace has descended upon what used to be the world's principal seedbed of war. But Americans should also realize that today's self-centered Europe is unlikely to share the burdens of world order. Americans should not mind. Europe is "not really capable of constraining the United States", he writes, and while Europe's moral and political support would doubtless be useful, it is not essential. "Can the United States prepare for and respond to the strategic challenges around the world without much help from Europe? The simple answer is that it already does."

Europeans, Kagan urges, should accept the consequences of their weakness. They should realize that given "a weak Europe that has moved beyond power, the United States has no choice but to act unilaterally." Europe should "move beyond fear and anger at the rogue colossus." It should understand the vital necessity of "a strong, even predominant America--for the world and for Europe especially." Europeans should, in fine, count American hegemony "an acceptable price to pay for paradise."

Kagan closes, however, with the hope that a more confident United States will take better care to show a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind." Having America and Europe on friendly terms would certainly be better for spreading their common Western beliefs. "Their aspirations for humanity are much the same", he writes,

even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very different places. Perhaps it is not too naively optimistic to believe that a little common understanding could still go a long way.

After so many forthright and confident pages, Kagan's anodyne ending is unconvincing. The role he assigns Europe in the newest American century may seem satisfactory in Washington and perhaps in London, but it does not appear to go down well in Paris or Berlin, nor in Moscow or Beijing.

Kagan's argument nevertheless seems powerful at home, but less because of its conclusions than its premises. These premises reflect a variety of interlocking assumptions widely shared among American foreign policymakers and analysts. We should be grateful to Kagan for demonstrating these assumptions so forcefully and showing just where they lead. Those uneasy with his triumphalist conclusions might therefore start by re-examining his triumphalist assumptions. This means trying to decide not only whether conflicting Transatlantic ambitions can be reconciled, as Kagan suggests, but whether the world is really as he describes it. Three large issues immediately come to mind. First, is America as powerful as Kagan says? Second, is Europe as weak? And third, whose political-philosophic orientation is more in tune with the likely world of the future?

American Power

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military invincibility of the United States has grown into an almost unchallenged article of faith among American foreign policy elites. According to this faith, America's global power is limited principally by its own political scruples and humanitarian self-restraint. Believing that the United States has such overwhelming power encourages a highly developed sense of responsibility among American leaders. Faith in their own strength puts them in the uncomfortable moral position of an omnipotent god. If there is evil in the universe, it is America's fault for not removing it. Such a heightened sense of national duty gives a particular comparative advantage to America's reigning neo-conservatives. Not much given to national self-criticism or doubt, they believe America's power to be not only invincible, but uniquely just.

Not surprisingly, the neo-conservative conscience tends to be highly critical of those periods in recent American history when others have been in charge. It sees American leaders as having often failed their responsibility. Among recent past presidents, only Ronald Reagan meets their standards for using America's power properly. The happy result, neo-conservatives believe, was to rid the world of the Soviets. Had we continued to use our military power vigorously, they also believe, we could have made today's world much less dangerous. Instead, the first Bush Administration hesitated to eliminate Saddam Hussein and, under Bill Clinton, the United States relapsed still further into self-denying weakness. Neo-conservatives blame the Transatlantic alliance for reinforcing these tendencies to self-doubt and self-limitation. What Europeans see as prudent self-restraint, neo-conservative Americans count as pusillanimous diffidence.

Most countries believe themselves virtuous, but nowadays no other country believes itself omnipotent. The neo-conservative judgment that diffidence is dysfunctional for America rests on faith in the country's crushingly superior military power. But America's military prowess is perhaps less absolute and less useful than the confidence of neo-conservatism might lead us to imagine. We won the Gulf War of 1991 easily, for example, but only after sharply limiting our objectives. The previous war--Vietnam--we lost. The Korean War was a draw. Neo-conservatives, of course, tend to assume credit for destroying the Soviet Union. But the Soviets were defeated not in battle but by their own "overstretch"--outsized geopolitical ambition resulting in ruinous economic policies while pursuing excessive military power. It may be more accurate, therefore, to say that the Soviets defeated themselves.

In the "unipolar" era, the United States has so far used its military might against either very small powers--Grenada and Panama--or against relatively helpless "rogue states"--Serbia, Afghanistan or Iraq. While sometimes brilliantly successful, these latter operations have depended primarily on overwhelming aerial bombardment against opponents with little air defense. They are the present-day equivalent of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. America's airpower plays the role of Britain's navy, keeping order among the "heathen" powers abroad while delighting the jingoists at home. Until the Iraq War, however, these hegemonic expeditions have been notable for their aversion to the full or prolonged use of American ground forces. Until recently, this aversion seemed a significant limit on America's martial ambitions. Presumably, a hegemonic global power has to be able to do more than punish "evil-doers" from the air, particularly if it plans to reform its ex-enemies into democracies, a fate the neo-conservatives proclaim for Iraq and others besides. Doing that requires an army able not only to defeat the enemy but to occupy his territory, perhaps for a long time.

Essay Types: Book Review