--Kagan and the 'Natural Forces of History'
The U.S. always has a choice to turn away from armed primacy and domination.
Daniel Larison December 29, 2022Robert Kagan wrote another paean to the wonders of U.S. hegemony:
Should the United States reduce its involvement in the world today, the consequences for Europe and Asia are not hard to predict. Great-power conflict and dictatorship have been the norm throughout human history, the liberal peace a brief aberration. Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay.
There is a lot wrong with Kagan’s essay, and we could go through it paragraph by paragraph to find all of the errors, but all you need to read is the last line. “Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay,” he says, and he is completely in earnest. There are not many more deluded expressions of American exceptionalism than that.
This is a vision of the world in which the U.S. is the appointed overseer and stands outside of the “natural forces of history” that it keeps in check. It is a lie for the very simple reason that the U.S. government is not a god and the people that work for it are not lords of order preventing the world from falling into disarray. If the “natural forces of history” are indeed natural forces, there is nothing that will stop them and anyone stupid and arrogant enough to try will be destroyed in the process. Kagan describes the sin of hubris and thinks it is an admirable trait to be embraced. If the “natural forces” are not what Kagan claims, that tells us that the U.S. is not doomed to roam the earth forever as the vigilante enforcer of “order.”
The U.S. always has a choice to turn away from armed primacy and domination, and that does not mean that the rest of the world is going to collapse into chaos and mayhem. Every imperialist throughout history has assumed that the fate of civilization or order has depended on continued domination of others, but in the end we can see that this is self-serving propaganda. Kagan’s essay is just the latest blast in a long tradition of imperialists justifying their imperialism as beneficial for the world, and that is how it should be received.
Kagan does something a bit odd in this essay that he will probably regret later: he admits that modern U.S. wars have not been necessary to protect the United States. He writes:
But all of the United States’ wars have been wars of choice, the “good” wars and the “bad” wars, the wars won and the wars lost. Not one was necessary to defend the United States’ direct security; all in one way or another were about shaping the international environment.
This is a remarkable admission for someone like Kagan, because it admits that the central conceit of U.S. interventionism for the last seven decades and beyond has been false. U.S. foreign wars have always been sold to the public as being essential for the security of the country. Kagan used to sell these wars using exactly this rhetoric. Claiming that unnecessary wars of power projection are wars of self-defense is an old standby of imperialist propaganda across the centuries, and these false claims will often work in getting people to support those wars on the assumption that their government has been “forced” to fight against someone else’s current or future aggression against the country. Kagan just acknowledged that all of this is a lie, and then in the next breath he demanded that the public keep supporting the aggressive role in the world that leads to all these wars.
I’m not sure there is much point in writing a lengthy response to Kagan’s essay. Kagan himself is incorrigible. He has been writing some version of the same argument for at least twenty-five years, and he is completely unaffected by the evidence that his ideology is bankrupt. The catastrophic U.S. blunders and crimes of the early twenty-first century do not trouble him, and why would they? For him, endless wars are just part of being a hegemon and Americans should suck it up and accept their role. He is unmoved by the human cost of these debacles, which he deems to be “low-cost” in any case because he never counts the local victims. Kagan’s admirers are incorrigible, because there is nothing that can happen in the real world that will ever shake their conviction that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation” and the “benevolent global hegemon.”
So why bother responding at all? Because I hope that there are many Americans out there that reject the lies that Kagan peddles, and because I would like to see a day when our foreign policy is no longer warped by such ideological obsessions. There is an alternative to the dead end of militarism and imperialism that the Kagans of the world offer. We are not condemned to march off the cliff in obedience to their insane maxims. The U.S. can choose to be at peace with all of the nations of the world, and it can choose to stop interfering in conflicts in which it has no vital interests. The rest of the world will manage without our militarized meddling, and we will then have to address the many serious problems that we have at home without distracting ourselves with fantasies of ruling the world.
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