Robert Kagan’s Latest Bugle for Ruinous Empire
By Bruce Fein*
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first have listen to Robert Kagan.
Mr. Kagan postulates in a profusion of books and articles that Americans are God’s chosen people, that the United States is the indispensable nation, and that the putative cures America has for the infinite ills of the world are superior to the diseases. Fleas are magnified into elephants to justify projecting the military strength of the United States everywhere under the Orwellian banner of anticipatory self-defense, i.e., destroy first, ask whether you killed innocents later.
Mr. Kagan’s latest cri de coeur blazed forth in an Opinions Essay in The Washington Post, “Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. American rejected it then. Will we now?” (A20-21, March 31, 2024). He absurdly assumes that the national security of the United States will be imperiled unless we provide Ukraine with infinite funds and weapons to defend against Russia’s attack launched in 2022.
The fate of Ukraine, whose borders have changed on multiple occasions throughout its history, is irrelevant to the peace and safety of the United States. Indeed, a Russian occupation or conquest would weaken Russia as a military power. It would be engaged in chronic and expensive efforts to quell inevitable Ukrainian rebellions reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s post-World War II bedevilments in Central and Eastern Europe which fueled its dissolution, e.g., East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Warsaw Pact was a costly paper tiger.
Invincible self-defense from actual or imminent aggression is the optimal national security policy of the United States. That policy and its justification was best articulated by secretary of state John Quincy Adams in his July 4, 1821, address to Congress. The secretary warned against miliary force to eliminate the crooked timber of mankind. Constant warfare would destroy liberty at home, echoing Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. That truth has been more than amply vindicated by experience.
Mr. Hamilton observed:
“The violent destruction of life and property incident to war--the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty, to resort for repose and security, to institutions, which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free.”
John Quincy Adams made the same point more powerfully:
“[The United States] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
Abraham Lincoln also discredited the delusion that without a garrison state bestriding the world like a colossus the United States would be destroyed by enemies without:
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
… [If danger]ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Mr. Kagan is deaf to the timeless wisdom of Hamilton, Quincy Adams, and Lincoln. He scampers away from endeavoring to refute their arguments (fortified by volumes of history), like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge without consulting Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
The ultra-war hawk envisions the end of the free world if the United States neglects to stand with Ukraine whatever it takes. Russia will conquer the Baltic States and invade European members of NATO. China will attack Taiwan. The world will surrender to enemies of freedom. Western civilization will end.
Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden similarly proclaimed in 1956 that international order and peace would disappear unless Egyptian President Gamal Abdur Nasser was destroyed for nationalizing the Suez Canal. History proved the stupendous error and drove the Prime Minister from office.
In any event, Mr. Kagan’s reputation for clairvoyance is suspect. Cajoling Americans to support the impending U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, he trumpeted in 2002 that “No step would contribute more toward shaping a world order in which our people and our liberal civilization can survive and flourish.”
The war came. Trillions were expended on a fool’s errand that made arch-enemy Iran a Middle East hegemon dominating Iraq. A precedent was set, which Kagan championed, that Russia followed in invading Ukraine. Hasn’t he been hoisted on his own petard?
The optimal influence of the United States abroad is the influence of example. To be sure, that modesty will leave many evils and imperfections in the world unaddressed. But it is superior to any other national security policy ever attempted or conceived.
Don’t sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect.
*Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and author of American Empire Before The Fall