Testy New Interview Reveals the Changing Colors of Robert Kagan
Simplicus Aug 7
Kagan gets immediately defensive over the interviewer’s perfectly natural callout of his hyper-interventionist advocacy. It’s clear that right from the get go, Kagan is setting a defensive tone as a kind of apologia and historical revisionism of his now-defunct former ideology.
Di Caro: Yet for decades you have advocated for U.S. interventionism and, in the case of the Iraq invasion of 2003, a preemptive war…
Kagan: Wait a minute. Can we stop right there? When you say that I’ve advocated for intervention for decades, what in particular are you talking about? I certainly supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but it’s not like I was just calling for intervention everywhere at all times. That’s a shorthand that you use, but it’s what people think, you know?
He goes on to even outright reject the label of “neocon”, and for a reason so ludicrous it must simply be seen to be believed:
Oy vey!
Someone is extremely defensive over the repudiation of what is essentially his life’s work. This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to salvage credibility.
The keen interviewer pushes deeper, asking Kagan if he’s reconsidered his past support for US wars—most notably, Iraq—particularly in light of recent events and the disastrously unfolding Iran debacle. In accordance with the extremely tetchy tenor of his responses, Kagan again reverts to knee-jerk defensiveness:
Kagan: To answer your question, I haven't really fundamentally changed my mind. These are different circumstances. You'd have to assume that I had some kind of doctrine of always invading the Middle East whenever possible. But that has not been my doctrine.
It’s clear he realizes how bad he looks in hindsight and can’t help but adopt an almost whiny tone in attempting to rewrite his key role in America’s geopolitical depletion.
Most interestingly, he then springs into a rant about why the Iraq war was in fact justified because Iraq had done something even Iran would not dream of now doing: invaded multiple neighbors, including Iran itself, and fatefully, Kuwait. Iraq was therefore a threat in need of neutralization for this transgression.
But the irony is lost on Kagan: Iran may not have invaded anyone, but one Middle Eastern country certainly has been bombing and invading virtually every one of its neighbors. Israel has recently unjustifiably invaded both Syria and Lebanon, not to mention Gaza. Wouldn’t that—by the logic of his own justifications—mean Israel is itself in need of intervention?
The next exchange is pure gold as Kagan scurries from accountability for what the interviewer cites as a generational disaster that caused 180,000+ civilian deaths, chaos in the Middle East, millions of displaced people across the region, trillions of US dollars lost, et cetera.
Kagan first dismisses the numbers by explaining this all happened over the course of 10 years, as if a “gradual” genocide and ethnic cleansing is excusable compared to an instantaneous one. But when he’s pressed further, his shifty response is pure political pilpul:
Kagan: Well, I didn’t say I can’t admit that it was a mistake. I’m not sure what the utility of admitting that it was a mistake is. It’s not going to bring anybody back to life. But, you know, there were obviously elements of the Iraq war that were a mistake. I was very clear about it at the time when it was obvious that the administration not only hadn’t sent in enough troops initially, but also didn’t understand the role that those troops had to play because [Donald] Rumsfeld, from the moment that they invaded, wanted to get out. And so we didn’t accept the responsibility that, as Colin Powell said, when you break it, you own it.
The biggest effect that I regret is how it influenced Americans’ attitudes towards foreign policy in general… In retrospect it is clear that Americans had become increasingly unenthusiastic about the role the United States was playing in the world.
He proceeds into an inflated exegesis about how the true nature of the problem is not the interventionism itself, but rather that the US has proven to be an unreliable partner to Gulf states, particularly under Trump’s term. But doing so is another ruse: Kagan is trying to pull us into his ‘lusory attitude’ frame by implying as a given that US is somehow entitled or even obligated to be in the Mideast, and the only allowable questions should be confined to precisely what kind of role it should play.
But this discounts true first principles, and intentionally so: he deviously wants us to ignore the first principle that there is no reason for the US to be entangled in the Middle East to begin with. As many historians have pointed out, the Middle East has not been some kind of national or strategic lodestar the US was always “destined” to embrace and stake its entire civilizational fate on. The fact is, the US arguably did not even begin to get seriously involved in the Middle East (occupationally, et cetera) until almost the 1970s, after the Arab-Israeli war, and particularly after the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971—and the reason is obvious: Israel.
As such, something that has only been a relatively recent milestone of US history is certainly not a trajectory to be used with unquestioning authority, as if no other rational alternative exists. At first blush, Kagan’s role appears to be to cement the US as forever politically entwined with the region for the purpose of securing Israel’s indefinite hegemony over it. They have fabricated artificial Overton windows for which policies can be discussed or challenged, and which should simply be assumed as “baked-in” givens as if US’s national interest in securing Israel’s Mideast prosperity and dominance is somehow Constitutionallyvested, and the US has some kind of legal, moral, or religious obligation to do so.
In reality, the obvious and fully justified plan of action would be to extricate the US from the Middle East entirely, and leave Israel to its own devices, as the US has nothing to gain and everything to lose in being Israel’s whipping boy and “protector” in a region hostile to the artificially implanted political entity.
But wait!
Just as we had imagined we had him fully clocked, Kagan does a breathtaking U-turn to scramble the board entirely, leaving a great mystery as to his true intentions.
The final exchange of the interview is most fascinating and revealing of all, and stabs at the very heart of what we had just discussed above:
Di Caro: My point is that the Gulf War was a Pyrrhic victory. The United States has never been able to extract itself from the Middle East.
Some would argue Israel is one reason why the United States can’t seem to extract itself, at least from the conflict with Iran.
Kagan: Well, that’s certainly been true.
First, the shrewd interviewer finally levels his sights on the ultimate verboten culprit. Shockingly, Kagan agrees with him.
Or, perhaps not-so-shockingly, because as we have seen with his recent writings, Kagan has begun to seemingly abjure Israel and the US’s involvement therein, perhaps as a final bit of damage control in a career and legacy marred by Israeli-centric US interventionist advocacy.
And then, the coup de grace:
Di Caro: Why have recent U.S. administrations utterly failed to restrain Israel despite the fact that the U.S. has considerable leverage?
Kagan: There are multiple elements to the answer. One is obviously the role of Jews in influencing American policy, which is a reality just the way the Irish, Italians, or Greeks have influenced American policy. The other thing is America is broadly Islamophobic, and so any enemy of Islam is a friend of ours for many Americans. I think Islamophobia is a reality in the United States, and Israel is supposed to be the bulwark against Islam.
That’s unfortunate. My view is that we should not have a foreign policy based on Islamophobia. We should be able to have perfectly good relations with Islamic countries and with Islam itself.
Here we begin to perhaps get a hint of Kagan’s artful angle: “Sure, the Israel-first mafia that controls the US is simply doing what the Italian and Irish mobs have been doing all along! There’s nothing uniquely subversive here!”
Ah, would that it were so, Mr. Kagan. Nice try, you almost had us with the new “reformed, honest, Muslim-loving ex-neocon” shtick—but the last bit was a little too on the nose, no pun intended.
The interviewer pushes the pin deeper into Kagan’s heel:
Di Caro: What’s your view of Israel’s conduct in Gaza? How can we talk about a “rules-based order” after the world allowed that to happen? Israel’s conduct was enabled by the United States.
Kagan: I myself almost never talk about a rules-based order because the United States has definitely pursued a double standard with regard to the rules-based order. You could say that we supported the rules-based order in the breach as much as in the observance.
Di Caro: You sound like a restrainer now.
Kagan: Well, this is the thing again. It’s like if you acknowledge that America does bad things in the world, then that makes you a “restrainer.” In my view, it just makes you analytically honest. Knowing that the United States does bad things does not answer the question of should the United States be involved in the world.
Ah, so you’re a kind of principleless political nihilist now. “My world view failed, so rules don’t matter anymore.”
Di Caro: The question is how the U.S. should be involved in the world.
Kagan: Critiques of the American order are legitimate. The question is what is a better alternative? If you want to tell me let’s never get involved in the Middle East again, I would say sure. I’m delighted to never get involved in the Middle East again. But that is not what the restrainers are fundamentally talking about. They’re talking about getting out of the whole alliance structure system and ending the nature of American leadership since 1945.
The assumption behind that has to be that the world is going to be at least as calm or calmer, and there’ll be less turmoil. And I just absolutely reject that. I think there is going to be more turmoil. And I think there are a lot of things that the restrainers are not thinking about and they’re almost in my view a little utopian in their assumption that a multipolar world can exist in some kind of peaceful harmony when I think history suggests otherwise.
The backpedal is certainly a fascinating portrait of a man groping to retain a sense of meaning in a world that has rebuked his core metaphysics.
It certainly is possible that Kagan is a deeper, more complex figure than we give him credit for, and that instead of devious ulterior motives he’s simply an adherent of American unipolarity because he patriotically believes it makes the world a safer, more prosperous place. But one of the chief contradictions of this viewpoint stems from the original PNAC charter, whose statement of principles decreed that America should “shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests” as well as “values”.
The inherent contradiction to this is rooted in the very end of the interview above, wherein Kagan implies that the reason he fears multipolarity is because it would mean a world co-ruled by nations whose principles and values may not be as “benevolent” (as per original PNAC terminology) and ethical as those of America’s. The problem is, Kagan is a proponent of “breaking a few eggs to make an omelette”. In short: to maintain global rule of and by “superior” American principles and values, one must actually act in an unprincipled and cutthroat way, enforcing dominance and aggression onto key power centers and strategic regions of the world. In short: you must practice a total lack of values to protect your stated values.
The contradiction is obvious: to maintain America’s “moral superiority” over the world, the nation must gain advantage and rule with total amorality, as it did during the PNAC GWOT years. It is a self-negating principle, and exposes a stunning hypocrisy at the heart of the vision espoused by the Kaganites.
The famous tenet comes to mind: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” That is to say, a thing is what it does, not what it professes, pretends, or is even designed to do; intention and practical actuality are not one and the same.
America’s “principles and values”—the very same ones the Kaganites are so fervid to promote and defend—are not what they are romantically theorized to be, but what they are demonstrated to be in actual practice. You know, rank hypocrisy, the perversion ‘rule of law’, lying, cheating, stealing, endless bombing and ethnic cleansing, et cetera.
In light of this, we can only conclude that Kagan’s milquetoast attempt at backpedaling from his earlier positions represents a balancing obfuscation of cold truths and first principles.
But share your thoughts, what do you think of Kagan’s ideological proteanism and moral shapeshifting?