by Robert Kagan
ALSO BY ROBERT KAGAN
A Twilight Struggle:
American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990
Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (edited with William Kristol)
Of Paradise
and Power
Of Paradise
and Power
America and Europe in the New World Order
ROBERT KAGAN
Alfred A. Knopf
NEW YORK 2003
For Leni and David
Of Paradise
and Power
Introduction
IT IS TIME to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power—the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power—American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s “perpetual peace.” Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory—the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.
It is easier to see the contrast as an American living in Europe. Europeans are more conscious of the growing differences, perhaps because they fear them more. European intellectuals are nearly unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common “strategic culture.” The European caricature at its most extreme depicts an America dominated by a “culture of death,” its warlike temperament the natural product of a violent society where every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns. But even those who do not make this crude link agree there are profound differences in the way the United States and Europe conduct foreign policy.
The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. When confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favor policies of coercion rather than persuasion, emphasizing punitive sanctions over inducements to better behavior, the stick over the carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: They want problems solved, threats eliminated. And, of course, Americans increasingly tend toward unilateralism in international affairs. They are less inclined to act through international institutions such as the United Nations, less likely to work cooperatively with other nations to pursue common goals, more skeptical about international law, and more willing to operate outside its strictures when they deem it necessary, or even merely useful.[1]
Europeans insist they approach problems with greater nuance and sophistication. They try to influence others through subtlety and indirection. They are more tolerant of failure, more patient when solutions don’t come quickly. They generally favor peaceful responses to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy, and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to appeal to international law, international conventions, and international opinion to adjudicate disputes. They try to use commercial and economic ties to bind nations together. They often emphasize process over result, believing that ultimately process can become substance.
This European portrait is a dual caricature, of course, with its share of exaggerations and oversimplifications. One cannot generalize about Europeans: Britons may have a more “American” view of power than many Europeans on the Continent. Their memory of empire, the “special relationship” with the United States forged in World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, and their historically aloof position with regard to the rest of Europe tend to set them apart. Nor can one simply lump French and Germans together: the first proud and independent but also surprisingly insecure, the second mingling self-confidence with self-doubt since the end of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the nations of Eastern and Central Europe have an entirely different history from their Western European neighbors, a historically rooted fear of Russian power and consequently a more American view of the Hobbesian realities. And, of course, there are differing perspectives within nations on both sides of the Atlantic. French Gaullists are not the same as French Socialists. In the United States, Democrats often seem more “European” than Republicans; Secretary of State Colin Powell may appear more “European” than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Many Americans, especially among the intellectual elite, are as uncomfortable with the “hard” quality of American foreign policy as any European; and some Europeans value power as much as any American.
Nevertheless, the caricatures do capture an essential truth: The United States and Europe are fundamentally different today. Powell and Rumsfeld have more in common than do Powell and the foreign ministers of France, Germany, or even Great Britain. When it comes to the use of force, most mainstream American Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they do with most Europeans. During the 1990s even American liberals were more willing to resort to force and were more Manichean in their perception of the world than most of their European counterparts. The Clinton administration bombed Iraq as well as Afghanistan and Sudan. Most European governments, it is safe to say, would not have done so and were, indeed, appalled at American militarism. Whether Europeans even would have bombed Belgrade in 1999 had the United States not forced their hand is an interesting question.[2] This past October, a majority of Senate Democrats supported the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war with Iraq, while their political counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and even the United Kingdom looked on in amazement and some horror.
What is the source of these differing strategic perspectives? The question has received too little attention in recent years. Foreign policy intellectuals and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have denied the existence of genuine differences or sought to make light of present disagreements, noting that the transatlantic alliance has had moments of tension in the past. Those who have taken the present differences more seriously, especially in Europe, have been more interested in assailing the United States than in understanding why the United States acts as it does—or, for that matter, why Europe acts as it does. It is past time to move beyond the denial and the insults and to face the problem head-on.
Despite what many Europeans and some Americans believe, these differences in strategic culture do not spring naturally from the national characters of Americans and Europeans. What Europeans now consider their more peaceful strategic culture is, historically speaking, quite new. It represents an evolution away from the very different strategic culture that dominated Europe for hundreds of years—at least until World War I. The European governments—and peoples—who enthusiastically launched themselves into that continental war believed in Machtpolitik. They were fervent nationalists who had been willing to promote the national idea through force of arms, as the Germans had under Bismarck, or to promote egalité and fraternité with the sword
, as Napoleon had attempted earlier in the century, or to spread the blessings of liberal civilization through the cannon’s mouth, as the British had throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The European order that came into being with the unification of Germany in 1871 was, “like all its predecessors, created by war.”[3] While the roots of the present European worldview, like the roots of the European Union itself, can be traced back to the Enlightenment, Europe’s great-power politics for the past three hundred years did not follow the visionary designs of the philosophes and the Physiocrats.
As for the United States, there is nothing timeless about the present heavy reliance on force as a tool of international relations, nor about the tilt toward unilateralism and away from a devotion to international law. Americans are children of the Enlightenment, too, and in the early years of the republic were more faithful apostles of its creed. At its birth America was the great hope of Enlightenment Europeans, who despaired of their own continent and viewed America as the one place “where reason and humanity” might “develop more rapidly than anywhere else.”[4] The rhetoric, if not always the practice, of early American foreign policy was suffused with the principles of the Enlightenment. American statesmen of the late eighteenth century, like the European statesmen of today, extolled the virtues of commerce as the soothing balm of international strife and appealed to international law and international opinion over brute force. The young United States wielded power against weaker peoples on the North American continent, but when it came to dealing with the European giants, it claimed to abjure power and assailed as atavistic the power politics of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European empires.
Some historians have gleaned from this the mistaken view that the American founding generation was Utopian, that it genuinely considered power politics “alien and repulsive” and was simply unable to “comprehend the importance of the power factor in foreign relations.”[5] But George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and even Thomas Jefferson were not Utopians. They were well versed in the realities of international power politics. They could play by European rules when circumstances permitted and often wished they had the power to play the game of power politics more effectively. But they were realistic enough to know that they were weak, and both consciously and unconsciously they used the strategies of the weak to try to get their way in the world. They denigrated power politics and claimed an aversion to war and military power, all realms in which they were far inferior to the European great powers. They extolled the virtues and ameliorating effects of commerce, where Americans competed on a more equal plane. They appealed to international law as the best means of regulating the behavior of nations, knowing well they had few other means of constraining Great Britain and France. They knew from their reading of Vattel that in international law, “strength or weakness . . . counts for nothing. A dwarf is as much a man as a giant is; a small Republic is no less a sovereign State than the most powerful Kingdom.”[6] Later generations of Americans, possessed of a great deal more power and influence on the world stage, would not always be as enamored of this constraining egalitarian quality of international law. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the great European powers that did not always want to be constrained.
Two centuries later, Americans and Europeans have traded places—and perspectives. This is partly because in those two hundred years, and especially in recent decades, the power equation has shifted dramatically: When the United States was weak, it practiced the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do. When the European great powers were strong, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now they see the world through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different points of view have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing them, different calculations of interest, and differing perspectives on the value and meaning of international law and international institutions.
But even the power gap offers only part of the explanation for the broad gulf that has opened between the United States and Europe. For along with these natural consequences of the transatlantic disparity of power, there has also opened a broad ideological gap. Europeans, because of their unique historical experience of the past century—culminating in the creation of the European Union—have developed a set of ideals and principles regarding the utility and morality of power different from the ideals and principles of Americans, who have not shared that experience. If the strategic chasm between the United States and Europe appears greater than ever today, and grows still wider at a worrying pace, it is because these material and ideological differences reinforce one another. The divisive trend they together produce may be impossible to reverse.
The Power Gap
Some might ask, what is new? It is true that Europe has been declining as a global military power for a long time. The most damaging blow to both European power and confidence fell almost a century ago, in the world war that broke out in 1914. That horrendous conflict devastated three of the five European powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia—that had been key pillars of the continental balance of power since 1871. It damaged European economies, forcing them into decades-long dependence on American bankers. But most of all, the war destroyed the will and spirit of Great Britain and France, at least until the British rallied under Churchill in 1939, when it was too late to avoid another world war. In the 1920s, Britain reeled from the “senseless” slaughter of a whole generation of young men at Passchendaele and other killing fields, and the British government began at war’s end the rapid demobilization of its army. A frightened France had struggled to maintain adequate military force to deter what it considered the inevitable return of German power and revanchism. In the early 1920s, France was desperate for an alliance with Great Britain, but the Anglo-American guarantee to defend France stipulated in the Versailles Treaty vanished into thin air when the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it. Meanwhile, the traumatized British, somehow convincing themselves against all reason that France, not Germany, was the greatest threat to European peace, proceeded to insist, as late as 1934, that France disarm itself to the level of Germany. Winston Churchill’s was a lonely voice warning of the “awful danger” of “perpetually asking the French to weaken themselves.”[7]
The interwar era was Europe’s first attempt to move beyond power politics, to make a virtue out of weakness. Instead of relying on power, as they had in the past, the European victors in World War I put their faith in “collective security” and in its institutional embodiment, the League of Nations. “Our purpose,” declared one of the league’s leading statesmen, was “to make war impossible, to kill it, to annihilate it. To do this we had to create a system.”[8] But the “system” did not work, in part because its leading members had neither the power nor the will. It is ironic that the driving intellectual force behind this effort to solve Europe’s security crisis through the creation of a supranational legal institution was an American, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson spoke with the authority of what had in recent decades become one of the world’s richest and most powerful countries, and whose late entry into World War I had significantly aided the Allied victory. Unfortunately, Wilson spoke for America at a time when it, too, was running away from power, and, as it turned out, he did not actually speak for his country. The American refusal to participate in the institution Wilson created destroyed whatever small chance it may have had to succeed. As Churchill wryly recalled, “We, who had deferred so much to [Wilson’s] opinions and wishes in all this business of peacemaking, were told without much ceremony that we ought to be better informed about the American Constitution.”[9] The Europeans were left to themselves, and when confronted by the rising power of a rearming, revisionist Germany in the 1930s, “collective security” melted away and was replaced by the policy of appeasement.
At its core, the appeasement of
Nazi Germany was a strategy based on weakness, which derived less from genuine inability to contain German power than from the understandable fear of another great European war. But built on top of this foundation was an elaborate structure of sophisticated arguments about the nature of the threat posed by Germany and the best means of addressing it. British officials, in particular, consistently downplayed the threat, or insisted that it was not yet serious enough to require action. “If it could be proved that Germany was rearming,” the British Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin said in 1933, then Europe would have to do something. “But that situation had not yet arisen.”[10] Proponents of appeasement produced many reasons why the application of power was unnecessary or inappropriate. Some argued that Germany and its Nazi government had legitimate grievances that had to be taken into account by the Western powers. The Versailles Treaty, as John Maynard Keynes explained, had been harsh and counterproductive, and Britain and France had only themselves to blame if German politics had turned angry and revanchist. When Hitler complained about the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the Western democracies were prepared to concede the point. Nor did the other European powers want to believe that an ideological rift made compromise with Hitler and the Nazis impossible. In 1936 the French prime minister, Léon Blum, told a visiting German minister, “I am a Marxist and a Jew,” but “we cannot achieve anything if we treat ideological barriers as insurmountable.”[11] Many convinced themselves that although Hitler seemed bad, the alternatives to him in Germany were probably worse. British and French officials worked to gain Hitler’s signature on agreements, believing he alone could control what were assumed to be the more extreme forces in German society.[12]