by Robert Kagan
Americans can help. It is true that the Bush administration came into office with something of a chip on its shoulder. The realist-nationalist impulses it inherited from the Republican Congress of the 1990s made it appear almost eager to scorn the opinions of much of the rest of the world. The picture it painted in its early months was of a behemoth thrashing about against constraints that only it could see. It was hostile to the new Europe—as to a lesser extent was the Clinton administration—seeing it not so much as an ally but as an albatross. Even after September 11, when the Europeans offered their very limited military capabilities in the fight in Afghanistan, the United States resisted, fearing that European cooperation was a ruse to tie America down. The Bush administration viewed NATO’s historic decision to aid the United States under Article 5 less as a boon than as a booby trap. An opportunity to draw Europe into common battle out in the Hobbesian world, even in a minor role, was thereby unnecessarily squandered.
But Americans are powerful enough that they need not fear Europeans, even when bearing gifts. Rather than viewing the United States as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leaders should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States. If the United States could move past the anxiety engendered by this inaccurate sense of constraint, it could begin to show more understanding for the sensibilities of others, a little more of the generosity of spirit that characterized American foreign policy during the Cold War. It could pay its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law, and try to build some international political capital for those moments when multilateralism is impossible and unilateral action unavoidable. It could, in short, take more care to show what the founders called a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” This was always the wisest policy. And there is certainly benefit in it for the United States: Winning the material and moral support of friends and allies, especially in Europe, is unquestionably preferable to acting alone in the face of European anxiety and hostility. These are small steps, and they will not address the deep problems that beset the transatlantic relationship today. But, after all, it is more than a cliché that the United States and Europe share a set of common Western beliefs. Their aspirations for humanity are much the same, even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very different places. Perhaps it is not too naïvely optimistic to believe that a little common understanding could still go a long way.
A Note About The Author
Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he is director of the U.S. Leadership Project. In addition to a monthly column in the Washington Post, he is the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990, and coeditor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book was set in Minion, a typeface produced by the Adobe Corporation specifically for the Macintosh personal computer and released in 1990. Designed by Robert Slimbach, Minion combines the classic characteristics of old-style faces with the full complement of weights required for modern typesetting.
Footnotes
1 One representative French observer describes “a U.S. mindset” that “tends to emphasize military, technical and unilateral solutions to international problems, possibly at the expense of co-operative and political ones.” See Gilles Andreani, “The Disarray of U.S. Non-Proliferation Policy,” Survival 41 (Winter 1999-2000): 42-61.
2 The case of Bosnia in the early 1990s stands out as an instance where some Europeans, chiefly British Prime Minister Tony Blair, were at times more forceful in advocating military action than first the Bush and then the Clinton administration. (Blair was also an early advocate of using air power and even ground troops in the Kosovo crisis.) And Europeans had forces on the ground in Bosnia when the United States did not, although in a UN peacekeeping role that proved ineffective when challenged.
3 Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (New Haven, 2001), p. 47.
4 Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton, 1959), 1:242.
5 Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1961), p. 17.
6 Quoted in Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, 1970), p. 134.
7 Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston, 1948), p. 94.
8 Edvard Benes quoted in E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 (London, 1948), p. 30.
9 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 12.
10 Quoted in A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1983), pp. 73-74.
11 Quoted in Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), p. 307.
12 As one French official stationed in Berlin put it, “If Hitler is sincere in proclaiming his desire for peace, we will be able to congratulate ourselves on having reached agreement; if he has other designs or if he has to give way one day to some fanatic we will at least have postponed the outbreak of a war and that is indeed a gain.” Quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936-1939 (London, 1977), p. 30; Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 294.
13 Quoted in Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York, 1983), p. 341.
14 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace (New York, 1987), p. 55.
15 Ibid.
16 Quoted in ibid., p. 65
17 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower,” Foreign Affairs 78 (March/April 1999): 35-49.
18 X [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, reprinted in James F. Hoge Jr. and Fareed Zakaria, eds., The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (New York, 1997), p. 165.
19 The United Kingdom and France had the greatest capability to project force overseas, but their capacity was much smaller than that of the United States.
20 For that matter, this is also the view commonly found in American textbooks.
21 Steven Everts, “Unilateral America, Lightweight Europe?: Managing Divergence in Transatlantic Foreign Policy,” working paper, Centre for European Reform, February 2001.
22 Notwithstanding the sizable British contribution to military operations in Iraq.
23 The poll, sponsored by the German Marshall Fund and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, was taken between June 1 and July 6, 2002. Asked to identify which “possible threats to vital interests” were “extremely important,” 91 percent of Americans listed “international terrorism” as opposed to 65 percent of Europeans. On “Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction,” the gap was 28 points, with 86 percent of Americans identifying Iraq as an “extremely important” threat compared to 58 percent of Europeans. On “Islamic fundamentalism,” 61-49; on “military conflict between Israel and Arab neighbors,” 67-43; on “tensions between India and Pakistan,” 54-32; on “development of China as a world power,” 56-19; on “political turmoil in Russia,” 27-15.
24 Everts, “Unilateral America, Lightweight Europe?”
25 Charles Grant, “European Defence Post-Kosovo?,” working paper, Centre for European Reform, June 1999, p. 2.
26 The comment was by former State Department adviser Charles Maechling Jr., quoted in Thomas W. Lippman, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy (Boulder, CO, 2000), p. 165.
27 Address by Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk to the Council on Foreign Relations, April 22, 1999, quoted in ibid., p. 183.
28 Tim Garden and John Roper, “Pooling Forces,” Centre for European Reform, December 1999.
29 Christoph Bertram, Charles Grant, and François Heisbourg, ”European Defence: The Next Steps,” Centre for European Reform, CER Bulletin 14 (October/November 2000).
30 Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War (
New York, 2001), p. 449.
31 Americans also didn’t want their pilots flying at low altitudes where they were more likely to be shot down. Ibid.
32 Garden and Roper, “Pooling Forces.”
33 Clark, Waging Modern War, pp. 420, 421. “The lack of legal authority,” Clark recalls, “caused almost every NATO government initially to reject Secretary Cohen’s appeal to authorize a NATO threat” prior to the outbreak of war in early 1999.
34 Ibid., p. 449.
35 Ibid., p. 426.
36 As Clark wryly reports, “No one laughed.” Ibid., p. 417.
37 Ibid., p. 430.
38 John Vinocur, “On Both War and Peace, the EU Stands Divided,” International Herald Tribune, December 17, 2001.
39 Europeans insist that there are certain structural realities in their national budgets, built-in limitations to any significant increases in defense spending. But if Europe were about to be invaded, would its politicians insist that defense budgets could not be raised because this would violate the terms of the EU’s growth and stability pact? If Germans truly felt threatened, would they insist nevertheless that their social welfare programs be left untouched?
40 Fischer speech at Humboldt University in Berlin, May 12, 2000.
41 Robert Cooper, The Observer, April 7,2002.
42 See Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence, KS, 1999), pp. 200-201.
43 Speech by Romano Prodi at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, May 29, 2001.
44 Everts, “Unilateral America, Lightweight Europe?” p. 10.
45 Chris Patten, “From Europe with Support,” Yediot Ahronot, October 28, 2002.
46 The common American argument that European policy toward Iraq and Iran has been dictated by financial considerations is only partly right. Are Europeans greedier than Americans? Do American corporations not influence American policy in Asia and Latin America as well as in the Middle East? The difference is that American strategic judgments sometimes conflict with and override financial interests. For the reasons suggested in this essay, that conflict is much less common for Europeans.
47 See Gerard Baker, “Europe’s Three Ways of Dealing with Iraq,” Financial Times, October 17, 2002, p. 17.
48 Fischer speech at Humboldt University, May 12, 2000.
49 Prodi speech at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, May 29, 2001.
50 Charles Grant, “A European View of ESDP,” working paper, Centre for European Policy Studies, April 2001.
51 As Grant observes, “An EU that was less impotent militarily would have more diplomatic clout.” Grant, “European Defence,” p. 2.
52 Dominique Moisi, Financial Times, March 11, 2002.
53 Timothy Garton Ash, New York Times, April 9, 2002.
54 Quoted in David Ignatius, “France’s Constructive Critic,” Washington Post, February 22, 2002.
55 As the historian John Lamberton Harper has put it, FDR wanted ”to bring about a radical reduction in the weight of Europe” and thereby make possible “the retirement of Europe from world politics.” Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge, UK, 1996), pp. 79, 3.
56 William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940 (New York, 1952), p. 14.
57 Quoted in Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction (New York, 1957), p. 142; Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 396.
58 Cooper, The Observer, April 7, 2002.
59 Quoted in Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 452.
60 Quoted in James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York, 1998), p. 107.
61 Ibid., p. 108.
62 Quoted in Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton, p. 195.
63 Quoted in Edward Handler, America and Europe in the Political Thought of John Adams (Cambridge, MA, 1964), p. 102.
64 “Half a Billion Americans?,” The Economist, August 22, 2002.
65 Quoted in Chace, Acheson, p. 150.
66 Quoted in ibid., p. 157.
67 Quoted in Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 416.
68 Quoted in Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 425.
69 X [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” p. 169.
70 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York, 1962), p. 134
71 Quoted in Harper, American Visions of Europe, pp. 114-15.
About Of Paradise and Power
From a leading scholar of our country’s foreign policy, the brilliant essay about America and the world that has caused a storm in international circles now expanded into book form.
European leaders, increasingly disturbed by U.S. policy and actions abroad, feel they are headed for what the New York Times (July 21, 2002) describes as a “moment of truth.” After years of mutual resentment and tension, there is a sudden recognition that the real interests of America and its allies are diverging sharply and that the transatlantic relationship itself has changed, possibly irreversibly. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension.
This past summer, in Policy Review, Robert Kagan reached incisively into this impasse to force both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Tracing the widely differing histories of Europe and America since the end of World War II, he makes clear how for one the need to escape a bloody past has led to a new set of transnational beliefs about power and threat, while the other has perforce evolved into the guarantor of that “postmodern paradise” by dint of its might and global reach. This remarkable analysis is being discussed from Washington to Paris to Tokyo. It is esssential reading.
Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he is director of the U.S. Leadership Project. In addition to a monthly column in the Washington Post, he is the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 and coeditor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988.
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
ALFRED A. KNOPF, PUBLISHER, NEW YORK
www.aaknopf.com
1/2003
Praise for Robert Kagan’s
Of Paradise and Power
“For its brilliant juxtaposition of strategy and philosophy, of the realities of power and the ethics of power, of the American ideal of justice and the European ideal of peace, Robert Kagan’s small book is a big book. Nothing like this has been written since the death of Raymond Aron.”
—LEON WIESELTIER
“Though in the past we have often disagreed, I consider this essay one of those seminal treatises without which any discussion of European-American relations would be incomplete and which will shape that discussion for years to come.”
—DR. HENRY KISSINGER
“Bob Kagan’s provocative and thoughtful essay is required reading for everyone concerned about the future of transatlantic relations. Ever controversial, Kagan’s critical contribution to understanding American and European views of world order will be discussed and debated for years to come. Although not everyone will agree with Kagan’s analysis, readers will benefit from its clarity, insight, and historical force.”
—SENATOR JOHN McCAIN
“This refreshing essay results from careful thought combined with critical information. Read it and you will think more deeply about this important arena.”
—GEORGE P. SHULTZ,
Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University
“Anyone looking for an intellectual primer to explain the geopolitical forces at work in the Iraqi conflict should order a copy of Robert Kagan’s book Of Paradise and Power.”
—DOMINIC LAWSON,
The Sun
day Telegraph
“Brilliant.”
—FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2003 by Robert Kagan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
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A shorter version of this essay originally appeared as an article entitled “Power and Weakness” in Policy Review (June/July 2002).
ISBN 1-4000-4093-0
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Published February 5, 2003
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