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Larry King’s Interviewing Style? Brutally Honest.

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Shorter Robert Kagan: “If I had to pin down what makes a man honest, I’d have to say it’s being a relentless kiss-ass who refuses to change his positions irrespective of how many discomfirming facts subsequently appear. (And if he does start to change his positions in a desperate bid to save a pathetic primary campaign, well…look over there, it’s the almost equally honest Zell Miller!)”

This reminds me of Stephen Holmes’ classic decimation of Kagan’s unjustly famous book People From the United States Drive Like This, But People From Europe Drive Like This. Holmes’ laying out of the fundamental idiocy of the neocon belief that there’s no problem that conventional military power can’t solve remains all-too-relevant today:

That Kagan’s argument here has some force will be recognized even by those who strenuously disagree with it. The same cannot be said for the emotionally charged mythology with which he decorates it. Just as prewar German nationalists loved to oppose Helden to Händler (Teutonic “heroes” to English “merchants”), so Kagan enjoys contrasting masculine Americans with effeminate Europeans: “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” Gun-shy Europeans are able to putter around their Kantian garden only because lethally armed Americans are out there patrolling the Hobbesian jungle to prevent the “post-historical paradise” from being destroyed by various ayatollahs, Saddam Husseins and Kim Jong Ils. Kagan brings his gendered interpretation of United States-European Union relations to a surprising culmination when, in his final paragraphs, he reinvents himself as a marriage counselor, urging the quarreling couple to kiss and make up, for their own sake and the world’s.

This is amusing, in its way, all the more so because it is basically unserious. Unfortunately, Kagan’s more sober attempt to trace trans-Atlantic discord to differences in military capacity founders on the experience of the Cold War, when Americans and Europeans agreed on a definition of a common threat even though their military capacities were just as asymmetrical as they are today. Countries that are militarily weak will sometimes defer quietly to allies that are militarily strong. At other times they will strenuously dissent. Capabilities alone, therefore, do not bear the explanatory burden that Kagan places upon them. Moreover, a much simpler explanation suggests itself. Europeans no longer feel that the United States is protecting them from a dangerous threat because the likelihood of a military invasion from the East has disappeared. Without U.S. help, Kagan claims, Europe will be unable to prevent itself from “being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of ‘moral consciousness.'” But who, exactly, is about to overrun Europe “spiritually as well as physically”? There may be a good answer to this question, but if Kagan knows, he isn’t telling. Lack of a clear and convincing answer to the “What military threat?” question explains tensions in the alliance more economically than differences in military capacity.

[…]

The book’s basic argument keeps crumbling under inspection because it rests on a sleight of hand. Its elementary fallacy lies in a selective application of its theoretical premise. A country’s foreign policy can become unrealistic if specially favored instruments prevent policy-makers from facing up to threats that must be addressed by other means. From this true premise, however, we cannot infer, as Kagan does, that Europe’s meager military capacities make European assessment of threats unrealistic while the United States’ formidable military capacities make American assessment of threats realistic. The illusions of the jungle are no less pernicious than the illusions of the garden. Kagan touches on this point when he allows, “The stronger may, in fact, rely on force more than they should.” But he does not integrate this insight into his basic argument. Indeed, he devotes no attention at all to the role of irrationality in the making of American foreign policy, even though he knows full well that a missionary impulse pervades Washington’s understanding of the United States’ global role, spoiling his clean contrast between realistic Americans and utopian Europeans.

A militarily weak society will typically underestimate problems that cannot be solved by civilian means alone. Just so, a militarily powerful society will typically underestimate problems that cannot be solved by military means alone. Both mistakes are possible and both can be fatal, but Kagan pays attention only to the former. This is why, despite the occasional justice of his remarks about European self-delusion, he comes across more as a Bush-administration apologist than as a foreign-policy analyst. Are Paris and Berlin really more “in denial” than Washington? Do Europeans have a more distorted view of the contemporary security environment than Americans? Kagan thinks so, but he is wrong.

[…]

But the most striking and by far the most dangerous misperception afflicting Bush’s approach to foreign affairs concerns the war against transnational terrorism. Kagan asserts that Europe “has had little to offer the United States in strategic military terms since the end of the Cold War.” Widely shared inside the administration, this view is based on the premise that the “end of the Cold War did not reduce the salience of military power.” Military power is just as central to American security today as it was during the Cold War — that is what Kagan would have us believe. And after the Cold War, “European military incapacity” means that our former allies have become almost wholly irrelevant to U.S. security. That is the assumption behind this book and, presumably, behind the unfathomably cavalier attitude of the Bush administration toward our European allies.

That this assumption is fallacious is the very least that might be said. The September 11 attacks were partly planned, organized and financed in Europe. The Muslim diaspora communities into which terrorist cells can invisibly blend remain the likeliest staging grounds for future al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. In other words, Europe remains a frontline region in the war against terrorism just as it was in the war against communism. As daily press reports also reveal, the European police have been acting in a perfectly Hobbesian manner, arresting scores of suspected terrorists. In other words, despite his pose as a no-nonsense realist, Kagan has apparently failed to realize the degree to which the contours of American national security have been redrawn since 9-11. The home front and the foreign front have now been disconcertingly blurred. National-security strategy must now operate in a domain where soldiering and policing have become of coequal importance. This profound change helps us understand the erroneous premise of Bush’s foreign policy. In our new security environment, despite the prevailing cliché, the United States is not the world’s only superpower.

That many Bush supporters seem to consider Kagan some kind of major thinker is highly instructive.

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