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Today In Our American Meritocracy

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If you have the right connections and the right kind of worldview, like Robert Kagan, being disastrously wrong about everything is never a bar to getting a cover story to share your thoughts about how the country can make yet more disastrous mistakes.  Presumably this goes for your relatives and friends too.

You may remember Kagan making his reputation (such as it is) with the anti-wisdom of his puerile book, America is From Mars, Europe is From Venus, Now Let’s Blow Up A Lot of People For Reasons To Be Determined Later. Stephen Holmes’s review is not merely useful for its decimation of a largely forgotten book, but its analysis of a deeply pernicious worldview that is very much with us:

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.

The United States’ unrivaled military power is not just a “tool.” It is also a warped lens distorting the way the Bush administration defines the direst threats facing the country. Acute problems that cannot be addressed by a unilateral deployment of American military power (such as North Korea’s horrifying slide toward becoming a serial proliferator of nuclear weapons) get much less sustained attention than problems (such as Iraqi noncompliance with UN resolutions) that can be addressed unilaterally and militarily. Oil dependency, underinvestment in foreign-language skills and global warming are three disparate examples of neglected national-security threats that are not made any less acute simply because they cannot be managed by unilateral military force.

And yet, it’s the Kagans rather than the Holmeses who will get the cover space from The New Republic.

…I like this, from njorl in comments:

How many Kagans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Three, one to say how well it is going, one to say how nice the room will look when it is well-lit and one to tell the workmen that with enough force the bulb can be screwed directly into the ceiling plaster.

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