The Kagan Subtext
Under the headline "The End of the End of History," (but behind a paywall, I think) TNR carries a long piece, maybe an excerpt, from a new book by Robert Kagan. The last line:
The world's democracies need to begin thinking about how they can protect their interests and advance their principles in a world in which these are, once again, powerfully contested.
It's unfair to judge a book by an article, but what strikes me about the latter is how it strains to renovate a scenario for major embattlement by conjuring a proper target for unilateralist belligerence. The curtain rises on... the autocracies of the in- or resurgent great powers, Russia and China.
I can't help but wonder whether what we're getting here is a polished-off brief for the battered neocon project. Reader, don't think that you have to retire your Martian belligerence just because the Iraq war was a boundless disaster. Don't despair. The Cold War will be back.
Comments (7)
Just as people who grew up in a divided, abusive household have often been observed to recreate that situation over and over again in their adult relationships, so many of my generation and Todd's generation who grew up during the Cold War seem fatally attracted to the Cold War outlook, and constantly seek to create it anew through their political activity.
A lot of folks - and not just neocons, but a whole raft of different kinds of liberal interventionists and messianic democrats - seem quite nostalgic and heartsick over the passing of the Cold War. That there should be some grand, global, bipolar ideological contest just seems like the most natural thing in the world to them. And they are at a loss as to how to think about the world with the old global patterns gone. They miss the simple-minded but stark intellectual dualities, the spy vs. spy intrigues and romances, and the two easily intelligible, hierarchical social and political world-systems that the Cold War created. Everything was so ... organized.
I think they even miss the nightmare parts. Fearing every day that the world might be incinerated on a global scale, and plunged into a nuclear winter dark age, tends to focus ones anxieties and energies, and gives meaning to one's drab existence.
No wonder these people can't wait to get it on again with somebody and declare a new Master Enemy, whether it be the new Sino-Asian Yellow Peril, the Islamo-something-or-other Menace, or the Brown & Black Invasion from the Barbarous Southern Hemisphere. And of course we can always go back to hating on Russia full time.
April 9, 2008 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a real danger of another cold war with Russia and China. It is not just the neocons and other wingnuts in the Bush admin pushing it either.
Expansion of Nato into the Ukraine and Georgia and building the missile defence shield in Poland and Czech are the clearest provocations against Russia. What is somewhat disappointing is that this is a story that is largely being ignored in the progressive blog world. To the extent that Russia is discussed mostly it is about the antidemocratic tendencies in Putin's Russia. This is sad. I don't think people realize that they are being manipulated by the same prowar forces that got us into the Iraq debacle when they promote this propaganda. I could also add that the major benefactors for the current anti-Chinese demonstrations over the Tibet issue is the prowar party. It was encouraging to see Steve Clemons reasonable views here at the Cafe over this issue.
We should stay alert. We instinctively are repelled by imperial war but can be seduced when war is packaged as humanitarian intervention.
April 9, 2008 1:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Kagan obviously got all he can out of IRAQ and now the public has turned against his war, so he needs a new enemy to warn against.
Conservatives, right wingers, people like Kagan
know there is a large segement of the public that needs an enemy to rail against in order to make their lives complete; communists, liberals, senior citizens, women, minorities, environmentalists, the lame, and the poor, are all targeted as the 'enemy of the day' by these cretins as they use this tactic to enlist the
bigots, the homophobes, the anti semites, the bullies, the criminal element and the psychotics into joining their movement.
Yep, prepare yourself for Cold War II.
April 9, 2008 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
What principles? Do we have principles? It's getting hard to tell the difference between Putin's principles and neocon principles. Do we still have any of the Bill of Rights left?
April 9, 2008 6:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why do people pay this clown?
April 9, 2008 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Cold War is back already, and the U.S. started it. The Bush administration's plans for a ballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe have already caused Russia to increase armaments production and rattle its saber with its neighbors. Won't be long till we'll have a full-blown arms race again, especially of the Department of Energy gets its way and we start going into overdrive building new nukes.
Anything to keep the military industrial complex going, I guess. Maybe it'll help the recession...?
On second thought, maybe not, with those jokers running the show. They'll find some way to botch it, I've no doubt.
April 10, 2008 3:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
The pushing for hostilities with China and Russia by the neo-cons are vanity positions. Our dependence on China is so major that, if they wanted to, they could produce a Depression in this country tomorrow. As for the European dependency on Russian natural gas, we already know how that can smooth out friction.
It is a non-starter, one of those dreambook images for the neo-vampiric wing of the foreign policy establishment - the true monsters, the vicarious killers, overfed, overindulged, ignorant, and powerful only because D.C. has become a horrorshow of corruption. Men who, like the libertines in Sade's One Hundred Days of Sodom, have grown so impotent that they need to imagine ever more bloody scenarios in order merely to get an erection.
April 10, 2008 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink