Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan
Born	September 26, 1958 (age 66) Athens, Greece
Political party	Independent (since 2016) Republican (before 2016)

Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958) is a U.S. neoconservative columnist, author, co-founder of the former Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Throughout his career he has promoted the concept of U.S. global hegemony, stating that the U.S. plays the "unusual" role of preserver and defender of a liberal world order and must actively maintain this role if it is to preserve a world that is friendly to U.S. interests, likening this to "gardening" in his book The Jungle Grows Back. He is married to former NATO ambassador Victoria Nuland.

Kagan has argued that only the United States has the capacity and the unique geographical advantages to provide global security and that "there is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States." His former think tank PNAC aimed to "rally support for American global leadership" and "accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles".

Career

From 1984-1988, Kagan was the principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George Shultz of the Reagan administration. From 1988 to 2010, Kagan was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kagan has also been Deputy for Policy at the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs and been a contributing columnist for The Washington Post and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, as well as authoring several books. He helped establish the now-defunct PNAC think tank in 1997.

Views

U.S.-led liberal world order

In Kagan's view, the "great accomplishment" of the U.S.-led liberal world order since the end of the Second World War is what he describes as the avoidance of great power conflicts. Kagan states that China and Russia pose the greatest challenge to what he claims is the "relatively peaceful and prosperous international order created and sustained by the United States" and that if they were to gain hegemony in their respective spheres of influence, "the world would return to the condition it was in at the end of the 19th century." Kagan states that the greatest check on China and Russia's ambitions has been the combined military power of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia.

While taking a stance in support of a U.S.-led liberal word order, Kagan characterizes it as a position necessarily maintained by force and which is founded not on any "right" but only on the conviction that such as system is the most just: "[I]n the international sphere, Americans have had to act as judge, jury, police, and, in the case of military action, executioner. What gives the United States the right to act on behalf of a liberal world order? In truth, nothing does, nothing beyond the conviction that the liberal world order is the most just. [...] A liberal world order, like any world order, is something that is imposed, and as much as we in the West might wish it to be imposed by superior virtue, it is generally imposed by superior power."

In various speeches and writings, Kagan has compared U.S. foreign policy to the behavior of fictional mob boss Hyman Roth, for example stating in his article "Why the World Needs America" that "American economic dominance has been welcomed by much of the world because, like the mobster Hyman Roth in 'The Godfather,' the U.S. has always made money for its partners" noting in another similar comment, "In a way the United States pursued what I like to call the 'Hyman Roth' approach to foreign policy [...] Hyman Roth 'always made money for his partners.' That's how come he survived as long as he did."

War on terror

In September of 2001, Kagan wrote in response to 9/11 that war should be declared immediately by Congress without having to name a country. He further wrote, in October of 2002, that Afghanistan was only part of a "wide ranging war," merely the "opening battle" considering what is waiting on the horizon.

Against Donald Trump and "America First" policy

In 2017, Kagan wrote that the election of Trump was a signal of U.S. voters' "unwillingness to continue upholding the world order". Kagan characterized "America First" policies as avoiding the role of the U.S. in upholding the liberal word order, which would lead to a series of compounding negative effects on said order's stability, with the "abdication by the United States of its global responsibilities" triggering "more aggressive revisionism by the dissatisfied powers" which he argues would "exacerbate the sense of weakness and helplessness and the loss of confidence of the liberal world, which will in turn increase the sense on the part of the great power autocracies that this is their opportunity to reorder the world to conform to their interests." Kagan suggested that Trump's term could be a "critical inflection point" that could potentially portend the collapse of the U.S.-led liberal world order if "America First" policies which prioritized the U.S.'s "bottom line" over maintaining the global order were pursued.