Robert Kagan

Bio: Robert Kagan is an academic researcher from Carnegie Learning. The author has contributed to research in topics: Foreign policy & Power (social and political). The author has an hindex of 15, co-authored 25 publications receiving 2388 citations.

Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order

Abstract: Robert Kagan asserts that on international issues, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus" (p. 3). Picking up on classical gender associations recirculated by John Gray's advice books, this catchphrase projects onto transatlantic relations sexy notions about the supposed differences between men and women. The analogy mobilizes conventional assumptions about the supposed biological determinants of sexual difference in support of what Kagan sees as another essential truth: "The United States and Europe are fundamentally different today" (p. 6). Although Kagan's analysis is in places sophisticated, it relies on narrow, even simplistic, concepts of power, strength, and weakness. While Kagan finds power "the all important question" (p. 3), he considers only military power efficacious. In his supposedly realistic world, neither economic and political pressures, nor cultural influence and ideology (save for ideas about the use of military force) have much impact. Kagan discusses the rise of the Nazis without reference to the Great Depression, which elevated what had remained a minor party during German prosperity. Nor does he mention that until 1939, leaders in the Western democracies appreciated the internal order secured by fascism in Italy and Germany while they worried that another war would spawn communist revolutions. Ignoring such textbook history, Kagan focuses on what he calls the "psychologies of power and weakness": in the inter-war period, "a frightened France" and "the traumatized British" (p. 12) tried "to make a virtue out of weakness" (p. 13). This narrow view of power and motivation fits the book's rhetorical structure: a simplifying, polarized depiction of the post-Cold War era. In this setup, robust Americans act on realism, while less manly Europeans display "fundamental and enduring weakness" (p. 28), military "impotence" (p. 46), and an "anemic" foreign policy (p. 65). Rejecting power, Europeans opt instead for "exuberant idealism" (p. 60) and "more and more shrill..,. attacks on the United States" (p. 100). Kagan stresses Europe's "relative weakness," reiterating the point on almost every page. By depicting Europe's post-1989 decision not to match American spending on advanced weapons as a failure of will that led to "inadequacies" (p. 24), he denigrates non-military power while justifying Washington's actions. "Given a weak Europe ... the United States has no choice but to act unilaterally" (p. 99). Kagan argues that Europeans, sheltered by Washington from the "brutal laws of power politics"(p. 58), are "settling into their postmodern paradise and proselytizing for their doctrines of international law and international institutions" (p. 76). While such "doctrines" appear to the author and to many in Washington as indulgent idealism, to worldly Cold Warriors such as Dean Acheson they appeared as useful adjuncts to American hegemony. Despite the sneer at Europe and at norms of peace and cooperation still held by most Americans, Kagan's ultimate target lies "outside the laws of

Power and Weakness

Abstract: IT IS TIME to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power -- the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power -- American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They ag ree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory -- the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways. It is easier to see the contrast as an American living in Europe. Europeans are more conscious of the growing differences, perhaps because they fear them more. European intellectuals are nearly unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common "strategic culture." The European caricature at its most extreme depicts an America dominated by a "culture of death," its warlike temperament the natural product of a violent society where every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns. But even those who do not make this crude link agree there are profound differences in the way the United States and Europe conduct foreign policy. The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. When confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favor policies of coercion rather than persuasion, emphasizing punitive sanctions over inducements to better behavior, the stick over the carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: They want problems solved, threats eliminated. And, of course, Americans increasingly tend toward unilateralism in international affairs. They are less inclined to act through international institutions such as the United Nations, less inclined to work cooperatively with other nations to pursue common goals, more skeptical about international law and more willing to operate outside its strictures when they deem it necessary, or even merely useful. (1) Europeans insist they approach problems with greater nuance and sophistication. They try to influence others through subtlety and indirection. They are more tolerant of failure, more patient when solutions don't come quickly. They generally favor peaceful responses to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy, and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to appeal to international law, international conventions, and international opinion to adjudicate disputes. They try to use commercial and economic ties to bind nations together. They often emphasize process over result, believing that ultimately process can become substance. This European dual portrait is a caricature, of course, with its share of exaggerations and oversimplifications. One cannot generalize about Europeans: Britons may have a more "American" view of power than many of their fellow Europeans on the continent. …

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Abstract: Addresses the challenges and questions confronting the modern-day liberal democratic world, from the competition among powerful nations to the violent struggle of radical Islam, and calls for a new approach on the part of the liberal world to shape the future.

Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy

Abstract: In foreign policy, conservatives are adrift. They disdain the Wilsonian multilateralism of the Clinton administration; they are tempted by, but so far have resisted, the neoisolationism of Patrick Buchanan; for now, they lean uncertainly on some version of the con servative "realism" of Henry Kissinger and his disciples. Thus, in this year s election campaign, they speak vaguely of replacing Clinton s vacillation with a steady, "adult" foreign policy under Robert Dole. But Clinton has not vacillated that much recently, and Dole was re duced a few weeks ago to asserting, in what was heralded as a major address, that there really are differences in foreign policy between him and the president, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. But the fault is not Doles; in truth, there has been little attempt to set forth the outlines of a conservative view of the world and America's proper role in it. Is such an attempt necessary, or even possible? For the past few years, Americans, from the foreign policy big-thinker to the man on the street, have assumed it is not. Rather, this is supposed to be a time for un shouldering the vast responsibilities the United States acquired at the end of the Second World War and for concentrating its energies at home. The collapse of the Soviet Empire has made possible a "return to

America's Crisis of Legitimacy

Abstract: "WHAT KIND of world order do we want?" asked Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. That this question remains on the minds of many Europeans today is a telling sign of the differences that separate the two sides of the Atlantic-because most Americans have not pondered the question of world order since the war. They will have to. The great transatlantic debate over Iraq was rooted in deep disagreement over world order. Yes, Americans and Europeans debated whether Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat and whether war was the right way to deal with it. A solid majority of Americans answered yes to both questions, while even larger majorities of Europeans answered no. Yet these disagreements reflected more than just differing tactical and analytical assessments of the situation in Iraq. As Dominique de Villepin, France's foreign minister, put it, the struggle was less about Iraq than it was between "two visions of the world." The differences over Iraq were not only about policy. They were also about first principles. Opinion polls taken before, during, and after the war show two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets. Whereas more than 8o percent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. Americans and

Power in international politics

Abstract: The concept of power is central to international relations. Yet disciplin- ary discussions tend to privilege only one, albeit important, form: an actor control- ling another to do what that other would not otherwise do. By showing conceptual favoritism, the discipline not only overlooks the different forms of power in inter- national politics, but also fails to develop sophisticated understandings of how global outcomes are produced and how actors are differentially enabled and constrained to determine their fates. We argue that scholars of international relations should employ multiple conceptions of power and develop a conceptual framework that encourages rigorous attention to power in its different forms. We first begin by producing a tax- onomy of power. Power is the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their circumstances and fate. This general concept entails two crucial, analytical dimensions: the kinds of social rela- tions through which power works (in relations of interaction or in social relations of constitution); and the specificity of social relations through which effects are pro- duced (specific/direct or diffuse/indirect). These distinctions generate our taxonomy and four concepts of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. We then illustrate how attention to the multiple forms of power matters for the analysis of global governance and American empire. We conclude by urging scholars to beware of the idea that the multiple concepts are competing, and instead to see connections between them in order to generate more robust understandings of how power works in international politics.

The Evolution of International Security Studies

Abstract: International Security Studies (ISS) has changed and diversified in many ways since 1945. This book provides the first intellectual history of the development of the subject in that period. It explains how ISS evolved from an initial concern with the strategic consequences of superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, to its current diversity in which environmental, economic, human and other securities sit alongside military security, and in which approaches ranging from traditional Realist analysis to Feminism and Post-colonialism are in play. It sets out the driving forces that shaped debates in ISS, shows what makes ISS a single conversation across its diversity, and gives an authoritative account of debates on all the main topics within ISS. This is an unparalleled survey of the literature and institutions of ISS that will be an invaluable guide for all students and scholars of ISS, whether traditionalist, ‘new agenda’ or critical. • The first book to tell the post-1945 story of International Security Studies and offer an integrated historical sociology of the whole field • Opens the door to a long-overdue conversation about what ISS is and where it should be going • Provides a detailed institutional account of ISS in terms of its journals, departments, think tanks and funding sources

Power and Resistance in the New World Order

Abstract: Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition Personal, Political and Intellectual Influences PART I: SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL THEORY Epistemology, Ontology and the Critique of Political Economy Transnational Historical Materialism and World Order Hegemony, Culture and Imperialism PART II: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORLD ORDER US Hegemony in the 1980s: Limits and Prospects The Power of Capital: Direct and Structural Globalization, Market Civilization and Disciplinary Neo-Liberalism The Geopolitics of the Asian Crisis Law, Justice and New Constitutionalism PART III: GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION AND POLITICAL AGENCY Globalizing Elites in the Emerging World Order Surveillance Power in Global Capitalism The Post-modern Prince Alternatives, Real and Imagined

“Draining the Sea”: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare

Abstract: Why do some wars result in the intentional killing of large numbers of civilians? In this article we examine the incidence of mass killing in all wars from 1945 to 2000. In the statistical analysis of our data set of 147 wars, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis that mass killing is often a calculated military strategy used by regimes attempting to defeat major guerrilla insurgencies. Unlike conventional military forces, guerrilla armies often rely directly on the local civilian population for logistical support. Because guerrilla forces are difficult to defeat directly, governments facing major guerrilla insurgencies have strong incentives to target the guerrillas' civilian base of support. We find that mass killing is significantly more likely during guerrilla wars than during other kinds of wars. In addition, we find that the likelihood of mass killing among guerrilla conflicts is greatly increased when the guerrillas receive high levels of active support from the local population or when the insurgency poses a major military threat to the regime.For their helpful comments on previous versions of this article the authors thank Bear Braumoeller, Alex Downes, Jim Fearon, Hazem Goborah, Stathis Kalyvas, Gary King, Will Lowe, Matthew Krain, Lisa Martin, Manus Midlarsky, Bruce Russett, Nicholas Sambanis, Naunihal Singh, Abdulkader Sinno, Allan Stam, Jeremy Weinstein, and the anonymous reviewers of International Organization. We are also grateful to Wolfgang Moehler for his research assistance. Our coauthor Dylan Balch-Lindsay was killed in an automobile accident on 1 September 2002, cutting short a promising career. He was a gifted young scholar, without whom this article would not have been possible. He is sorely missed by his friends and colleagues. Donations in his name can be sent to the Dylan Balch-Lindsay Memorial Fund for Graduate Education/Foundation of the University of New Mexico, c/o Carol Brown, Department of Political Science, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-1121.