Even Robert Kagan, the King Neocon himself, is not so much walking back his bellicose imperialism as running away from it:
In 1997, Kagan co-founded Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank that lobbied for a muscular foreign policy and the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony. The group exercised its considerable influence to push regime change in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Kagan’s advocacy has always been based on a belief that the world would collapse into disorder without American leadership, even though U.S. military misadventures have repeatedly destabilized parts of the world.
So, is Robert Kagan now reconsidering his past hawkishness? I interviewed him to find out. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Martin Di Caro: Are you undergoing a conversion? Is that fair?
Robert Kagan: I don’t think so, because I never denied that blowback was a reality. In fact, my writing shows that when the United States is out there acting in the world, Americans tend to not even be aware of the effect of American power on other nations. And so they’re constantly shocked whenever the use of American power leads to a response. The best example is Japan and Pearl Harbor. Many Americans acted like it was out of the blue when Japan attacked us when, in fact, the U.S. pursued policies that were likely to lead to a Japanese attack. The same was true of 9/11 in the sense that it was at least in part a response to the American presence in the Middle East.
The question is, do you act even though you know that there is going to be blowback because the stakes are worth it. So, I never doubted it and, as I say, recognizing the effect of American power on other nations is an important part of my history.
Di Caro: Yet for decades you have advocated for U.S. interventionism and, in the case of the Iraq invasion of 2003, a preemptive war…
Kagan: Wait a minute. Can we stop right there? When you say that I’ve advocated for intervention for decades, what in particular are you talking about? I certainly supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but it’s not like I was just calling for intervention everywhere at all times. That’s a shorthand that you use, but it’s what people think, you know?
Di Caro: Do you reject the neoconservative label?
Kagan: I do reject it, not only because it has taken on connotations that I think are frankly antisemitic, but because it’s just a bad description of what I am. What I am is a liberal. Lib-er-al. My foreign policy is liberal. If you look back on the history of American foreign policy, the people who have pursued the policies that I favor have always tended to be progressive and liberal. And conservative foreign policy in America has always tended to be in the direction of restraint. I worked for the neoconservatives. I worked for Irving Kristol. They were called neoconservatives because they had been on the left and then they were newly on the right.
Now, all of this is absolutely absurd, as Simplicius notes.
Someone is extremely defensive over the repudiation of what is essentially his life’s work. This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to salvage credibility. In accordance with the extremely tetchy tenor of his responses, Kagan again reverts to knee-jerk defensiveness… It’s clear he realizes how bad he looks in hindsight and can’t help but adopt an almost whiny tone in attempting to rewrite his key role in America’s geopolitical depletion.
I’ve read Kagan’s books, and he’s been methodically retreating from the idea that America’s military can impose satanic imperialism on the world for nearly 20 years now, despite his previous advocacy of it. The jungle, as he calls it, has proven to be significantly more resistant to the order he wishes to impose out of the chaos that he, his wife, and the other neocons have been causing for at least the last 40 years.