WASHINGTON, 11 July 2004 — Robert Kagan is a professional writer and a very good one, who uses his impeccable education to the best possible advantage. Unlike many of his fellow neoconservatives, he gets along easily with people and doesn’t argue over nonessentials.
Kagan got his start as principal speechwriter for former Secretary of State George Shultz. Secretary Shultz had his own carefully thought-out agenda, but seemed to get nowhere with the world press. Someone suggested that if he stopped worrying about the Palestinians and focused on the rest of his agenda, things might work out better. They did, and Shultz never looked back. In fact, he seemed almost to have rationalized an entirely new reason for helping the Israelis.
This writer cannot ascertain whether Robert Kagan played any part in Shultz’s new agenda, and if so, when his influence began. What is clear, however, is that Kagan can come up with precisely appropriate words for any occasion. He was and still is a natural speechwriter.
Kagan came by his felicitous turn of phrase honestly, and shares those talents with other members of his family. His father is Yale University historian Donald Kagan, and his brother, Frederick, is a military historian at the US Army Academy.
On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Donald and Frederick Kagan published While America Sleeps. Jim Lobe described the book in an article entitled “Family Ties Connect US Right, Zionists,” published in Pakistan’s English-language newspaper, Dawn. “This was a clarion call on Washington — which was already spending more on arms than the 13 next biggest militaries combined — to increase its defense spending sharply lest it find itself, like Britain in the late 1930s, unable to face down a new Hitler,” Lobe wrote. “Since then, both men have published reams of columns warning that Washington must immediately increase military spending by at least 25 percent to keep up with its global responsibilities.”
Donald and Frederick both are prominent exponents of the neoconservative cause, and both signed the Sept. 20, 2001 open letter to President George W. Bush urging that the war on terrorism include the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack.” Robert Kagan, who earned his B.A. at Yale College and a M.A. degree in public policy and international relations from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and an Alexander Hamilton Fellow in American Diplomatic History at American University in Washington, DC.
In 1981 he was assistant editor of Public Interest magazine. In 1983 Kagan served as foreign policy adviser to Congressman Jack Kemp and as special assistant to the deputy director of the US Information Agency. A member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff in 1984 and 1985, Kagan then served until 1988 as deputy for policy in the State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a foreign service officer and US deputy chief of mission to NATO, currently is Vice President Dick Cheney’s No. 2 foreign policy adviser. “While Nuland enjoys a strong reputation as an independent thinker,” wrote Lobe, “the family connection to Kagan is typical of the extraordinarily tight-knit nature of the regime that has taken control of US foreign policy since 9/11.”
By the time Nuland was assigned to Brussels, Robert was writing a regular column for Rupert Murdoch’s neoconservative The Weekly Standard. Kagan also writes a monthly column for The Washington Post, and has published articles in Foreign Affairs, Commentary, The New York Times, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the National Interest, and the Policy Review.
His first book, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990, was published in 1996 by the Free Press. The book received financial backing from the Bradley Foundation and the Carthage Foundation, two key conservative funders.
Kagan’s expertise was not merely academic: Elliott Abrams had appointed him in 1985 to head the Office of Public Diplomacy, created to push for US support for the Nicaraguan Contras. As Philip H. Burch wrote in 1997, “After the Iran-Contra scandal broke, Abrams pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress. Kagan, however, failed to mention Abram’s illicit activities or his guilty plea in his A Twilight Struggle.” In his final days in office, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Abrams, along with Col. Oliver North and Adm. John Poindexter.
In 2003 Knopf published Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, which made The New York Times best-seller list. Despite that success, it is in Europe that Kagan’s name virtually has become a household word.
As Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote, “if author Robert Kagan could retract one sentence it would be the catch phrase that has come to summarize his view of the current trans-Atlantic rift: ‘Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.’” In Kagan’s view, Europe and America “agree on little and understand one another less and less.” This, he claims, is because Europe has benefited from 60 years of US security guarantees, has not been forced to spend as much on defense as the United States, and is softer when it comes to issues like Iraq and other “rogue states.”
Continued Smith, “For many European analysts, Kagan’s name is nearly as common as George Bush’s or Donald Rumsfeld’s as a symbol of the growing antagonism between the United States and its NATO allies. Many European commentators have seen Kagan as the brains behind a neoconservative American effort to distance itself from what Rumsfeld calls the ‘old Europe’ of Germany and France.”
In a 2002 article for Policy Review, Kagan argued, “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, powering 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.”
Peter Smith described Kagan’s thesis as follows: “Europeans’ experience with World War II was so horrific that they set about forming multilateral structures like the European Union. This was not just for the economic benefits of free trade but to prevent the nationalistic power struggles that so often ravaged the continent. Now, ‘everything they do is multilateral by definition,’” Kagan said, adding that while benefiting from the American security umbrella, Europeans are living in a relative ‘paradise’ of prosperity and peace. “Power is important, particularly American power,” he said, noting that former President Bill Clinton spoke of the ‘indispensable nation.’”
In 1997, following the publication of his book, Kagan became a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Along with The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, he is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. Kristol and Kagan also collaborated on the book, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, published by Encounter Books in 2000, and to which both Donald and Frederick Kagan contributed chapters.
Writing in the March 30, 2003 Boston Globe, Laura Secor described Robert Kagan as “A big man in his early 40s with salt-and-pepper hair and something of a baby face, Kagan possesses an aggressive, rapid-fire intelligence that rarely misses a beat or flubs a syllable. Good-humored and affable, he also exudes the bland personal inscrutability of the government official he once was — in the Reagan State Department, where he was a wunderkind in his mid-20s.”
Continued Secor, “The Bush administration could certainly have tried harder to avoid the break with European allies, Kagan concedes. As he told a crowd of politicians and notables in London in mid-March, there has been undoubtedly a lapse of statesmanship on the American side. No one not in the direct employ of the Bush administration could deny that. The way the administration has handled things couldn’t be better designed to create ill will.” Kagan maintains that the dream of promoting American values through international institutions died with Woodrow Wilson. He consistently supports a hard line, recommending a strategy of “regime change” wherever hostile regimes challenge American interests. In Of Paradise and Power, however, Kagan concedes that the trouble with military might is that it comes with a great temptation for its use.
(Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Magazine.)
