William Pfaff — Robert Kagan and the Ruin of Ideas

The neo-conservative commentator, Robert Kagan, co-founder in 1997 of the Project for a New American Century, and after that institution crashed amidst the ruins of Iraq, founder of its 2009 successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative, is continuing his crusade for a new Reaganism—which he construes as American world domination. Now it is with a new book, “The World America Made,” summarized in a long article in the May 26 issue of The New Republic, and received in that city with apparent enthusiasm. 

His purpose has always been to put Reaganite foreign policy back on its feet—or what he and other conservatives (neo or otherwise) think Reaganist foreign policy really was, the “defeat” of Soviet Communism, achieved through “moral clarity” and outspending the Soviet Union in arms. Others might say that the USSR collapsed of its own internal contradictions, and because of Mikhail Gorbachev’s moral leadership.

Today the Kagan crusade seeks the defeat of Vladimir Putin’s new Russia through besieging it with new NATO states and economic sanctions. This, of course, is Victoria Nuland’s (Mrs. Kagan’s) department. When not engaged in that effort—currently in difficulty—the Kagan recommendation is that the U.S. confront Chinese power, and other states that abuse human rights, “rogue” states, and Arab terrorists, sweeping all of them into a new American world order.

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Robert Kagan and the Ruin of Ideas
William Pfaff