Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sat for this 36-minute interview recently,
with Charlie Rose. Kagan sees China & Russia raising a new, daunting challenge to global democracy: functioning, economically prosperous autocracies, with populations willing to accept dictatorial government, including control of broadcast media and Internet access, so long as it produces acceptable economic and social results. The post-Cold War dream of a world made safe for liberal democratic capitalism has thus been dashed.
Nationalism, supposedly dealt a fatal blow by economic and communications globalization and the growth of multilateral institutions like the European Union, is now resurgent. Russia yearns for a return to superpower status, its leaders and its people seething with resentment at the loss of national prestige with the collapse of the Soviet Union. China sees itself emerging to retake its rightful place on the world stage, after two centuries of humiliation. Patterns of rivalry between China and Japan are being repeated; China is tilting toward Pakistan, while India and Japan tilt toward the United States. India seeks to escape the residual effects of British colonialism, despite its manifest benefits of India's political development. Kagan cites Lord Palmerston's famous 19th century aphorism about nations having neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, merely permanent interests. Kagan says that while true, a nation's perceptions of its interest are dynamic, not static, and thus can change over time, as circumstances appear to dictate. Kagan warns:
[N]ations are never entirely satisfied.When one horizon has been crossed, a new horizon always beckons. What was once unimaginable becomes imaginable, then desirable. Desire becomes ambition, and ambition becomes interest. More powerful nations are not necessarily more contented nations. They may actually be less contented.
Russia and China may be adopted the model of Meiji Japan, which around 1870 began to adopt Western institutions not in pursuit of global harmony, but to further their own nationalist ambitions. Writes Kagan:
Power changes people, and it changes nations. It changes their perceptions of themselves, of their interests, of their proper standing in the world, of how they expect to be treated by others....
Nations have historically considered honor and price worth fighting for, often at the sacrifice of economic interests, and disputed territories have often been the cause of war.
Kagan regards Islamism as a "hopeless dream"; Iran, true to its Persian heritage, seeks dominance in the Mideast. Like Sunni radical Islam, militant Iranian Shia Islam is driven by anger at their displacement on the world stage for three centuries. Buttressing Kagan's view re militant Islam's decline in appeal, however, are figures provided in the latest column by foreign policy maven Fareed Zakharia. FZ cites an independent study from Canada's Simon Fraser University, that contradicts studies by the American government that show rising terror attacks. The SFU study excludes casualties in Iraq, which is a war zone, and finds that since 2001 there has been a 40 percent drop in terror attacks. FZ notes also that Islamists do not wear well with those who meet them up close. By 2007 support for al-Qaeda stood at 1 percent in Afghanistan; between August 2o07 and January 2008, support for al-Qaeda in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province fell from 70 to 4 percent.
FZ concludes that our fear of terror is excessive. Were it not for WMD terror prospects, he might well be right. But FZ also, inadvertently, refutes one of his principal debating points, one he has made often in the past five years: that the Iraq War has ruined America's posture worldwide. True, America did take a severe hit, but Islamism will lose popularity contests almost always, because most people (including, to be fair, FZ) realize that the Islamists are so much worse than the Americans.
Kagan notes re America that its reputation for increasing arrogance was forged in the Bush I and Clinton years. Between 1989 and 2001 America intervened militarily overseas more than ever in a similar time frame, an average of one intervention every 16 months. Madeleine Albright publicly bragged that America was "the indispensable nation." While in many contexts the statement was, and remains, true, it was hardly diplomatic to tell the world out loud. Europeans championed aggressive use of international law to achieve humanitarian aims, at times trumping traditional national interest in sovereignty; autocracies like China and Russia regarded such trends (rightly) as a threat to them, not just to Third World flyspeck nations.
Kagan concludes that there is no longer an "international community" with common interests. The Kosovo War of 1999 proved that, when NATO sidestepped a Russian veto in the Security Council--a entity that, Kagan says, "is slipping back into its long coma" after its brief post-Cold War revival. Nor does fighting terror make Russia and China our true partners: Russia fights terror in Chechnya and China in its western province of Sinkiang (the Muslim Uighurs--China is clamping down on even non-violent Uighurs, using the upcoming Olympics as an excuse to escalate repression), but both countries see Mideast terror as handcuffing America, and thus increasing Russian and Chinese influence in the world.
Yet American's influence is rising, with Europe, fearful of Russia, and India, fearful of China, moving towards our orbit. Kagan offers a caveat: "But even if the United States were superhuman in it wisdom, even if it behaved morally and capably at all times, American power would still inspire jealousy and hostility and, in some quarters, even fear." Yet, Kagan concludes: "in most of the vital regions of the world...the United States is still the keystone in the arch. Remove it, and the arch collapses."
Democracies must, Kagan writes, come together to win the struggle for influence waged with the autocracies, but the battle will take decades to be resolved. It in effect returns the world to the Great Game of 19th century politics, with postmodernist politics of the 21st century largely eclipsed. Kagan does not explicitly state, but the democracies operate under handicaps that their 19th century forbears did not face: democratic publics suspicious of non-idealistic policies and (understandably) averse to fighting wars, and elites (media, business and NGOs) hostile to the very democracies who make their rise to power possible. Thus no American president can operate with the impunity that British, French and German statesmen did in the 19th century. This is hardly all bad, but it is hardly all good, either.
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