The Report on the American Decline That Obama Stressed

It is well known that strange love affairs come about as a result of politics. In this case, the couple is Robert Kagan and Barack Obama. Kagan is one of the most influential intellectuals of American conservatism, and not only because of what is surfacing in the primaries. Intellectual sophistication is not the Republicans’ specialty. Kagan’s texts have a profound and lasting impact on the way in which Americans see the world. In “Power and Weakness,” he coined one of the statements that made him famous: “Europeans are from Venus [the goddess of love], and Americans are from Mars [the god of war].” In “The Return of History and the End of Dreams,” he defied the idea that the post-Cold War order brought irreversible success for liberal democracy and market economy or, as Fukuyama called it, the “end of history.”

Kagan now offers a very interesting text, “Against the Myth of the American Decline,” a prelude to a new book, “The World that America Made.” In his article, Kagan dismantles point by point the thesis of the American decline. “Decline?” he asks. “Compared to when?” And, above all, “Compared to whom?”

Very effectively, Kagan takes us by the hand to the so-called world in which the U.S. is hegemonic, showing us that the idea that there existed a time when Washington could do what it wanted is a myth. From Sputnik to the Korean war, through the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam, the U.S. suffered greatly, says Kagan, to impose its will.

According to Kagan, the idea that any time in the past was better is fallacious. The same is true of the rise of China. Of course China is booming, he says, but economic growth is one thing and becoming a superpower is another. China is not one, Kagan reminds us, and neither does it want to be one, he insists. And even if it wanted to be, it would have to face extraordinary difficulties (not the least of them would be that all its neighbors would unite against it). The decline is not a reality, it’s an option, Kagan concludes. If we believe in the decline, we will end up seeing it come to us.

Analysts say that Obama devoured the report, which he stressed profusely, commenting on it point by point to his advisers. He even cited it in his State of the Union address on Jan. 24 when he said, “Anyone who says that America is in decline or that our influence is declining does not know what they are talking about.”

No objection, of course, were it not that Kagan is advising Romney on foreign policy, which is very visible in the fact that the White Paper of the Romney campaign endorses Kagan’s thesis (the paper is probably even drafted by Kagan). In it, Romney accuses Obama of “thinking that America is in decline.”

It’s either one of the two, or Kagan’s text is magnificent and has convinced the president and the leading presidential candidate (the dream of any analyst), or it is superfluous enough to convince two people that need to be convinced beforehand of the same thing. I’ll leave it to their election.