Robert Kagan, Obama’s Neoconservative Guru

Make no mistake, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, calculated to the millimeter the agenda of his “off the record” meeting with American TV anchors this past week. Obama spent ten minutes discussing the article “Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline” by Robert Kagan, a neoconservative historian, who is one of the advisors to Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, on foreign policy. The Democrat discussed Kagan paragraph by paragraph, as reported in the blog “The Cable,” a report in the magazine Foreign Policy.

The article, in The New Republic, is based on a book which a scholar from the Brookings Institute released on Feb. 7, “The World America Made.” In his book and in his article Kagan refutes the thesis now in vogue, that the decline of American power is inevitable.

And Obama makes use of Kagan to rebut Romney’s accusations that the American president conforms to the theory of the supposed decline of American power on the world scene, and that he has a mandate to apologize for himself in front of international leaders.

In a December debate, Romney fired: “Our president thinks that America is in decline. It is if he’s president. It’s not if I’m president.”

In his plan for conducting foreign policy, Romney states: “A perspective has been gaining currency, including within high councils of the Obama administration, that regards the United States as a power in decline. And not only is the United States regarded as in decline, but that decline is seen as both inexorable and a condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”

During the campaign, Obama arrived and was seen carrying Fareed Zakaria’s book, “The Post-American World.” The photo-op was part of the message of multilateralism that he had wanted to communicate. But now, in the face of Republican criticism, he wants to distance himself from the formulation of the “rise of the rest” and polish his credentials as a great devotee of a long-lived American hegemony (take away, American exceptionalism).

In his speech about the United States, the Democratic president stated “The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe.” He continued: “From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back. Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Kagan’s article in The New Republic is very interesting.

He argues that the USA has already passed through various periods as difficult as the present one, without, in the end, losing its position of global power. Pinpointing a recent book by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, “That Used to Be Us,” Kagan writes, “Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis.”

He begins his article saying: “Is the United States in decline, as so many seem to believe these days? Or are Americans in danger of committing pre-emptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of their own declining power?”

In the questions which demonstrate the power of a country — the size and its economic influences in comparison with other powers; the size of its military power facing other nations; the level of its influence in foreign policy matter within the international system — the U.S. has not worsened, adds the scholar.

He goes on to say that a recession does not make for a decline of a superpower “…just as one swallow does not make a summer.”*

“The United States suffered deep and prolonged economic crises in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s.” In each of these cases, the country recuperated and, in reality, emerged “in a stronger position relative to other powers than before the crisis.”

The portion of the world’s GDP that the U.S. accounts for has remained constant in the past four decades at about 25 percent.

China and India, according to Kagan, will grow at a cost to Europe, not to the United States.

In military capability, the USA continues to be unequaled, he continues, spending $600 billion dollars a year on defense — without including the spending in Iraq and Afghanistan — a higher level of spending than all other powers combined.

Kagan tries to make exceptions to the rise of Brazil, alongside China, India Russia and Turkey.

“Brazil’s share of the Global GDP was a little over 2 percent in 1990 and remains a little over 2 percent today,” he says. He continues by saying that the growth of the Brazilian economy, or of the Indian economy, does not diminish American global power of the United States: “Both nations are friendly, and India is increasingly a strategic partner of the United States. If America’s future competitor is likely to be China, then a richer, more powerful India will be an asset, not a liability.”

Kagan disagrees with the thesis of various declinists that the USA will not be able to use its “soft power” in the future to get other nations to do what is in Washington’s interests, as in the past. But could it be that it still will be able to do so?

For Kagan, there is a false nostalgia, a romantic notion, that the USA always got everything it wanted in past.

In the Cold War, for example, there were achievements such as the Marshall Plan, NATO and the Bretton Woods system, but there also were enormous setbacks in the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, which was a disaster for American interests in the region, “a product of forces which the USA tried to influence but could not,” as the ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson said. **

Kagan cites various similar events, conveniently forgotten by apologists for the past glory of the United States. He recognizes there is a risk that the country is in decline, but still does not treat it as a “fait accompli.” He remembers when Japan and Russia were once on the “inevitable” road to replace the USA as a superpower, and derailed.

Could it be that the same will occur with China?

* Editor’s Note: Kagan’s article uses the word “spring.”

**Editor’s Note: The original quotation, while accurately translated, could not be verified.