Politics, today and tomorrow
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The Return of History and the End of Dreams Robert Kagan — diplomat, author, American now living abroad — is not one to buy into the Bush administration's mantra that the United States' geopolitical actions are just simply because they are. Kagan is smarter than that. Instead, Kagan the author relies heavily on Kagan the diplomat, especially so in The Return of History and the End of Dreams. The result is a concise book — only 105 pages of text — that expertly describes the world today and, more important, how today's actions are shaping tomorrow's future. An admission: I am a self-avowed Robert Kagan disciple, proudly so. His most recent book, Dangerous Nation, is a landmark work that exquisitely details the United States' longstanding reality of being a nation with imperialistic desires, of a people whose isolationism — particularly in the first 200 years of existence — and desire to react militarily only when provoked is more myth than truth, a distasteful thought to many. In The Return of History, Kagan takes a simple premise — the inevitable differences between democracies and autocracies — and weaves it through the realities of 2008. Reading it is more than a primer on current events. It's a quick-but-intense master's-level study of the world's political existence, and a refreshing reminder that all things international aren't haplessly dictated today by events occurring along the Tigris River. For example, Kagan discusses at length the relationship between the autocratic governments of Putin's Russia and Communist China. They are, the author writes, both rivals and confidantes, impossible to separate. Each wants more power. Each believes in centralized, nondemocratic forms of government. Each competes (and loses) openly with the United States for positioning on the global stage. And each holds an economy rivaled by few on the planet. Using the Russia/China pairing as a model, Kagan explains how the political certainties of 2008 resemble those of the past — that the Earth's nations are still divided between those that embrace Western-style democracy and those that adhere to Eastern-style authoritative, centralized rule. Our hopes that the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall would make it easier to transplant the U.S. brand of democracy have not materialized. It's a failure we should have expected. Author Kagan, who served in the U.S. State Department, should not be branded as unpatriotic. He clearly believes not only in the United States' power, but in the need for it to be used correctly for the betterment of the world. "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," Kagan writes. He also makes a strong argument that as anti-Americanism has grown in the Middle East, other nations throughout the globe have grown closer to the United States — not in ideology, but out of necessity — as countries gravitate toward those in power and those who can offer economic and military protection. The book's thesis is easy to grasp: Not much has changed in the world, as Kagan's title suggests. What he, and others, want to know is how will the world's democratic nations react to the actions of their powerful autocratic neighbors. As we've seen, history likely gives us the answer. |
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