Postmodern Toughness

Robert Kagan has a great, long article in The Weekly Standard about how wrong Fukuyama was and how right the other guys (i.e. himself) were about the end of history and the future of human progress. Touched off by the Russo-Georgian War, Kagan’s piece is full of sharp observations and the kinds of insights that make him the most respected (and possibly the most realist) of the neocon brain trust.

But there is some funniness afoot. One of the most bizarre aspects of the American reaction to the Russo-Georgian War has been the underlying similarity of the rhetoric coming from right and left. Though perhaps few want to admit it, the line between Obama’s world citizen and McCain’s world Georgian is not so dark or wide. At the outset of the war, my main criticism of the anti-Russia lobby had been that they reached immediately for the battle drums and pounded away in the face of an extraordinarily complex and ambiguous geopolitical situation. The main criticism aimed my way observed that few among the anti-Russia lobby were really lobbying for actual war with Russia, and, indeed, many commentators seemed much more interested in a rush to posturing than a rush to war — albeit, the kind of posturing that could quickly get you a war, like it or not.

So it is with great curiosity that I read lines like these in Kagan’s piece:

So what to do? Instead of figuring out how to accommodate the powerful new autocracies, the United States and the world’s other democracies need to begin thinking about how they can protect their interests and advance their principles in a world in which these are once again powerfully challenged. The world’s democracies need to show solidarity with one another, and they need to support those trying to pry open a democratic space where it has been closing [my emphasis – JP].

‘Solidarity’? A ‘democratic space’? It’s hard to find more pomo, eggheady, Euro-weenie language than that. Toughness pops in at the margins — what does it mean to be ‘prying open’ a ‘democratic space’, I wonder? Does it mean invading South Ossetia, as Georgia did? And what (here’s the rub) does Kagan mean by ‘support’, another of this decade’s great therapeutic fudge words?

Kagan answers in some kind of mystical code, which revolves around the invocation of language reserved, I’m sure, for some race of bureaucratic cavemen that lives in an alternate foreign-policy world directly across from the Geico offices:

Whether or not China and Russia are susceptible to outside influence over time, for the moment their growing power and, in the case of Russia, the willingness to use it, pose a serious challenge that needs to be met with the same level-headed determination as previous such challenges.

Yes, but what does that mean? Surely we never want to fail to meet a challenge with the clearminded focus we used to successfully meet similar challenges in the past. Tell me something I don’t know: like what you mean by ‘meeting’ the particular challenges we face, as opposed to the general challenge that you seem to be constructing out of parts with more differences than similarities. Kagan finally fesses up:

If Moscow is now bent on [whatever that means] restoring its hegemony [ditto] over its near neighbors [as opposed to far ones?], the United States and its European allies must provide those neighbors with support and protection [my emph]. If China continues to expand its military capabilities [build another tank?], the United States must reassure China’s neighbors [Japan? Or Taiwan?] of its own commitment [another classic therapeutic fudge-word] to Asian security.

China’s supposedly central contribution to the Resurgence of New Autocracies is incidental. But in order to avoid saying ‘we have to risk a war with Russia to satisfy our national and global interests’, Kagan has to waste space making forced analogies between The Russia Threat and The China Threat. No, it’s all about Russia — and those two magic words, support and protection. The first one is easy enough, ranging from sincere talk to the kind of unassailable humanitarian operations going on now in beleaguered Georgia.

But protection? If this is pig latin for Put Ukraine in NATO before it’s too late, that at least I understand. Yet somehow I suspect the meaning of protection is somewhat more complex than that. At the heart of Kagan’s worldview is something that he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, of all people, as calling ‘the world problem.’ I’m broadly sympathetic to Niebuhr’s big claims, but this one sends a shiver:

the world problem [as Kagan quotes] cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in solving it.

It is my firm conviction that the world is neither possessed of a great and unitary problem nor is one itself, that neither is it a problem that must be solved nor one that could be.* Solid too is my insistence that, whatever America’s responsibilities abroad, there is no ‘full measure of devotion’ that Americans somehow owe humanity and/or our own consciences. When I hear talk of fullness and comprehensiveness and the contemptibility of half measures and skepticism about driving policy by tests of emotional completeness, I run for the door.

If you read closely, Kagan wants to argue that the world problem is the eternal revanchism of regimes that will fight wars their own citizens would not, and that only the US can lead its allies in the eternal struggle to keep that kind of backsliding at bay. You can see the internal contradiction at work here, right? It is, at any rate, there; only by socially constructing the continuing crisis of a World Problem can Kagan or anybody mobilize the American people, who were never cut out for that kind of work and whose providence pointed them elsewhere, to fight to ensure that the threat which supposedly already exists never really comes into being. The moment we cease to think of international relations as a World Problem, the sooner we can recognize that dealing with Russia as opposed to China — or Russia in one sphere of activity or bad behavior as opposed to another — is an undertaking best pursued a la carte.

The main problem and paradox for the US is that, domestically, grand narratives and grand visions have always set the agenda and driven history — but, in our foreign dealings, grand narratives and grand visions have almost always mislead and disappointed us. The one instance in which this was not the case was the Long War from 1941-1991, fought first against the Germans and then against the Russians. (Our war with Japan, by contrast, had no romantic, thematic grandeur about it.) To think that this one exception to the rule ought to cement America in a paradoxical condition is to beg a radical reconceptualization of American foreign policy — one in which perhaps the best grand strategy is no grand strategy at all. And what could be tougher — or more postmodern — than that?

* I’ve edited this line for clarity. Thanks to Kerry Brennan.