Kagan and the 'Natural Forces of History'

The U.S. always has a choice to turn away from armed primacy and domination.

Robert Kagan wrote another paean to the wonders of U.S. hegemony:

Should the United States reduce its involvement in the world today, the consequences for Europe and Asia are not hard to predict. Great-power conflict and dictatorship have been the norm throughout human history, the liberal peace a brief aberration. Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay.

There is a lot wrong with Kagan’s essay, and we could go through it paragraph by paragraph to find all of the errors, but all you need to read is the last line. “Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay,” he says, and he is completely in earnest. There are not many more deluded expressions of American exceptionalism than that.