The Incorrigible Ideologues of Empire

It is really the grasping, expansionist Mr. Potter that Kagan wants America to emulate.

Thomas Meaney doesn’t pull his punches in his review of Robert Kagan’s latest book:

“The Ghost at the Feast” ends with a speculative post-mortem of the 20th century. More and longer U.S. military interventions would have achieved better results, Kagan argues. In the interwar years, instead of playing the role of creative accountant for Germany’s wartime debts, the United States should have simply occupied Europe with a few thousand troops — “no more than it kept in the Philippines.” That no single human being argued for such a course does not dampen Kagan’s enthusiasm.

It has been Kagan’s role for decades to make the intellectual case for American empire and militarism. He has never seen a crisis or conflict that he didn’t think could be improved or solved by American power, and he will never acknowledge that the U.S. has overreached or seriously erred in its uses of power. Kagan is an incorrigible ideologue of empire, so we know he isn’t going to change his mind. What needs to change is the foreign policy discourse that rewards and encourages these kinds of arguments.