The 'Price of Hegemony' Is Too Damn High

Kagan is essentially saying that the U.S. should be willing to play nuclear Russian roulette to defend countries we are not obliged to protect.

Robert Kagan takes a long time to get to his predictable conclusion that the U.S. and its allies should be willing to go to war for the sake of countries where they have no vital interests:

It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world. If the United States and its allies—with their combined economic, political, and military power—had collectively resisted Russian expansionism from the beginning, Putin would have found himself constantly unable to invade neighboring countries.

Interventionists always minimize the dangers of their preferred course of action, and they have to do this because what they want the U.S. to do is usually both dangerous and unnecessary. We have seen this many times in arguments for military action against much weaker states, and in recent weeks we have seen quite a lot of it in arguments for joining the war in Ukraine. The argument is the same one we have heard for years: act now (i.e., go to war now) because things will only get worse if you act later. It does not seem to dawn on these people that this sense of temporal claustrophobia is exactly what encourages other states to wage their own reckless wars. The belief that it is cheaper and therefore wiser to go to war sooner assumes that war is inevitable and desirable and that earlier intervention is likely to succeed.

Kagan’s counterfactual is revealing in how divorced from political and military realities it is. The idea that the Bush administration was going to rally the U.S. and its allies to intervene militarily against Russia in Georgia at the tail end of Bush’s presidency in the middle of two other unsuccessful wars is pure fantasy. That was never in the cards, and that is because going to war for Georgia made absolutely no sense and would not have been better for the United States and its allies. The Bush administration was the closest thing to an embodiment of Kagan’s “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy that we are likely to see in our lifetimes, and even they weren’t stupid enough to do what he advises. Going to war for Ukraine in 2014 was impractical for many of the same reasons, and that’s before we get to the question of nuclear weapons.