Progressive Historians: History For Our Future

History and the Kagans: Paradise and Power IX

by Bastoche | 1/20/2008 02:24:00 PM

Barack Obama, according to Michael O’Hanlon in his recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “has some work to do.” Obama advertises himself as the candidate who will harmonize all the voices, raucous and discordant and vehemently partisan, contending on the stage of American politics. But for O’Hanlon it is already clear that Obama has no intention of drawing together all the rowdy and dissonant factions into one all-inclusive chorus of comity and hope. Quite the contrary, Obama is being deliberately exclusionary and shunting off to the wings a significant portion of the American electorate. The loss, O'Hanlon warns, will be Obama’s, for by cutting himself off from that portion, he is also cutting himself off from the “non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom of the American people that he seeks to lead.”

That portion, one to which O’Hanlon himself belongs, comprises the liberals and “centrists” who supported, and who still support, the Iraq War. These liberals and centrists subscribe to the “non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom” widespread among “the American people,” a wisdom that has discerned—that has always discerned—the right course of action in Iraq. According to O’Hanlon, there are “two problems with Mr. Obama’s Iraq views” that threaten to sever him from this wisdom and from those who embody it, thereby undermining “his ability to build a truly inclusive American political movement.”

1. Monsters and Hawks

The first problem concerns Obama’s refusal to respect the motives of those who supported and who still support the war. As O’Hanlon reminds us, Saddam “was one of the worst and most dangerous dictators of the late 20th century,” an inveterate “monster” who imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands of his own people. O’Hanlon admits that by 2003 Saddam may have committed the worst of his mayhem, “but he was grooming his sadistic sons Uday and Qusay as successors with unknowable consequences.” Throughout his career Saddam had provided his sons with a model of egregious behavior, and although one could not predict with absolute certainty that they would reproduce the paternal template, they were themselves incorrigible thugs and without doubt predisposed to continue and even magnify their father’s cruelty. The moral justification to initiate a preemptive war of choice against the Iraq regime was therefore clear. Saddam and his malignant sons had to be stopped before they committed further atrocities against innocent people, both in and beyond Iraq. And just as it could not conceivably be doubted that the sons were predisposed to replicate their father’s behavior, so too it could not conceivably be doubted that they would be impervious to reason and resistant to diplomatic approach. Like their father, they would prove to be masters of masquerade, fronting to the world facades of rationality and peace, while covertly hatching sadistic schemes of mayhem and terror.

The nonpartisan wisdom of the American people understands that a preemptive strike against such ruthless murderers was justified. “Yet Mr. Obama,” as well as other partisan ideologues of the left, discounts this argument and “consistently accuses those who supported the war of political motivations -- and unsavory ones at that.” O’Hanlon does not specify what those unsavory motives were—invasion for the sake of oil, perhaps—but his point is clear: far from being unsavory, the motives of the liberal and centrist hawks were honorable, even laudable. They did not seek to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam’s regime for the sake of personal or national profit. They sought to topple Saddam in order to rescue the Iraqi people from his brutality, to bring them the benefits of democracy, and to integrate them into the worldwide network of free and prosperous nations. No covert motives impelled their decision: no desire to project America’s power into the Middle East and to relish victory in the clash of civilizations; no drive to unleash America’s military might and to take pleasure in the grandiose and triumphant spectacle; no craving to shape the course of history and to savor the knowledge that they were among the elite who shaped it.

The liberals and centrists thus had a solid rationale for supporting military action in Iraq, and they have a solid rationale for continuing it. Obama, however, “would withdraw all our main combat forces in the first 16 months of his presidency,” once again putting himself at odds with the non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom of centrist Americans who will not “support such a policy once they fully consider its likely implications for Iraqi—and American—national security.” The likely implications of “a rapid U.S. witdrawal” from Iraq are not difficult to discern—if one’s foresight is not bedimmed by partisan ideology. A retreat of American forces from Iraq will result in “renewed civil warfare,” a resurgence of internecine strife that will fatally undermine both political and civil stability. The collapse of stability will in turn recreate precisely those conditions conducive to the growth and propagation of terror. And that terror will not confine itself to Iraq. The nonpartisan, non-ideological wisdom of centrist America thus discerns what Obama, in his partisan, ideological dimness does not: the ultimate consequence of a rapid American disengagement from Iraq will be a renewed migration of terror to America.

2. Force Has a Logic All Its Own

The neocons and their allies, the liberal interventionists, recognize that in the wake of Iraq their intellectual justification for the use of American military might in world affairs needs to be refurbished. Shelby Steele draws a distinction between wars of choice and wars of survival and argues that the proper use of diplomacy can transform the former into the latter. Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder call for a Concert of Democracies that will lend legitimacy to America’s use of force in world crises. And Michael O’Hanlon argues that the use of force to change regimes is not only permissible but morally compulsory when a regime becomes monstrous and subjects its own people to sadistic degradation and death.

In each instance the “logic of reason,” exemplified in negotiation and diplomacy, is either subordinated to the "logic of force" or erased entirely from the scenario. O’Hanlon, for example, argues that a disengagement of American forces from Iraq within a timeframe of sixteen months constitutes “a rapid withdrawal.” Perhaps it does. Given the complexity of such a process and unforeseen contingencies, a withdrawal that guarantees the safety of American troops could take longer than sixteen months. But it would still constitute that which O’Hanlon wants to avoid: a disengagement of American troops from Iraq.

To rule out military disengagement O’Hanlon erases from his scenario a crucial point, namely that American military disengagement from Iraq would occur simultaneously with diplomatic and economic and humanitarian reengagement. Such reengagement would not be unilateral but would take place with a multilateral and regional framework—a framework conceived, constructed, and maintained through diplomacy and negotiation. Such a framework could perhaps be put together under the auspices of the UN and would certainly include the US. But the US would not dominate and control it. As Obama said in “A Way Forward in Iraq,” his November 2006 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “we have to realize that the entire Middle East has an enormous stake in the outcome of Iraq, and we must engage neighboring countries in finding a solution.” Specifically,   

we should convene a regional conference with the Iraqis, Saudis, Iranians, Syrians, the Turks, Jordanians, the British and others. The goal of this conference should be to get foreign fighters out of Iraq, prevent a further descent into civil war, and push the various Iraqi factions towards a political solution.

The logic of force, in other words, would be replaced by the logic of reason. O’Hanlon does not mention diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian reengagement because like the neocons with whom he has aligned himself he privileges the logic of force in international relations. According to Robert Kagan, in Of Paradise and Power, this privileging of the logic of force over the logic of reason has a long history, one that extends back to the beginning of the Cold War. The distinction between these two foreign policy logics, Kagan says, derives from the famous Long Telegram (Part 5, Section 1) of George Kennan.

The founding document of the Cold War, Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram,’ starkly set out the dominant perspective of America’s postwar strategic culture: The Soviet Union was ‘impervious to the logic of reason,’ Kennan wrote, but would be ‘highly sensitive to the logic of force.’ (89-90)

During the Cold War, “Kennan’s ‘logic of force’ became the operating assumption of American strategy” (91). The neocon narrative of the Cold War, to which Kagan makes his own contribution in Of Paradise and Power, is admirably direct, compellingly clear, and melodramatically simple. Two great military powers emerged from the carnage of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the ideologies of the two powers were diametrically opposed. The ideology of the Soviet Union espoused an autocratic one-party state and a command economy. The ideology of America, on the other hand, espoused a pluralistic multiparty state and a free-market economy. Moreover, each nation was inherently expansionist, intent both on promoting its way of life of throughout the globe and on containing the ambition of its great competitor.

Democracy thus squared off against despotism for global dominance. Because each nation had a nuclear capacity more than sufficient to annihilate the other, they avoided direct military confrontation. Instead, they sublimated their ideological rivalry by competing in space races and quadrennial games. More important, they fought proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. But not in Europe. Though confronting one another directly over the Iron Curtain, both the United States and the Soviet Union understood that a conventional military confrontation in Europe could uncontrollably escalate into a nuclear one.

And so for half a century peace reigned in Europe. It was of course a peace that was predicated on the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers and their deterrent effect. But it was peace nonetheless. And within the secure space provided by American military power, according to Kagan, Europe underwent a momentous shift in perspective. To be sure, the nations of Western Europe maintained during the Cold War imposing armed forces, but they were small in comparison to those of America. And there was no good reason to augment them, since the awesome firepower of the US military was more than sufficient to deter the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union.

The nations of Western Europe therefore left the protection of the free world to the superpower, America, and devoted most of their productive energies to rehabilitation, both economic and political. They restored their economies out of the carnage of the WW II, and they decided that cooperation, based on reason and rules, was more conducive to growth and wellbeing than the futile competition of colonialism and war. They therefore renounced their traditional enmities and pulled closer together, forging the political and economic ties that resulted finally in the European Union.

Their Union has by no means proved to be perfect. But it has continued to grow, and its success has led Europeans to conclude that the “soft” power of negotiation and economic exchange is a more effective method of reconciling international differences than the “hard” power so favored by the US. Even rogue and recalcitrant nations, they argue, can be coaxed into reform by the rationales of diplomacy and the incentives of exchange. Reason, they affirm, is universal. No nation is wholly immune to its power.

America demurs.

One of the things that most clearly divides Europeans and Americans today is a philosophical, even metaphysical disagreement over where exactly mankind stands on the continuum between the laws of the jungle and the laws of reason. Americans do not believe we are as close to the realization of the Kantian dream as do Europeans. (91)

America does not deny the Kantian dream. It is as committed as Europe to a concert of nations founded on reason and the rule of law. As Kagan says, “Americans are idealists” (95). But their idealism has not beclouded their judgment. They “remain realists in the limited sense that they still believe in the necessity of power in a world that remains far from perfection” (95). Outside the Kantian paradise that Europe has established lies a jungle of Hobbesian anarchy, ruled not by the rationalities of trust and law but by the irrationalities of deceit and force. Though many nations outside Europe profess to abide by international standards of behavior, they are in reality driven by covert motives of power and domination. In spite of Europe’s optimism, such nations can never be reached by reason. They live by deceit and force, and can be countered effectively only on their own terms.

To deal with the outlaws—and there will always be outlaws—the world needs a sheriff. America is that sheriff, the indispensable nation that can clearheadedly estimate danger and straightforwardly deal with it. Because they have the strength to see danger clearly and the will to deal with it directly, “Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic terms—as Gary Cooper at high noon” (95). Europeans scoff at such pretense. Accustomed to the use of rationality and rules and averse to the use of force, they prefer that America not take military action against the outlaw but rather appeal to it by means of diplomacy and economic incentives. America in turn scoffs at such naiveté. It knows that the outlaw will treat such appeals as appeasement and will happily take advantage of the weakness and gullibility of its adversary. Americans instinctively know that the outlaw is not susceptible to the logic of reason and will bend only to the logic of force. America’s allies in Europe might balk at the spectacular assertion of American military might. But Americans see the danger—they see it clearly and they see it whole—and they “will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not” (95).

3. Of Cowboys and Character

Before the sheriff acts, he talks to the outlaw. When the outlaw proves intransigent, as outlaws always do, the sheriff unholsters his hardware, surgically strikes, and reestablishes the peace. The grateful townspeople, far from disputing the moral authority of their protector, congratulate his success, return to their shops and saloons and, beneath the roll of the final credits, revivify their getting and spending.

Such is Kagan’s ideal scenario, but the realist in him has always recognized that the ideal will of necessity be modified by the contingencies of the real. Writing early in 2003, just prior to the March invasion, he is well aware that many of the townspeople do not wholeheartedly approve of the sheriff’s aggressive stance towards the outlaw. Witnessing America’s immovable resolve to initiate a preemptive war of choice against Iraq, many Europeans, puzzled by America’s zeal and helpless to placate it, “have come to consider the United States itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus” (100). Kagan himself allows that there is something incalculable in America’s behavior, something that impels it to push beyond the safety and circumspection of its European allies. He foresees that the invasion of Iraq will not be a brief humanitarian exercise in regime change but “will likely produce a lasting American military presence in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, and perhaps a long-term occupation of one of the Arab world’s largest countries” (96). He also foresees that many in America itself will be disturbed by this unprecedented insertion of American power into the Middle East and Central Asia.

But viewed from the perspective of the grand sweep of American history, a history marked by the nation’s steady expansion and a seemingly ineluctable rise from perilous weakness to the present global hegemony, this latest expansion of America’s strategic role may be less than shocking. (96)

Those who are disturbed by America’s assertive behavior in the Middle East understand neither America’s role in the unfolding story of freedom nor its character as a nation, a character fully in accord with the role that history has scripted for it. This character is indeed incalculable, even dangerous. From its birth America has felt itself impelled to expand: first its territory and now its ideology. It has often put diplomacy and negotiation in the service of its expansionary drive and especially, of course, when it did not have the military means to assert its will in the world. But during the twentieth century it developed those means, and now, though it will always fall back on diplomacy and trade to expand its ideals, it stands ready and eager to use its military might to counter tyranny and carry freedom into every region of the globe.

In fact, for Kagan, there is something in the depths of America’s character as a nation that instinctively responds to the logic of force. Now, nearly five years after writing Of Paradise and Power—and after five years of observing war and occupation in Iraq—Kagan has somewhat modified his preference for unilateral action and the preemptive use of force. As his support for a Concert of Democracies suggests, he now sees that it might be useful for the sheriff to consult more closely with the townspeople and gain their consent before squaring off against the outlaw.

But square off he must, with or without the consent of the townspeople. For the neocons—and for those liberals like Michael O’Hanlon who have allied themselves with the neocon view—the world remains a dangerous place, populated by autocrats and demagogues intent on subduing the weak and dominating the free. And America, as the title of Kagan’s latest book announces, remains a dangerous nation—dangerous, that is, to the autocrats and demagogues who resist the march of freedom through history. It is America’s mission in history to carry freedom to every corner of the globe, and it cannot rest—it will not rest—until it has done so. Nor will America’s character allow it to rest. Some of America’s European allies—some Americans themselves—are perturbed by America’s “cowboy” character and its distinctive qualities: its assertiveness, its spiritedness, its propulsive energy, its affinity for the logic of force. Perturbing they may be, but these qualities are intrinsic elements of the American character, and precisely the ones that will enable America to achieve its goal. As Kagan puts it, those who deny these characteristics deny the very nature of America as a nation.

Next time I will examine Kagan’s characterization of America as the Cowboy Nation. To help elucidate Kagan’s concept of America’s character, I will also discuss a key idea of Harvey Mansfield, whom The Weekly Standard has hailed as “our greatest living scholar of political philosophy and our greatest living political philosopher.” Specifically, I will examine a quality that Mansfield and other neocons, Kagan included, have seen as integral to the American character—spiritedness or thumos.

Note

Kennan subsequently recast the Long Telegram into an essay, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which he published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 and in which he made the case for containment as the best approach to the threat posed by an expansive Soviet Union.

crossposted at dailykos

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History and the Kagans: Paradise and Power VIII

by Bastoche | 12/30/2007 02:01:00 PM

Victor Davis Hanson does not like echo chambers, and Washington, he claims, has become one. A number of notions, it seems, are flinging repetitively around the enclosed and reverberant spaces of the Beltway Bubbleworld and, as a result of the ceaseless reiteration, are being elevated to the status of “gospel.” One such notion is that “We need to talk to Iran.” Hanson will have none of that. Tyrannies such as Iran resort to diplomacy only when, as Hanson puts it, “their backs are against the wall or their appetites are for a time sated.” With Saddam eliminated and the Taliban, at least for now, posing no threat, Iran finds its back at a comfortable remove from any flat and vertical surface and its appetite whetted for mischief. It therefore feels no urgent need to discuss, among other items, its exasperating insistence on enriching uranium.

Before we talk to Tehran, we need to shove it back and make it simmer down, and Hanson knows exactly what that shoving and subduing entails. We must encourage “the Sunni world” to coalesce “into a general anti-Iranian bloc” and, of course, we must achieve victory in Iraq, thus establishing on the border of the theocratic state a viable democracy. Curiously, Hanson seems to think that Iraq will align itself with the anti-Iranian Sunni bloc he envisions, even though the Iraqi government, once stabilized, will almost certainly be a Shiite-dominated one with ties to Tehran. That small detail aside, Hanson is adamant: negotiations with Iran can only be conducted from a position of strength, and a unified bloc of Sunni nations reinforced by a victory in Iraq will put us in that position.

1. Discipline and Diplomacy

Not all neocons, however, are willing to wait for such eventualities to develop. Shelby Steele and Robert Kagan, for example, have recognized that negotiating now with Iran can prove in the long run distinctly advantageous to America. In his recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, “Obama is Right on Iran,” Steele defends Obama’s commitment to what has become “the most glamorous word in the Democratic ‘antiwar’ lexicon,” diplomacy. Steele’s defense, however, rests neither on an idealistic rejection of war nor on a realistic acceptance of war as a last resort, but rather on a distinction between two kinds of war: wars of survival and wars of discipline.

A nation, when attacked, engages in a war of survival in order to preserve itself as a sovereign and independent entity. The purpose of a war of discipline, on the other hand, is not to safeguard survival but “to preserve a favorable balance of power that is already in place in the world.” This favorable balance of power, supervised by the world’s “enforcer,” America, guarantees global peace. When “a menace” arises that threatens to upset the global balance, America responds, committing itself to war in order “to discipline the world back into a balance of power that best ensures peace.” Further, such wars, according to Steele, “are pre-emptive by definition.” That is, they preempt the menace before it gains such power and becomes inflated with such ambition that it threatens to shift the global balance precariously away from stability and order.

Steele, I assume, would not dispute that this “favorable balance of power” is tilted in favor of America. In fact, to speak of a “balance of power” is misleading since America stands alone as far and away the world’s predominant military nation. No other group of nations, let alone a single nation, can “balance” the colossal strength of each of America’s military arms. But from the perspective of neocons such as Steele and Kagan, this is exactly as it should be. From a foreign and realist perspective, the predominance of America’s military might indicates a potentially unsettling imbalance of world power. But from an American and idealist perspective, it is precisely America’s military might that guarantees a favorable balance of power not only for America but for the world.

According to the neocons, America’s role in the world is to promote freedom and to preserve peace. Unique among history’s nations, America puts its colossal power primarily at the service of these laudable and honorable ends, and, even though it is now enjoying a period of unipolar predominance, it would never think of misusing its military stature in order to advance, unjustly and dishonorably, its own “vital interests.” Therefore, when an autocratic or terrorist menace arises that threatens to destabilize the balance of power, America, secure in the knowledge that it is impelled by no covert motive of exclusive self-interest, can move preemptively to enforce discipline and chastise the outlaw.

Such a view of American power, it seems, reserves no place for diplomacy. When a new menace to global order arises and is identified as such, America must take prompt and decisive military action to eliminate it. But Steele has learned an important lesson from America’s conduct in the Iraq war. As he correctly points out, when attacked and threatened with annihilation, a nation has no choice but to fight. Also, when defending itself in a war of survival, a nation need not seek justification: defense against aggression supplies it with all the moral authority it needs.

However, a nation that threatens to disrupt the balance of power and disturb international peace poses no threat to our survival. The war that we wage to preempt its menace, therefore, is a war of choice, deliberately entered into for no other reason than to “discipline” the troublemaker and preserve the peace. But as Steele recognizes, when a nation engages in a such a war, a preemptive war of choice, “moral authority becomes a profound problem.” While a nation need not seek justification to wage a war of survival, it cannot remain morally cavalier when it chooses to wage a war of discipline. Quite the contrary, when the question hinges not on immediate survival but on a prospective threat, a nation must establish a secure moral ground before it commits itself to the violence of war.

Steele admits that we engaged Iraq in a war of choice, a preemptive war of discipline, and he also admits that we did so without having established a secure moral basis for our act. That lack of a moral foundation has had the inevitable effect of undermining both our military efforts in the field and our political relations with our allies. The lesson that we must extract from this episode is therefore clear. In the future we must conclusively establish our moral authority before undertaking to wage a war of choice. We must, that is, clearly demonstrate that the nation against which we choose preemptively to go to war has resolutely committed itself to disrupt the global balance of power. When we have demonstrated that fact, we will have securely grounded our moral authority and gained the “license” to fight this war of choice as if it were a war of survival, bringing to bear on the upstart the full weight of our military might. And how do we demonstrate that our prospective adversary has resolved to disrupt the global order, thereby rendering itself vulnerable to preemptive assault? By engaging it first in diplomacy.

Iran is a case in point. Clearly committed to disrupting the balance of power in the world, it has become a menace to peace and must be disciplined. However, before we discipline the miscreant, we must first establish our moral authority to do so by engaging it diplomatically. As Steele imagines it, an American president, in an act of heroic humility, flies to Tehran and entreats the Iranians to cease their disruptive behavior. Should they refuse to comply with our appeal to curb their ambitions and arrogantly dismiss our “high-risk” attempt at diplomacy, “then we would have the moral authority to fight as if for survival,” that is, without restraint and deploying the full preponderance of our power. Such a fight we would undoubtedly win, our victory preserving the balance Iranian ambition had threatened to disturb and protecting the peace Iranian malice had threatened to destroy.

2. Fine Word, Legitimate…

Like Steele, Robert Kagan counsels diplomacy, and like Steele he counsels it as a means to an end: providing America with the legitimacy it needs to take “strong action” against Iran. In his Washington Post essay, “Time to Talk to Iran,” Kagan argues that the NIE has, in regard to Iran, “broken” the two most effective “policy tools” in America’s geopolitical kit, military action and economic sanctions. Washington now has left at its disposal but one intact instrument: diplomacy. For Kagan, though, this seemingly negative development can have a positive outcome if the US is prescient enough to exploit it. “The next administration, especially if it is Democratic, will probably want to try to talk to Tehran,” Kagan says. Indeed it will, and if the outgoing administration has devoted a year to serious negotiation with Tehran, the incoming one will have ample evidence at hand to judge the likely results of its own diplomatic efforts. If Tehran has been and continues to be accommodating, the new administration can reciprocate by, for example, rescinding economic sanctions. If, on the other hand, Tehran has been and continues to be intransigent, the new administration will have the justification it needs to act decisively and with a clear conscience. That is, if the new administration “decides it must take strong action,” diplomatic isolation, for example, along with more severe economic sanctions, “it will have an easier time showing that all other options were exhausted.”

Kagan clearly details the demands to which Iran must accede. It must demonstrate to the IAEA that its enrichment facilities are for the purpose of civilian use only and that it has no covert program to develop nuclear weapons. Further, Kagan says, negotiations with Tehran “should go beyond the nuclear issue” and include its support of Hezbollah and Hamas and, what is most important, “its supplying of weapons to violent extremists in Iraq.” Kagan does not specify who these “violent extremists” are, but I assume he means the Badr Organization (the military arm of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) and the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al Sadr, Shiite groups with ties to Tehran.

If Tehran accedes to these demands, especially if it ceases all enrichment of uranium and cuts its ties to violent factions in Iraq, “it will be welcomed into the international community, with all the enormous economic, political and security benefits this brings.” If, on the other hand, “the Iranians stonewall or refuse to talk -- a distinct possibility -- they will establish a record of intransigence that can be used against them now and in the critical years to come.” If, that is, Iran in its fanatic stubbornness refuses to acquiesce to the demands that America puts on the diplomatic table, if it balks at submissively playing its role in the scenario that America has scripted for the Middle East, if it continues to insist that its own independent interests as a sovereign nation be attended to and respected, then it will have put on display before the world its moral depravity. Conversely, America, having made a good faith attempt to talk to the tyrant, will have established in the eyes of its allies its moral legitimacy. America can then, without hesitation, act to isolate, punish, undermine—even, perhaps, preemptively to eliminate—a regime that refuses to yield to reason and that remains committed to the destruction of peace.

3. From the Particular to the Universal

Robert Kagan and Shelby Steele have derived from the political and moral wreckage of the Iraq War a crucial lesson: America must clearly establish its moral authority before it deploys its military might in preemptive wars of choice or initiates other “strong” actions against recalcitrant regimes. In pursuit of that end, these neocons, along with their allies, the liberal interventionists (the so-called “liberal hawks”), are now engaged in a far-reaching endeavor to construct a new theoretical and practical framework for American foreign policy. Kagan and Ivo Daalder, for example, have called for a Kantian Concert of Democracies whose multilateral voice will legitimate America’s future interventions in world crises. And, as “Time to Talk to Iran” makes clear, Kagan has seen that diplomacy, when appropriately deployed, can help America deal effectively with the deceit of autocrats and terrorists.

Since he published Of Paradise and Power in 2003, Kagan has not so much evolved as adapted to the new geopolitical reality that America’s war in the Middle East has created. Military force remains his tool of choice, but he has come to understand that it must work in conjunction with other policy instruments. Diplomacy and multilateral action, he now allows, are useful, even vital means to achieve America’s final end. But though he might have amended the means, for Kagan that final end, the one that America has been born to achieve, a paradise of world peace created and sustained by American power, has not changed and will not change.

As Kagan argues in the closing section of his book, the central fact about America as a nation is that it is expansionist. “The myth of America’s ‘isolationist’ tradition is remarkably resilient,” Kagan says. “But it is a myth. Expansion of territory and influence has been the inescapable reality of American history, and it has not been an unconscious expansion” (86). America’s expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a deliberate and territorial one. But it is a fundamental error to think that America’s expansionist impulse since the end of World War II has been focused on physical territory. Demonstrably it has not. That impulse, sublimated and transformed, now seeks to expand the reach not of American territory but of American ideology. Born out of freedom, America is now striving to complete its historical mission: to universalize the particular, that is, to introduce its specifically American values of freedom and democracy into every nation on earth.

This expansionist impulse has been inherent in America since its birth, and it defines America’s transcendent importance as a nation in the grand narrative of human history. “The proof of the transcendent importance of the American experiment,” Kagan claims, is found “not only in the continual perfection of American institutions at home but also in the spread of American influence in the world” (88). The ongoing march of history has justified, and will continue to justify, America’s expansion of its ideological reach. America is the nation in which freedom and democracy were first incarnated and made flesh, and it has no intention of isolating these fundamental human values and keeping them confined within its own borders. Universal values will irrepressibly transcend the finite boundaries of the nation in which they originated and assimilate into themselves every other nation in the world. America’s destiny, its mission in history, is thus indisputably clear and indisputably transcendent: to take that which is particular, American democracy, and, by carrying it to every corner of the globe and installing it in every nation on earth, make it what it has always in essence been—universal.

America’s national ideal and national purpose are thus universal in nature and global in scope. But America seeks hegemony for its national ideology not because it seeks to deprive other nations of their autonomy and freedom but precisely because it wants to initiate other nations into their autonomy and freedom, to break the shackles of fanaticism and tyranny that enslave them and liberate them into their true potential as free and productive members of what Kant called the Federation of Peace. For this reason, Kagan says, Americans have always believed, and still believe, that by striving to introduce their American ideals into the world they “advance the interests of humanity” (88). As Benjamin Franklin said, “America’s cause is the cause of all mankind,” and this bedrock idealism is an inherent and unchanging aspect of the American character.

This enduring American view of their nation’s exceptional place in history, their conviction that their interests and the world’s interests are one, may be welcomed, ridiculed, or lamented. But it should not be doubted. And just as there is little reason to expect Europe to change its fundamental course, there is little cause to believe the United States will change its own course, or begin to conduct itself in the world in a fundamentally different manner. (88)

Indeed it will not. Neither will the neocons conduct themselves “in a fundamentally different manner.” They and their interventionist allies in the liberal camp will continue to provide the theoretical support for America’s long term and historically sanctioned endeavor. That theoretical support must now modify itself to take into account the lessons learned from Iraq, but the neocons will leave untouched their basic view of the world, a view that Kagan, in Of Paradise and Power, expertly presents in all its satisfying simplicity. Within the confines of their continent, as Kagan tells it, the nations of Europe have constructed a paradise of Kantian peace based on reason and rules. Outside those confines, however, remains and will remain for the foreseeable future a wilderness of Hobbesian anarchy in which autocratic states and terrorist networks renounce the rule of law and use only deceit and force to gain their ends. On the fragile boundary that separates the paradise of Kantian reason from the wilderness of Hobbesian anarchy stands the world’s Sheriff, America, bravely and steadfastly defending the paradise of reason and rules from the outlaws intent on destroying it. “Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic terms,” Kagan claims, “as Gary Cooper at high noon.” And like all good and steadfast men of the law, who clearly see the covert motives of the lawless, Americans are not swayed by the doubts and apprehensions of those they protect. “They will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not” (95).

The townspeople in Kagan’s scenario are, of course, the Europeans, who abide by a “logic of reason.” America, as the world’s Sheriff, also abides by that logic. But as the “enforcer,” the indispensable nation that guarantees stability and peace in a world still populated by rogues and outlaws, America must also abide by a different logic, a “logic of force,” and next time, in the last installment of this series, I’ll summarize Kagan’s argument and discuss the two logics that together define for Kagan America’s role in the world.

Crossposted at dailykos

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HIstory and the Kagans: Paradise and Power VII

by Bastoche | 12/10/2007 03:01:00 PM

On Monday, 3 December, the combined intelligence agencies of the US released a summary of their National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The same day at a press briefing, Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor to President Bush, commented on the “key judgments” in the Estimate. The Intelligence Community, Hadley said, “has high confidence—high confidence—that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program that it has never acknowledged and continues to deny.” The intelligence community also reports, with “high confidence,” that this covert program was brought to a deliberate halt in 2003 and, with “moderate confidence,” that it has not been reactivated.

However, though the Iranians halted covert work on nuclear weapons, the Intelligence Community reports “with moderate to high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.” The measure of Iran’s current intent to develop a nuclear weapons capacity must, of course, remain inexact, but the Intelligence Community is moderately confident that “convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult.”

Hadley’s presentation emphasizes two important points. First, as stipulated in the report, “from at least the late 1980s to 2003,” Iran maintained an undeclared and covert program to develop nuclear weapons. Second, although Iran halted its covert weapons program in 2003, it will possibly and even likely resuscitate it at some opportune time in the future. In his press conference of 4 December George Bush emphasized precisely these points. According to the President, “Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous.” The danger of the Iranian regime has now, by the NIE, been indisputably demonstrated. “Iran had a hidden—a covert nuclear weapons program. That’s what [the NIE] said,” the President insisted. Since it has been shown that Iran had in the past an undeclared, covert program, who can affirm that in the near future “they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?” And having resuscitated such a program, they could clandestinely pass to it the uranium enriched in their so-called civilian program.

An Iran deliberately seeking a nuclear capacity “would create a danger for the world,” the President said. But that danger, and the international community’s response to it, can be averted if Iran follows the “better way forward” that the UN has made available to it. It must, that is, comply with the UN resolutions (the first, 1696, without sanctions, the subsequent, 1737 and 1747, with sanctions) and suspend all activity related to the enrichment and processing of uranium. Further, it must fully cooperate with the UN watchdog group, the IAEA, and demonstrate that it is conducting no covert and undeclared nuclear weapons program. If, on the other hand, Iran refuses to cooperate with the international community on these matters, it will, as Hadley put it in his briefing, suffer the consequences: “diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and…other financial pressure.”

1. The Overt and the Covert

It will not, though, suffer military reprisal. Neither Hadley in his briefing nor the President in his conference stated that America is poised to launch air attacks should Iran continue its noncompliance with the UN resolutions. Reaction was swift and predictable. Denied all at once their hope of seeing select portions of Iran reduced to cinders, neocon proponents of war immediately put on flamboyant displays of political pique. Norman Podhoretz, for example, stalking onstage like a distraught and flummoxed Lear, confessed to entertaining dark and "even darker" suspicions of those in the Intelligence Community who produced the Estimate. “For some years now,” according to Podhoretz, the Intelligence Community has been “leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush,” and the NIE is only the latest installment in that ongoing endeavor. The Community’s purpose this time, according to Podhoretz, “is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.” Swayed by the Estimate, the administration, Podhoretz fears, will substitute for the bold application of military force the craven appeasements of diplomacy.

Fortified no doubt by such indications of an incipient backlash, Senate Republicans on Friday announced plans to establish a bipartisan commission that will take a fresh look at the evidence on which the Estimate is based. They want to assess for themselves not only Iran’s nuclear capability but, even more important, Iran’s intent. As the neocons have profusely warned, even if Iran has called a temporary halt to its covert work on a weapons system, its covert motive—regional and even world domination—remains unchanged.

Of this the neocons have no doubt: the desire to dominate and oppress is still covertly at work behind Iran’s overt façade of cooperation. They feel justified in making such a judgment because in their view the world is split into two strictly delimited moral and political sectors. In one sector stand those nations—America, the European Union, Japan, Australia, etc.—committed to freedom and democracy. In the other stand those nations committed to tyranny, oppression, and, in our time, terror. As Robert Kagan argues in the book I am examining in this series, Of Paradise and Power, the Europeans have constructed in the sector of democracy a Kantian paradise of perpetual peace based on reason and rules. Outside that paradise of freedom and peace, however, is a world of anarchy and terror, a Hobbesian realm in which autocratic nations like Iran dispense with reason and rules and employ in their stead deceit and force. On the border between the two stands the indispensable nation, America. Like Europe, America is a nation committed to reason and rules. Unlike Europe, however, America is a nation committed also to the maintenance and use of military power. America, therefore, according to Kagan, is the one nation that can assume the role of the world’s Sheriff, committing itself to the protection of the world’s peaceful nations from the autocratic outlaws committed to the destruction of democracy and the eradication of freedom.

Iran, for neocons like Podhoretz, is one such outlaw. Its regime is a radical Islamic theocracy that repudiates accountability and transparency. The extremists in Tehran, led by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, use the standard methods of the autocrat, deceit and force, in order to oppress their own people and to spread terror throughout not only the region but the world. Autocrats, the neocons know, are never satisfied with a power that is limited. Driven by their irrational desire to oppress, they seek to expand their regime of tyranny and terror. With hardened autocrats such as those in Tehran, who brazenly use deceit to wheedle the naïve and dupe the unwary, diplomacy is useless. They may say that they want nuclear power for peaceful purposes only, and in the short term they may even be willing to abandon their quest for a nuclear weapon. But behind their façade of reasonable behavior, their long-term goal remains unmodified: to develop a nuclear capacity and to use it in order to subjugate every nation in the region to their radical Islamic agenda. Since they cannot be reasoned out of their quest for regional and world domination, only one option remains to those nations who seek to preserve peace in the region and in the world: the regime in Tehran must be subjected to a swift and overwhelming application of military force.

One neocon, though, believes that the Iranians can be talked to and reasoned with. In his most recent Washington Post column, “Time to Talk to Iran,” Robert Kagan claims that, as a consequence of the NIE report, Bush has been deprived not only of his military option, air strikes, but also of his economic option, sanctions. Only one option remains available to him, an option that he has not up to this point considered using—diplomacy. He must talk to Iran.

As I said in a previous post, Robert Kagan seems to be evolving. In a Washington Post column with Ivo Daalder he has called for a Concert of Democracies, a formal group of democratic nations that would meet on a regular basis to discuss and seek solutions to international crises. Akin to Kant’s Federation of Peace, this Concert of Democracies appears to signal a movement in Kagan’s political thinking away from rigid neocon ideas and toward a more flexible, even liberal approach to foreign policy and international affairs.

Appearances, though, can be deceiving. I’ll discuss Kagan’s “Talk to Iran” column in more detail next time. First, though, I want to return to the philosopher whose name Kagan repeatedly invokes in Of Paradise and Power, Immanuel Kant, and to his central moral idea, the categorical imperative. Like Kant, Kagan sees that politics and morality are inseparable. His vision of America as history’s “Dangerous Nation” is grounded in a moral ideal: freedom. America’s mission in history, as Kagan sees it, is not only to preserve freedom from the attacks of tyrants but also to topple tyrannical regimes and establish in their place democracy and freedom. During the Twentieth Century America became a nation with sufficient power to engage fully in its mission. For half a century it was balked in its quest by its great competitor, the Soviet Union. But after the total collapse of Communist tyranny, it stood forth alone as militarily the most powerful nation on earth, and for the foreseeable future it will retain that preeminence.

But America is also a nation committed to reason and rules, and it will never misuse its power and become that which it has been born to fight: the autocrat and imperialist. With complete confidence, therefore, one can declare that America is not only the preeminent military power in the world but also the preeminent moral power. Indeed, America is the preeminent moral power in history. America was conceived in freedom and its destiny is to universalize the great moral value out of which it was born. And by extending the great moral value of freedom until it has become universal, America will also bring to birth the great Kantian ideal: perpetual peace.

Kagan, as Kant would put it, is a political moralist. He has unified politics and morality in one comprehensive vision, a grand historical narrative in which America extends freedom throughout the world until it has established, under its benign auspices, a reign of prosperity and perpetual peace. Kant, though, as I have mentioned, distinguishes between the political moralist and the moral politician, a distinction based on the supreme moral rule that he calls the categorical imperative. And it is not the political moralist, according to Kant, who adheres to and follows the supreme moral rule but the moral politician.

2. The Imperative and its Implications : Freedom, Equality, Solidarity

In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Kant gives the imperative no fewer than five different, though related, formulations. The one most pertinent to our present discussion is the following:

So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. (Gregor, 38)

According to Kant, it is morally imperative that one person not use another solely as a means to satisfy a material or emotional or psychological need. To use a person solely as a means to gratify a need is to reduce that person to the status of an instrument. That part of the imperative is clear enough. However, the other part of the imperative, that one person must always treat another as an end in himself, is more difficult to understand and needs a bit of unpacking.

In Kant’s view, as I explained in the previous post in this series, when a person is impelled by an impulse or inclination to achieve an end (eating breakfast, learning how to play the piano, invading and occupying a Middle East country), he deploys his ordinary practical reason to devise appropriate means and then, as Kant puts it, wills the end, that is, enacts the means he has devised to achieve his end.

Pure practical reason, on the other hand, unlike ordinary practical reason, is not roused to action by an impulse or need. Pure practical reason acts spontaneously, out of its own inherent energy, to legislate one overriding moral rule: the categorical imperative. That imperative guides the person in his specific moral choices (Kant calls them maxims), and when his moral choices conform to the imperative—to treat all others as ends in themselves—the person is acting morally: he is acting with a good will.

Put this way, though, something is lacking in Kant’s description of the categorical imperative. A person impelled by his inclinations seeks a specific end. With that end in mind he devises means to achieve it and then wills the end, that is, puts into practice those specific means. However, when acting in accordance with the categorical imperative, he does not seem to have a specific end or goal in mind other than conformity to the imperative itself: he must treat others as ends in themselves and not merely as instruments to gratify his self-interest and self-love. The imperative, therefore, seems purely negative, a constraint on his action, a duty he must perform for its own sake and with no other end in mind. As such, it seems to offer him nothing positive in his relation to the others towards whom he directs his will.

Kant, though, does supply an end towards which the will, when it acts in accord with the imperative, directs itself, and that end is something which for Kant inheres in every rational being as an absolute value: freedom. For Kant, that which gives absolute value to every human being is the free, autonomous, unconditioned will. That is, the absolute value of a person is enacted and affirmed when he freely chooses his own goals and legislates his own moral principles uncoerced by any internal or external force.

Conversely, the absolute value of a human being is violated and diminished when his will suffers coercion. Such coercion proceeds from two sources, an internal source and an external source. The internal source that can coerce a person’s will and diminish his humanity is his repertoire of inclinations. As Kant recognizes, a person’s will is continually and quite naturally conditioned by his inclinations, by his physical and emotional needs and desires. All too often, however, those inclinations impel him to use another person solely as a means to gain sexual satisfaction, wealth, status, power, etc. When coerced by his inclinations the person’s will is no longer free, no longer a good will, and he diminishes himself by acting immorally, that is, by using others as instruments to gratify his self-interest and his self-love.

Another person, however, retains her freedom. She too is impelled by her inclinations to use others solely as instruments to satisfy her material and emotional needs. But listening to the imperative announced by her reason and consenting to it, she resists the coercive force of her inclinations, becomes not subject to them but master of them, and treats others not solely as means to gratify her desires but with dignity and respect as ends in themselves, that is, as rational agents as capable as she is of adhering to the imperative and achieving freedom. And by assenting to the imperative and mastering her inclinations, she achieves not just a free will but a good will, a will that affirms the inherent dignity and value of others as free rational beings and that refuses to use them merely as instruments to gratify her self-interest and self-love.

For Kant, though, this is not all that is implied by pure practical reason and its imperative. The person of good will knows that every person is a rational being capable of following the imperative that emerges from pure practical reason. Every human being, that is, is capable of self-mastery and free moral action. In the realm of morality and pure practical reason there are no divisions based on class or religion or national origin. Those who belong to one class or one nation or one sect are no more capable of self-mastery and freedom than those who belong to any other. In his cosmopolitan vision, Kant affirms that all are capable of authentic moral action, capable, that is, of living as free men and women who treat one another with dignity and respect and not as mere instruments to satisfy the impulses of self-love.

In the realm of morality and pure practical reason, then, equality coexists with freedom. But even that is not all. For the person of good will, knowing that all are as capable of self-mastery and freedom as she is, strives to create the conditions—material, cultural, and political—in which they too can achieve the freedom of self-mastery. Unfortunately, all too often people live in conditions that militate against their achievement of freedom. One such condition is ignorance, another is poverty, and yet another is the violence that attends war. The person of good will seeks to eradicate the conditions that militate against the achievement of self-mastery and to promote the conditions that nurture it, specifically, knowledge and prosperity and peace. The end of the good will, then, its final purpose and goal, is not just the freedom of one but the freedom of all. The person of good will lives in solidarity with her fellows, affirming their dignity and absolute value as rational beings and striving to promote the conditions that nurture their inherent capacity to achieve self-mastery and freedom.

3. The Overt and the Covert: Reprise

If such are the implications of the categorical imperative, then we must, it seems, judge the neocons ideal Kantians. Like Kant, they hold freedom to be an absolute value and are committed to its worldwide promotion. It is certainly true that the neocons are intent on expanding the reach of America’s political and economic dominance. But at the basis of the neocon agenda, its driving force and essential motive, is the expansion of the American ideal of freedom. They envision America as the nation destined in history to bring into existence an international imperium of freedom and perpetual peace. And they are intent on amplifying America’s military power as the means to achieve its destined end. In their equal emphasis on freedom and on power, then, the neocons have brought into an ideal unity both morality and politics.

One could therefore never accuse the neocons of being actuated by a will-to-power and of harboring covert impulses to hegemony and domination. They themselves, of course, having high confidence in their good will and purity of motive, would refuse to acknowledge such an accusation or sneeringly deny it. Kant, however, recognizes that when a person scrutinizes the “incentives” driving his behavior, he will almost always unearth only motives that are worthy and good. Nonetheless, he says,

from this it cannot be inferred with certainty that no covert impulse of self-love…was not actually the real determining cause of the will; for we like to flatter ourselves by falsely attributing to ourselves a nobler motive, whereas in fact we can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind our covert incentives, since, when moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of actions that one does not see. (Gregor, 19-20)

What counts, as the neocons claim, is intent. Neocons such as Podhoretz are quick to expose the covert intent of the Iranians: they are autocrats determined to subjugate and oppress. If Podhoretz were inclined to put it in Kantian terms, he might say that the Iranians are intent on reducing the nations in their region to mere instruments of their own fanatic self-interest. He might also say, if he were so moved, that the “incentives” of the neocons are honorable and fully transparent: to rescue those nations threatened by Iranian tyranny and to bestow on them the benefits of American freedom. In other words, the neocons have no covert motives that clash with their overt espousals. They have been, are now, and always will be, transparently and indisputably, the embodiment of the American ideal, supporting freedom and democracy in its ongoing and never-ending struggle with the anti-ideal of tyranny and terror.

As I would put it, though, the neocons are, in Kant’s terms, political moralists, and Kant knew full well that such moralists have covert motives that do not accord with the façade they present to the world. In order to elucidate those motives, though, we must go beyond both Hobbes and Kant. As useful and as suggestive as their concepts of honor and power, self-interest and self-love are, they are pre-Marx, pre-Nietzsche (whose genealogy of morals is very different from Kant’s), pre-Freud and the whole psychoanalytic tradition, and it is to these modern critics that we must go in order to understand the relation between the overt acts and declarations of the neocons and their covert motives and agendas.

Even so, there is much more to be gleaned from Kant: the formulation of the imperative that stresses autonomous self-legislation and freedom from external coercion; his distinction, based on the imperative, between the political moralist and the moral politician; the relation between the imperative and his concept of the republic; and his cosmopolitan vision of a federation of republics that will sustain perpetual peace.

I’ll go into these ideas in more detail when I examine Kagan and Daalder’s Concert of Democracies, a visionary scheme that they share with Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry, who discuss it in their Princeton Project Report, “Forging a World of Liberty Under Law.” Next time, though, I’ll return, after this long detour into Hobbes and Kant, to Of Paradise and Power itself and to Kagan’s concluding peroration on America’s place in the grand historical march of freedom and democracy.

Note:

The Groundwork has gained the reputation of being a difficult text. It has gained that reputation because it is a difficult text. I have found two editions particularly helpful in puzzling out its intricacies: those of Mary Gregor (Cambridge UP) and of Allen W. Wood (Yale UP). Gregor's edition contains a helpful intro, and Wood’s edition contains interpretive essays, including an especially illuminating one by Wood himself.

Crossposted at dailykos

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History and the Kagans: Paradise and Power VI

by Bastoche | 11/11/2007 02:09:00 PM

“It would take the will of men, not nature, to bring down this horrific human invention.” So says Robert Kagan in his most recent column for The Washington Post. The “horrific human invention” to which he is referring is American slavery. Prior to the Civil War, Kagan tells us, there were those in America who, rather than confronting this shameful system with strength and will, preferred to let “nature take its course,” that is, to let the predetermined course of history step by step dismantle the institution of slavery. No direct governmental intervention, political or military, would be necessary to expunge the blight. The progress of civilization itself would do the job.

“Abraham Lincoln called these ‘lullaby’ arguments,” Kagan says, and such arguments are being served up again and in our own time by those who prefer to remain passive in the face of resurging autocracy “in China, Russia, Venezuela and elsewhere.” Economic liberalization, so these gradualists say, will step by step and inevitably produce in these autocratic nations political liberalization. Kagan disagrees. Rather than subverting autocratic regimes like Russia and China, economic liberalization and growth are strengthening them. Only one solution remains to the problem of resurgent autocracy, according to Kagan. The free nations of the world must “confront autocracies and demand that they hold free and fair elections.” Patiently awaiting the inevitable progress of democracy will not do the trick. The free nations of the world must act. “Passivity in the face of tyranny will not suffice,” Kagan concludes.

Meanwhile, in the November 12 issue of The Weekly Standard, Fred Kagan makes a related point. In Iraq we overthrew an autocrat, Saddam Hussein, and we are now trying to establish in that country a democratic system in which not violence but free and fair elections will resolve disputes. There are those, however, who insist that, because American military power cannot resolve the “tensions” between the disputing factions in Iraq, we must bring the troops home and let the Iraqis resolve their difficulties on their own. Kagan disagrees. The Bush administration’s “most ambitious aims involved only establishing a stable and peaceful democracy in Iraq--which is very different from resolving all tensions, as anyone who knows anything about democracy can tell you.” In a stable democracy factional tensions always exist, but the “core issues” that produce those tensions must be resolved “peacefully, through a political process rather than through violence.” Unfortunately, not all the contending factions in Iraq are committed to the use of peaceful means to resolve their disputes, and America must “reject and oppose those who seek to use force to gain leverage in the political process.” Kagan assures us that such rejection and opposition “is exactly what we are now in the midst of doing.”

Even though this strategy of “rejection and opposition”—that is, the Surge—is beginning to mitigate sectarian strife, Kagan says, we must not expect it to achieve a perfect reconciliation between the contending groups. Factional tensions persist in other countries that have worked their way through periods of extreme civil violence. In Northern Ireland and Bosnia, even in the United States itself, patriotic citizens continue to glower at one another across factional divides. “But achievement of perfect harmony was not the standard for the United States” nor for any other nation, “and it should not be the standard for Iraq.” Instead of such an unattainable standard, two realistic and achievable “standards” must, in Iraq, be established and maintained: first, a stable political system within which factional disputes can be resolved in an orderly manner and, second, a stable social environment within which the political system can function.

Our principal goal in Iraq, Kagan assures us, is now and has always been to establish these standards, that is, “to create a stable government…that is able to govern its own people and drive violence down to a manageable level.” The first standard was established by the Iraqi Constitution and the 2005 elections. The second standard is now being established by the Surge. The Surge is suppressing and will continue to suppress the violence manufactured by four factions: Al Qaeda, Baathist holdovers from the Saddam era, Iranian proxies, and sectarian militias, especially the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Until those four instigators of violence and anarchy are effectively subdued, Iraqis cannot establish the conditions—social stability and peace—within which free and fair elections can regularly take place and a democratic process successfully function. The Iraqi government, however, is at present incapable of controlling those factions, and it needs America’s continuing presence and help until it can suppress on its own the instigators of anarchy. When the Iraqis themselves are capable of managing factional violence and sustaining the democratic process, America can confidently claim that it has achieved its primary goal: the establishment of freedom and democracy in a nation previously ruled by autocracy and despotism.

1. A Concert and a Surge

The Brothers Kagan have a point. In a democracy, free and fair elections are one way that those who do not govern hold accountable those who do (an independent judiciary and a responsible press are two others). The great American Ideal is to make this electoral power—and the other components of democracy—available to all the peoples of the world. Idealists though they are, the Brothers Kagan are also practical politicians, and they have devised the means by which this great end can be achieved. The scope of Brother Fred’s method, the Surge, is limited to one nation, Iraq. Fred claims that certain factions in Iraq are actively seeking to undermine the democratic goal. One faction, the Baathists, wants to reestablish the old secular autocracy. The other factions—Al Qaeda, the proxies of Iran, the Mahdi Army—want to establish a new theocratic one. At present, only American military power, organized into an effective counterinsurgency force, can subdue these anarchic elements and thus create a space in which a stable democracy can take root and begin peacefully to resolve the “core issues” among the disputing factions.

Brother Robert’s perspective is not the present situation in Iraq but the looming contest between, on the one hand, the great democracies of the world and, on the other, the giant autocracies, Russia and China. And he too has a method by which free nations can, short of war, act to put pressure on those nations who refuse to abide by the principles of freedom and democracy. In a recent Washington Post article, he and Ivo Daalder have called for a Concert of Democracies. This group of free and democratic nations will regularly meet in order to discuss and achieve consensus on critical international situations. Their discussion and the consensus that emerges from it will be based on “shared principles”: freedom and democracy. Such a consensus, reached through rational discussion and based on unassailable principles, will thus provide legitimacy for America’s “next intervention,” that is, America’s next confrontation with autocratic coercion and tyranny.

This Concert of Democracies bears more than a passing resemblance to an idea that Kant put forward in his 1795 philosophical sketch, Perpetual Peace: a league of states that, on the basis of reason, establishes and maintains a condition of international peace. In Of Paradise and Power, the book that I am examining in this series, Kagan gestures again and again towards Kant and his idea of a peace that is perpetual because it is founded on reason. On the basis of rationality and rules, according to Kagan, Europe has crafted a paradise of Kantian peace set off from the Hobbesian anarchy that prevails in the rest of the world. America’s role, as Kagan sees it, is to stand on the border between the two, courageously and honorably defending freedom and democracy from the assaults of terrorist outlaws and autocratic rogues.

But what Kagan fails to mention, or fails to understand, is that Kant, in his writings on morals and politics, makes a crucial distinction between two types of reason and two types of politician. The political moralist, as Kant calls him, uses ordinary practical reason and its methods in order to advance his nation’s self-interest. The moral politician, on the other hand, uses pure practical reason and its methods, based on the categorical imperative, in order to attain international peace. By means of ordinary practical reason, or instrumental reason, the political moralists of the world can certainly construct a league of states or a “Concert of Democracies,” as Kagan and Daalder call it. But for Kant such a league is neither a paradise nor perpetually peaceful since each of its member nations is committed, finally, to its own power and privilege, its own self-interest. Only on the basis of pure practical reason and the imperatives that emerge from it can the moral politicians of the world create a federation of free and equal states and guarantee a perpetual peace.

In other words, for Kant perpetual peace can be attained only when politics and morality are brought into accord with one another. And Kant is under no illusion that such an accord is easily achieved. The world is brimful of political moralists who espouse freedom and honor and international cooperation but whose allegiance is to national prestige and self-interest. Conversely, the world labors under a severe shortage of moral politicians who commit themselves to the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative, and to the political ends that flow from it: freedom and equality for all the peoples of the earth. To put it another and very Kantian way, whereas the ideal of the political moralist is a nationalistic ideal, the ideal of the moral politician is a cosmopolitan ideal.

For Kant, then, we have on the one hand the political moralist who, on the basis of instrumental reason, espouses a nationalistic ideal of self-interest and power. On the other, we have the moral politician, who on the basis of pure practical reason, espouses a cosmopolitan ideal of freedom, equality, and solidarity. This distinction between the political moralist and the moral politician is a crucial one in Kant’s political philosophy, and in order to understand it we must first understand the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy, the categorical imperative, which he defines and illustrates in that brief and immensely influential work, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.

In their political writings the Brothers Kagan and their Father Donald put a heavy emphasis on a specific human faculty: the will. In the Groundwork so too does Kant. His purpose in the Groundwork is to discover and define the factor that makes a person’s will a good will, and he discovers that factor in the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative. Further, he claims, this supreme moral principle is oriented toward one supreme human end—freedom. As we’ve seen, the Kagans are idealistically committed to the triumph of freedom over its perennial opponent, tyranny. One might think, therefore, that Kant and the Kagans are on common ground in regard to this most fundamental of moral matters. They are not. The political moralist—and each of the Kagans is a shining example of the political moralist—is always happy to traffic in the ideals of freedom and democracy. But his end is a world removed from that of the moral politician.

2. A Gal’s Gotta Do What a Gal’s Gotta Do

Kant begins Section I of the Groundwork with this famous passage: "There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will." (trans. Allen W. Wood)

Before we consider what, according to Kant, makes a will good, we must first consider what the will is and what relation it has to other human faculties. The will is that mental faculty that causes a person to act in order to obtain an object or achieve an end. A person’s will, though, does not set the end which the person strives to obtain or achieve. For Kant, a person’s will is conditioned, that is, moved to act, by his physical and social and moral inclinations or needs.

When a person sees an object or envisions an end that promises to satisfy one of his inclinations, he uses his ordinary practical reason (his instrumental reason) to devise the means that will enable him successfully to possess the object or achieve the end. He then, as Kant puts it, wills the end. That is, by an act of will he puts into practice the means, devised by his practical reason, that will enable him to achieve his end: the possession of an object or the achievement of a goal that satisfies the initiating inclination.

One person, for example, has a desire (inclination) to learn to play the piano. In order to achieve this end, he employs his practical reason to map out the necessary means: he must find a good teacher, budget time for practice, set aside funds for the instrument and the lessons, etc. He must now will the end, that is, put into practice the means that he has devised to achieve it. If he is sufficiently resolute—if he has sufficient will—he will so deploy the means as to achieve his end. Conversely, if he is not sufficiently resolute—if he lacks sufficient will—he will deploy the means so infrequently or irregularly as to make no progress towards his goal.

Another person has a desire to assert America’s dominance in the Middle East in order to spread the benefits of democracy and guarantee the satisfaction of America’s “vital interests.” In order to achieve this end, he employs his practical reason to map out a strategy (the means): invade select nations, topple governments that are tyrannical, install governments that are democratic, create conditions that will enable the installed democracy to flourish, etc. He must now will the end, that is, deploy the means that will successfully transform the Middle East into a paradise of freedom and democracy and a reliable supplier to America of vital resources. Of course, spreading democracy is not as easy as learning to play the piano, and he might find that however resolute his will, the end is not as easily achieved as he at first expected. Nonetheless, he remains confident that if he continues to apply an effective strategy—if he continues, that is, to will the end—he will successfully achieve his laudable and honorable goal.

These are both instances in which a person, moved by an inclination to achieve a goal, mobilizes his practical reason, devises a strategy to achieve his end, and puts the strategy into practice or, in Kant’s terms, wills the end. In neither case, though, do we have an example of the will undertaking a moral action, an action that in Kant’s view exemplifies the good will. In fact, it is possible that the second person, the one intent on spreading democracy, is, in spite of the seeming goodness of his goal, committing an immoral act.

But more on that next time. First, an example of an act that, in Kantian terms, is an authentic moral act, an act that flows from a good will.

A person has a desire to remedy a situation that she recognizes as unjust: the invasion and occupation of a Middle East nation by an American regime intent on securing its interests and expanding its sphere of influence. Her remedy—the goal that she wants to achieve—is to end the occupation. In order to achieve this goal, she employs her ordinary practical reason to map out a strategy: write letters to the editor of the local paper, become involved in the campaigns of like-minded politicians, take part in public demonstrations, etc. She must now will the end, that is, put into practice the elements of the strategy that her practical reason has mapped out.

But problems arise that interfere with her motivation to put those means into practice: she has recently divorced and is seeking a new relationship; she is working overtime so that she can buy a new car; both her mother and her father are staunch supporters of the president and his policies. Correcting the injustice has now become inconvenient and troublesome, using time and energy that she is more inclined to put towards other goals. Even worse, working to end the occupation might very well produce conflict between her and her parents. But even though these factors are exerting on her a powerful pull and deflecting her will away from doing the right thing, she nonetheless resists their pull, chooses the right thing, and does it.

To put it in Kant’s terms, the person’s inclinations—to begin a new relationship, to buy a new car, to avoid conflict with her parents—are preventing her from willing her end. At this point her pure practical reason intervenes and insists that she adhere to its rule, the categorical imperative. Caught in this conflict between reason and desire, she now makes what for Kant is an authentic moral choice. Though pulled away by her inclinations—by her self-love, as Kant puts it—from doing what she knows must be done, she resists the pull and does the right thing. She works to correct the injustice her nation is committing because that work, she sees, is a moral necessity, a duty for which she must reserve some small part of her time and energy. Thus, by resisting her inclinations and consenting to the imperative, she wills an act that is authentically moral. And in willing such an act, her will becomes a good will.

3. So What Is This Thing Called the Categorical Imperative?

Fred Kagan claims that the Bush Administration has always had one overriding goal in Iraq: the eradication of autocracy and the establishment of democracy. As his brother Robert now argues, the free nations of the world must stir from their passivity, unite into a Concert of Democracies, and actively resist the expansion of autocracy in the world. The protection and promotion of freedom are certainly laudable and honorable goals, and the neocon politicians who strive to attain such goals with strength and will are, just as certainly, moral politicians, that is, politicians who are moved by the imperatives of international freedom and equality. One cannot possibly call them political moralists, that is, politicians who are loud in their espousal of international freedom and equality but who are, in reality, motivated by nationalistic self-interest and nationalistic self-love.

Well, as I’ve said, not only can one call the Kagans political moralists in Kant’s sense of the term, one can hold them up as paradigmatic illustrations of the type. And to see why, we now have to look at the categorical imperative itself and at the type of nation that, according to Kant, is founded on the moral imperatives of freedom, equality, and solidarity—the republic.

Crossposted at dailykos

Labels: Bastoche, History and the Kagans

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History and the Kagans: Paradise and Power V

by Bastoche | 10/28/2007 03:37:00 PM

In his essay, “End of Dreams, Return of History,” (which I briefly referenced in Part III of this series and to which I will return in more detail in future posts), Robert Kagan claims that we have entered an era in which “history”—that is, the contest between ideologies and between two ideologies in particular, liberalism and autocracy—is once again determining the foreign policy choices of the world’s nations. The most fundamental choice each nation must make is, of course, on which side of the ideological divide to stand: the liberal side with America, the European Union, Japan, Australia, and India or the autocratic side with Russia, China, and Iran.

But ideology is not the only motivating force in this new era of “history.” The world’s great nations, according to Kagan, are once again being motivated by “competitive national ambitions of the kind that have shaped human affairs from time immemorial.” Nations, that is, are ambitiously competing not just for material wealth and prosperity but for commodities more intangible: status, prestige, and honor.

Such nationalistic ambition, according to Kagan, “drives China’s foreign policy today.” Although this ambition is “tempered by prudence,” the Chinese are nonetheless “powerfully motivated to return their nation to what they regard as its traditional position as the preeminent power in East Asia.” They believe, just as Americans believe, that power “is a good thing to have and that it is better to have more of it than less.” Power, though, is not an end in itself but a means to an end, and that end cannot be measured solely in the material terms of economic wealth and military might. The Chinese understand, just as Great Powers have always understood, “that status and honor, and not just wealth and security, are important for a nation.”

That other autocratic giant, Russia, is also “moved by more traditional great-power considerations, including the pursuit of those valuable if intangible national interests: honor and respect.” The Europeans too “seek honor and respect…but of a postmodern variety.” Europe’s ambition is no longer to stand on the world stage as a predominant military power, but rather “to occupy the moral high ground in the world, to exercise moral authority…to be keeper of the global conscience, and to be recognized and admired by others for playing this role.”

America, in this respect, is no different from China or Russia or Great Britain or any other powerful nation in human history. America too is ambitious for status and prestige and honor, and since America is by far the predominant military and economic power in the world, it quite naturally seeks to base its sense of national honor on its economic and military might.

But economic and military strength are not the only criteria that America uses to distinguish itself from other nations and claim for itself a place of special honor in the grand sweep of history. America seeks also the prestige that flows from a different kind of power and authority, the moral authority that the Europeans currently claim. For America, in Kagan’s view, is the nation that originated in freedom and whose destiny is to organize the world into one democratic polity of peace, thus bringing to its historical culmination the universal ideal out of which it was born.

1. The Two Ideals

America thus, in Kagan’s view of the world, gives its allegiance to two ideals of honor: the ideal of the warrior and the ideal of the moralist. America lives by the ideal of the warrior when it protects democracy from the aggression of tyranny and terror. It lives by the ideal of the moralist when it promotes democracy and actively disseminates it throughout the globe. America is uniquely fitted to live and act by both ideals because it is both militarily powerful and morally prudent. Though militarily powerful, America puts its power prudently at the service of the value out of which, as a nation, it was born—freedom—and does not use its colossal power in order to assert an autocratic and imperial agenda.

That America can live by both ideals and can shift prudently from one to the other is especially important in this era when the clash of ideologies, as Kagan puts it, is once again looming on the horizon. In the coming decades autocratic nations will be competing against one another and against liberal nations not only for resources but for status and influence, for prestige and honor. Such nations will not hesitate to employ the Hobbesian methods of deceit and force, against which the Kantian methods of reason and rules favored by the liberal nations will, predictably, prove useless. One nation, at least, while remaining devoted to reason must also so dedicate itself to military power that it can resist the attempts of the autocrats and terrorists to subvert democracy and eradicate freedom from the march of history.

One nation has indeed come forward to fight autocracy and terror and to establish freedom and democracy on a universal basis. That singular nation, the world’s “dangerous” nation, as Kagan calls it, stands at the apex of history not only as the preeminent military power but also as the preeminent moral power. That nation is, of course, America.

In Kagan’s neocon worldview, America is, simply put, history’s preeminent nation. America stands singular and alone as the embodiment of the ideal—freedom—to which history itself aspires. The Europeans may have, after centuries of violence and conflict, crafted a realm of reason and rules, but America originated as a nation of reason and rules. Further, though Europe sees itself as the embodiment of a new Kantian order, only America has the power to protect that order and to promote it throughout the globe.

In his book, Of Paradise and Power, Kagan makes the distinction between the Hobbesian world of anarchy, in which the terrorist and autocratic states of the world compete to gain power and preeminence, and the Kantian paradise of reason, in which the democratic states of Europe cooperate to maintain peace and prosperity. In Kagan’s scheme of things, America has taken on the role of the world’s Sheriff, protecting the nations that occupy the paradise of peace from those that occupy the wilderness of power. America can successfully assume this role because, on the one hand, it has the strength and will to deal effectively with the Hobbesian rogues and outlaws and, on the other, it is dedicated to reason and rules and the Kantian ideal of perpetual peace.

Kagan, however, though he refers often in his argument to Kant’s idea of perpetual peace, fundamentally misunderstands it. Kant understood that the exercise of true moral authority conforms to three imperatives: freedom, equality, and solidarity. The goal of the moral nation is not preeminence, the affirmation that one nation, above all others, is replete with power and therefore more worthy of dignity and respect than any other nation, but equality, the affirmation that every nation, irrespective of its economic and military might, is capable of autonomous self-legislation and therefore as worthy of dignity and respect as every other nation.

The ideal of the warrior, on the other hand, is based on preeminence, the acknowledged dominance of one individual or nation over all others. Only one nation can stand as the most powerful of its era, and in our era that nation is, of course, America. But, in Kagan’s view, there is more. Only one nation can boast that its military and economic might are unequaled not just now but in the entire span of human history. And, for Kagan, even that is not all. Only one nation will be able to look down from the very summit of human achievement—the organization of the world into one polity of freedom and peace—and claim that it has brought history to its culmination and close. At the end of history, when freedom overcomes terror and tyranny, peace and equality will prevail among all nations. But in that paradise of freedom and equality one nation will stand forever preeminent, the nation that will have produced, by means of its power, everlasting peace and that will, on the basis of its power, forever guarantee it: America.

As charming and seductive as Kagan’s worldview is, it radically distorts the relationship between the ideal of the warrior and the ideal of the moralist. Instead of the ideal of the moralist constraining that of the warrior, the ideal of the warrior has infected that of the moralist. Kagan’s concept of honor is a warrior’s concept of honor, and his concept of power is a warrior’s concept of power. Preeminence, domination, victory, and fame are the values that drive his worldview. As Kagan envisions it, America will ultimately stand forth not only as history’s preeminent military nation, the nation that achieved an unsurpassable apex of power, but also as history’s preeminent moral nation, the nation that brought to its final realization the ideal for which history was created: freedom.

The fatal flaw in Kagan’s worldview, in the neocon worldview generally, is that moral action and freedom do not derive from a dialectic of domination and submission, of preeminence and subservience, of power and weakness, but from a different sort of dialectic entirely, a dialectic, to use Kant’s terms, of reason and desire. Out of reason, pure practical reason, as Kant calls it, come the moral imperatives that constrain the desire to dominate and rule by means of military power: the imperatives of freedom and equality and solidarity. In the realm of practical power one nation might very well be superior to all other nations. But in the realm of practical reason, every nation is, finally, an autonomous agent of self-legislation and no more worthy of dignity and respect—of “honor”—than any other nation.

Kant upholds an ideal of human action and human agency that is rational, an ideal based on reason and leading to a struggle for equality. Kagan upholds an ideal of human action and human agency that is irrational, an ideal based on power and leading to a struggle for predominance. Kagan is committed to a view of America as the world’s predominant nation, the nation that, finally, will stand above all others in the grand narrative of history, and thus is committed not to a Kantian ideal of reason and rules but to a warrior ideal of power and preeminence—a warrior ideal of honor.

I’ll discuss in more detail Kant’s concept of perpetual peace next time, but first, with the help of Thomas Hobbes and William Shakespeare, I’ll illustrate the connection between the two attributes on which Kagan puts his main ideological emphasis: power and honor.

2. To Wear Without Corrival All Her Dignities

Harry Percy—or Hotspur, as he is better known—is annoyed (Henry IV, Part One: Act I, scene iii). He has done yeoman’s work for his King. Not only did he help Henry depose King Richard and usurp the throne, he has now helped him secure it by defeating in battle the Scottish rebel, Douglas. True, he at first refused to hand over to the King the prisoners he took from Douglas—an act of defiance that has nettled Henry. But now, come before Henry at Windsor, he agrees to do so—as long as Henry ransoms Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Mortimer, from the Welsh rebel Glendower. Henry bristles at the suggestion since Mortimer, it seems, has married Glendower’s daughter and turned rebel himself. Hotspur defends his brother-in-law, but Henry will have none of it and orders Hotspur to comply with his demand.

Henry exits, and Hotspur, incensed at being treated with such highhanded disdain, proceeds to exhibit the irascible temper that has earned him his nickname. To Hotspur it is clear that Henry, having ascended to the throne and to the title of King, has become so enamored of his power and preeminence that he treats with contempt even those who have put their lives and blood at his service. All must genuflect to his will or suffer the punitive swipe of his anger. But Hotspur has no intention of letting himself be relegated to a position of passive and abject subservience. Henry gained his preeminence through rebellion, did he? Hotspur will follow the precedent that Henry has set: he will become a rebel himself and expunge the dishonor with which Henry, in his arrogance, has sullied his name.

Listening to Hotspur’s tirade are his father Northumberland and his uncle Worcester. Hotspur shifts his annoyance to them and claims that now and in the future they will stand convicted of two shameful acts. First, they aided Henry in his deposition of Richard, “that sweet lovely rose,” as Hotspur now calls him. But that retrospective shame is mere prelude to the greater and prospective one. “And shall it in more shame be further spoken,/That you are fool’d, discarded, and shook off/By him for whom these shames ye underwent?” (177-79) Hotspur urges them not to remain the submissive recipients of Henry’s contempt and disfavor. “No, yet time serves wherein you may redeem/Your banish’d honors and restore yourselves/Into the good thoughts of the world again” (180-82).

Only one field exists on which they can cleanse themselves of the blot of shame that now disfigures their reputation and restore themselves to honor: the field of battle. By means of rebellion and war will they rescue what they have lost—their stature and prestige—and subject the one who insulted them, Henry, to the everlasting humiliation of defeat. Hotspur welcomes the contest: “Send danger from the east unto the west,/So honor cross it from the north to south,/And let them grapple” (195-97).

Indeed, Hotspur seems eager to stand at the precise juncture where danger and honor meet:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities. (201-07)

Shakespeare here illustrates for us a central aspect of the warrior ideal of honor: the drive to stand preeminent and without rival in the world. In the scale of honor only one position is worthy of occupancy: the first position, the very summit of the scale. Any other position, from number two on down, signals a reduction of honor and of worth. And only one person can stand atop the scale. The supreme position is not meant for occupation by a crowd, and two constitutes a crowd. Anyone who pretends to climb atop and share that space with its occupant becomes a “corrival” and must either be pushed off or given sole right of occupancy. Equality is not a concept that exists in the warrior’s ideal of honor—equality at the top, that is. Below the top all are equal: equally secondary, equally diminished, equally unworthy of the fame and glory and prestige—of the honor—that accrues to the one at the summit of the heap.

Hotspur, though, wants to gain preeminence not just through any act but through an act commensurate with his own grandiose image of himself, an act akin to leaping at the moon or diving into the depths. In rebellion against his King he finds such an act. As a warrior, he knows that only one quality justifies occupancy of the realm’s supreme position: power. And as a warrior he also knows that there is only one arena in which he can most convincingly display his power: war. In that arena he has already more than once displayed his skill and courage and prowess as a warrior, in a word, his power. When, in that greatest of all competitive arenas, he next puts on display the spectacle of his power, he will defeat Henry and compel those who witness his triumph to give him his reward. And for Hotspur his reward is not just a tangible one, the throne of England, but something intangible and even more valuable: everlasting honor.

3. The Pleasure of Contemplating Their Own Power

Like Shakespeare, Hobbes also understood the connection between, on the one hand, a person’s display of power and, on the other, that which he receives as reward for such display: honor.

In Chapter X of Leviathan, “Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthiness,” Hobbes defines honor and dishonor as the subjective evaluations we place on a person, the degree, that is, to which we assign a person value or worth. “The manifestation of the value we set on one another is that which is commonly called honoring and dishonoring. To value a man at a high rate is to honor him; at a low rate is to dishonor him” (x, 17).

The rate at which we value a person, the degree, that is, to which we honor or dishonor a person, is dependent primarily on a single consideration: the amount of power that person is able to display. "Honorable is whatsoever possession, action, or quality is an argument and sign of power. And therefore to be honored, loved, or feared of many is honorable, as arguments of power. To be honored of few or none, dishonorable” (x, 37-8).

Numerous qualities can prompt us to evaluate a person’s worth at a high level. Such material attributes as wealth or privilege are indications of power and therefore honorable. “Magnanimity, liberality, hope, courage, confidence” and similar character traits are honorable, “for they proceed from the conscience [consciousness] of power” (x, 40). Those glorious indices of martial success, “dominion and victory,” are also honorable “because acquired by power.” Conversely, “servitude, for need or fear, is dishonorable” (x, 39). Those who serve do so, of course, only because they are weak and without sufficient power to compel others to serve them and so are unworthy of high estimation and honor.

We might assume that conventional ideas of justice would influence our estimation of a person’s worth or value. They do not. “Nor does it alter the case of honor, whether an action (so it be great and difficult, and consequently a sign of much power) be just or unjust; for honor consisteth only in the opinion of power” (x, 48).

Hobbes does not approve of this drive for honor: in the state of nature, as he envisions it (see Part IV of this series), the desire for glory is one of the three principle causes of conflict. But Hobbes also understands that in the state of nature, in which there is no sovereign invested with the power to produce and maintain order, it makes good rational sense for an individual to accrue as much power as possible in order to compete successfully for resources and to protect what he gains.

Some individuals, though, are driven by an irrational motive in their pursuit of power, in that they “[take] pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires” (xiii, 4). Some individuals, that is, are driven to needless acts of war in order to display their power before the gaze of the world and to gain from such display—from their victory in combat—honor and all her dignities: prestige, fame, and glory. After they have thus distinguished themselves above all others, they will forever have the pleasure of contemplating their own power. To put it more exactly, they will forever have the pleasure of seeing reflected in the eyes of those they have subjected the image of their superiority.

It is just such a pleasure that Kagan and the neocons hope to enjoy. Kagan of course does not claim that America displays its military strength and warrior will for the sake of establishing itself at the apex of historical honor. His vision of American power is, on the surface, a prudent and practical one. The world outside Europe, as he describes it, is a world of Hobbesian anarchy, and America, as the protector of democracy and freedom, must be able to face down and defeat the autocrats and terrorists who occupy it. In the Hobbesian sector of the world it must, that is, abide by the warrior ideal of power and domination.

But for Kagan America is not only the warrior who valiantly protects the weak against terror and tyranny but also the savior who is born to bring freedom and perpetual peace to all the nations of the world. When Kagan speaks of America’s moral destiny, he seems to be shifting away from a warrior ideal to a moral ideal. But such is far from the case. Rather than relinquishing the warrior ideal for a higher moral ideal, Kagan sublimates the warrior ideal: America will once again put on display its singular greatness before the world, vanquishing its enemies (and pretenders like Europe) not only as a military power but as a moral power. Though America will earn honor in the arena of war, it will achieve its ultimate honor after it has eradicated the Hobbesian realm of anarchy and established Kantian peace on a worldwide basis. America will then stand forever as history’s preeminent nation.

But however much Kagan tries to sublimate his warrior ideal, it remains a warrior ideal, based on preeminence and power. No amount of gesturing towards the Kantian ideas of reason and peace (which he misunderstands) will transform his warrior ideal into something sublime. His ideal of America as history’s “dangerous” nation—dangerous because of its commitment to both freedom and power—remains embedded in and inseparable from his ideal of America as history’s supreme warrior nation.

Such sublimation of the warrior ideal also allows Kagan, and the neocons in general, to indulge in a neat bit of ideological shape-shifting. Given the resurgence of “history” and the looming conflict between liberalism and autocracy, there is little prospect that America will be able any time soon to establish a Kantian realm of worldwide peace. For the foreseeable future, America will have to live in a world of Hobbesian struggle and war, contending against those nations that seek to eradicate freedom and replace it with autocracy and terror. The neocon idealists, therefore, will have to forego their dream of establishing, under the aegis of American power, a worldwide empire of democracy and peace. They will have to settle for a lesser but still honorable spectacle: America, its only goal the preservation of freedom, displaying its predominant power in the glorious arena of war.

4. There is Honor and Then There is – Well, What Exactly?

In that glorious arena in which he confidently expected to win everlasting fame, Hotspur loses not only his life but something more valuable. On the field of Shrewsbury he meets not King Henry but Henry’s son, Prince Hal. In the single combat that follows, it is not the seasoned warrior, Hotspur, but the former delinquent, Hal, who emerges the victor. “O Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth,” Hotspur says as he is dying. “I better brook the loss of brittle life/Than those proud titles thou has won of me./They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh” (V.iv.77-80).

It is not the tangible wounds to his body but the intangible wounds to his honor that cause Hotspur grief and prompt his despair. Hal’s victory over him in battle—the glaring indication that Hotspur's power is less than that of his opponent—has dealt death not only to his body but to his reputation and his vaunting pride as a warrior. Even worse, because he has displayed in battle not strength but weakness, not power but impotence, Hotspur’s defeat has forever attached to his name the antithesis of honor: shame and humiliation.

There is, however, on the field of Shrewsbury one soldier who cares about neither honor nor humiliation. Prior to the battle Falstaff delivers a “catechism” on honor (V.i.127-41) in which he points out that honor has no power to set a leg or an arm or to “take away the grief of a wound.” If honor has no power to remedy physical hurt, what power does it have? None, really. It is but a “word” and has nothing in it but the incorporeal “air.” In battle a man might earn a title to this puff of breath, but if he dies while earning it, he’ll neither hear it applied to his name nor feel its effects. And even if he does live to enjoy its benefits, such enjoyment will be brief, for the envy of others will not long allow him to keep his title. “Therefore I’ll none of it,” Falstaff concludes, preferring a long and inglorious life without the empty title of honor to a short and glorious one with it.

Falstaff’s catechism is by no means Shakespeare’s final word on the relationship between power and honor. Shakespeare would express his mature view in the tragedies that follow the Henriad, especially King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. But for our purposes, the individual to whom we must now turn in order to counter the neocon ideal of honor is the one to whom Kagan himself repeatedly refers: Immanuel Kant.

Crossposted at dailykos

Labels: Bastoche, History and the Kagans

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