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h/t Charles Burris: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/niall-ferguson-and-andrew-j-bacevich/
A long article, but very much worth the read.
Bacevich completely destroys Kagan's BS ...
The Duplicity of the Ideologues
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues
Andrew J. Bacevich (04 June 2014)
U.S. Policy & Robert Kagan's Fictive Narrative
“Almost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States.” Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, “that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing.” Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that “something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine,” he writes in the New Republic (“Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire”). Indeed, “the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us.”
These changes “signal a transition into a different world order,” one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don’t bother to look for material explanations. “If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring,” Kagan writes, “it is not because America’s power is declining.” The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is “an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose.” Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons.
Writing in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks hails Kagan’s New Republic essay as “brilliant.” A more accurate appraisal would be slickly mendacious. Still, Kagan’s essay also qualifies as instructive: Here in some 12,700 carefully polished words the impoverished state of foreign-policy discourse is laid bare. If the problem hobbling U. S. policy is an intellectual one, then Kagan himself, purveyor of a fictive past, exhibits that problem in spades.
That Robert Kagan, a bona fide Washington insider, currently housed at the Brookings Institution, possesses very considerable talents is doubtless the case. A well-regarded historian, he is also a skilled polemicist and an ideologue. Here he combines all three callings to fashion a historical narrative that advances two claims. The first enshrines the entire period since 1945—until Obama sounded retreat anyway—as a kind of golden age when freedom, democracy, and liberal values flourished as never before. The second attributes this golden age almost entirely to enlightened American leadership. Policymakers in Washington, he writes, manifested a “sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the interests of many others around the world.”
Neither one of these claims stands up to even casual scrutiny. Rather than describing the prevailing realities of the post-1945 era, phrases like “world order” and “global responsibility” obfuscate. Purporting to clarify, they merely gloss over. Kagan employs these as devices to beguile, while constructing a version of “truth” that ignores inconvenient facts. There’s a name for this technique: It’s called propaganda.
The “world order” of the decades following World War II exists only in Kagan’s imagination. [...]
[W]hen brave Europeans under the boot of Soviet dominion periodically rose up—East Germans in 1953, Poles and Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968—Washington’s commitment to freedom and democracy took a backseat to its preference for avoiding a potentially climactic East-West showdown. In each case, the United States stood by as the Kremlin brutally restored discipline in its empire.
Of course, much like the Soviets in Eastern Europe, Washington asserted the prerogative of policing its own sphere of influence. When it did so—overthrowing regimes not to its liking in Guatemala, Iran, and South Vietnam, for example—the “promotion of a liberal world order” did not rank high in the list of American motives. So too with the roster of despots, dictators, and kleptocrats that the United States assiduously supported. From Batista and Somoza in the 1950s to Musharraf and Mubarak in the past decade, a regime’s adherence to liberal values seldom determined whether or not it was deemed a worthy American ally.
Such matters do not qualify for inclusion in Kagan’s celebration of American global leadership, however. Guatemala he simply ignores—not worth the bother. Iran gets mentioned only as a “rogue state” with an inexplicable hankering to acquire nuclear weapons. As for Vietnam, Kagan contents himself with an ambiguous reference to its “uncertain and unsatisfying” outcome, as if the war were a risky stock purchase that still might show a modest profit.
Other disruptions to a “world order” ostensibly founded on the principle of American “global responsibility” included the 1947 partition of India (estimated 500,000 to one million dead); the 1948 displacement of Palestinians (700,000 refugees); the exodus of Vietnamese from north to south in 1954 (between 600,000 and one million fled); the flight of the pied noir from Algeria (800,000 exiled); the deaths resulting directly from Mao Tse Tung’s quest for utopia (between 2 million and 5 million); the mass murder of Indonesians during the anti-Communist purges of the mid-1960s (500,000 slaughtered); the partition of Pakistan in 1971 (up to 3 million killed; millions more displaced); genocide in Cambodia (1.7 million dead); and war between Iran and Iraq (at least more 400,00 killed). Did I mention civil wars in Nigeria, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that killed millions? The list goes on.
Kagan mentions none of those episodes. Yet all occurred during the Cold War, when the United States was, in his words, “vigilant and ready to act, with force, anywhere in the world.”
By what standard does a system in which such things occur qualify as a “world order”? With the United States reacting passively to human misery on an epic scale (where not actively abetting the perpetrators), what is the operative definition of “global responsibility” that squares with U.S. behavior? If, as Kagan argues, “the American project has aimed at shaping a world different from what had always been, taking advantage of America’s unique situation to do what no nation had ever been able to do,” then how can it be that such awful events persist?
The answers to these questions are clear. [...]
[ ... continued at link: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues]
A long article, but very much worth the read.
Bacevich completely destroys Kagan's BS ...
The Duplicity of the Ideologues
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues
Andrew J. Bacevich (04 June 2014)
U.S. Policy & Robert Kagan's Fictive Narrative
“Almost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States.” Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, “that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing.” Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that “something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine,” he writes in the New Republic (“Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire”). Indeed, “the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us.”
These changes “signal a transition into a different world order,” one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don’t bother to look for material explanations. “If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring,” Kagan writes, “it is not because America’s power is declining.” The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is “an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose.” Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons.
Writing in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks hails Kagan’s New Republic essay as “brilliant.” A more accurate appraisal would be slickly mendacious. Still, Kagan’s essay also qualifies as instructive: Here in some 12,700 carefully polished words the impoverished state of foreign-policy discourse is laid bare. If the problem hobbling U. S. policy is an intellectual one, then Kagan himself, purveyor of a fictive past, exhibits that problem in spades.
That Robert Kagan, a bona fide Washington insider, currently housed at the Brookings Institution, possesses very considerable talents is doubtless the case. A well-regarded historian, he is also a skilled polemicist and an ideologue. Here he combines all three callings to fashion a historical narrative that advances two claims. The first enshrines the entire period since 1945—until Obama sounded retreat anyway—as a kind of golden age when freedom, democracy, and liberal values flourished as never before. The second attributes this golden age almost entirely to enlightened American leadership. Policymakers in Washington, he writes, manifested a “sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the interests of many others around the world.”
Neither one of these claims stands up to even casual scrutiny. Rather than describing the prevailing realities of the post-1945 era, phrases like “world order” and “global responsibility” obfuscate. Purporting to clarify, they merely gloss over. Kagan employs these as devices to beguile, while constructing a version of “truth” that ignores inconvenient facts. There’s a name for this technique: It’s called propaganda.
The “world order” of the decades following World War II exists only in Kagan’s imagination. [...]
[W]hen brave Europeans under the boot of Soviet dominion periodically rose up—East Germans in 1953, Poles and Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968—Washington’s commitment to freedom and democracy took a backseat to its preference for avoiding a potentially climactic East-West showdown. In each case, the United States stood by as the Kremlin brutally restored discipline in its empire.
Of course, much like the Soviets in Eastern Europe, Washington asserted the prerogative of policing its own sphere of influence. When it did so—overthrowing regimes not to its liking in Guatemala, Iran, and South Vietnam, for example—the “promotion of a liberal world order” did not rank high in the list of American motives. So too with the roster of despots, dictators, and kleptocrats that the United States assiduously supported. From Batista and Somoza in the 1950s to Musharraf and Mubarak in the past decade, a regime’s adherence to liberal values seldom determined whether or not it was deemed a worthy American ally.
Such matters do not qualify for inclusion in Kagan’s celebration of American global leadership, however. Guatemala he simply ignores—not worth the bother. Iran gets mentioned only as a “rogue state” with an inexplicable hankering to acquire nuclear weapons. As for Vietnam, Kagan contents himself with an ambiguous reference to its “uncertain and unsatisfying” outcome, as if the war were a risky stock purchase that still might show a modest profit.
Other disruptions to a “world order” ostensibly founded on the principle of American “global responsibility” included the 1947 partition of India (estimated 500,000 to one million dead); the 1948 displacement of Palestinians (700,000 refugees); the exodus of Vietnamese from north to south in 1954 (between 600,000 and one million fled); the flight of the pied noir from Algeria (800,000 exiled); the deaths resulting directly from Mao Tse Tung’s quest for utopia (between 2 million and 5 million); the mass murder of Indonesians during the anti-Communist purges of the mid-1960s (500,000 slaughtered); the partition of Pakistan in 1971 (up to 3 million killed; millions more displaced); genocide in Cambodia (1.7 million dead); and war between Iran and Iraq (at least more 400,00 killed). Did I mention civil wars in Nigeria, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that killed millions? The list goes on.
Kagan mentions none of those episodes. Yet all occurred during the Cold War, when the United States was, in his words, “vigilant and ready to act, with force, anywhere in the world.”
By what standard does a system in which such things occur qualify as a “world order”? With the United States reacting passively to human misery on an epic scale (where not actively abetting the perpetrators), what is the operative definition of “global responsibility” that squares with U.S. behavior? If, as Kagan argues, “the American project has aimed at shaping a world different from what had always been, taking advantage of America’s unique situation to do what no nation had ever been able to do,” then how can it be that such awful events persist?
The answers to these questions are clear. [...]
[ ... continued at link: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues]
