Robert Kagan makes a case for a stronger military –– ready and able to engage if necessary –– in “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).
And he calls for cooperation, diplomacy, and (what seems impossible today) uniting instead of dividing ourselves and our Allies.
While the United States Navy has kept the seas open and safe for global trade since the end of World War II, other nations have grown richer and more powerful and now threaten a world order of peace and prosperity, according to Kagan.
“With its security essentially safeguarded by the United States, with Chinese trade flowing freely on waterways kept open by the U.S. Navy, in a world of great-power peace preserved by American power and the liberal order, China could spend only a small percentage of its growing GDP on defense while pursuing Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy of ‘keeping a low profile and biding time.’ … As China has grown richer, more powerful, and more secure, Chinese leaders and the Chinese people have returned to old visions of hegemony.”Then there’s Russia. Kagan writes, "In the American-led liberal order, Russia has fallen from superpower status, but China has risen toward it.”
He says China has an emperor again; Russia has a Stalin-lite dictator; and Hungary, Turkey, and Brazil have all grown tall autocratic weeds in their gardens.
HMCS Regina (FFH 334), JS Ashigara (DDG 178) and HMAS Arunta (FFH 151) during RIMPAC 2020.
There is “No risk of the United States or Japan attacking China, but resentment that democratic countries that believe in the liberal order –– and rule of law –– will prevent China from achieving its goals of unification (Taiwan), control of the South China Sea, and status as a global leader, as an alternative to the liberal democratic model.”
Kagan says it may be the natural ebb and flow of history that does not necessarily move away from conflict.
The ebb and flow can include good uses of power such as World War II and the liberation of Kuwait and tragedies such as the second Iraq War and, of course, Vietnam. “The Iraq War resembled the Vietnam War in many ways.”
The Second World War was a righteous cause for democracy, but that doesn’t mean it was perceived that way at first.
America did not act immediately in the face of naked revanchism in Europe and Asia. American anti-interventionists argued against going to war with Germany or Japan…
“What if the United States did go to war, they asked, sent its armies across the ocean, landed its forces on a fortified continent against Hitler’s battle-tested armies, and at some unimaginable cost managed to win? What then? Wouldn’t the U.S. Navy have to ‘establish ‘freedom of the seas’…on all the oceans?’ Would not policing the world after the war entail the endless expense of American ‘blood and treasure,’ not to mention a kind of ‘unadulterated imperialism’ and ‘world domination’? Faced with these objections –– which, it turned out, were not far off the mark in predicting America’s postwar role –– Roosevelt never fully succeeded in convincing Americans.”
…until the attack on Pearl Harbor and Oahu. “After Pearl Harbor, Americans looked at the world differently,” Kagan writes.
Americans are tired of overseas interventions and may be willing to appease other nations’ aggressions. After all, Kagan notes, the only reaction by the Obama administration to Putin’s invasion of Crimea was sanctions.
Kagan makes the case that appeasement is not an effective strategy, whether with Imperial Japan in Manchuria or Hitler in Poland…
“The peace established after World War II and which endures almost seventy-five years later was not based on accommodating Japanese and German anxieties, even though those nations suffered infinitely greater horrors at the hands of the Allies than anything Russians suffered at the end of the Cold War.”
… or, in modern history, Putin and Georgia and Ukraine/Crimea.
Ships and submarines from the Republic of Singapore Navy and U.S. Navy gather in formation in the South China Sea during the underway phase of Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) Singapore 2015 with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and the armed forces of nine partner nations. (MC2 Joe Bishop)
Kagan predicts continued “challenges on the Korean Peninsula, in the South China Sea, in the Middle East, and along the fault lines between Russia and NATO.” War is not inevitable, but fear of war is rational. Armageddon is possible, he says, in a world where nuclear weapons do not guarantee world peace, and where autocracy, tyranny, and nationalism are on the rise.”
“We wanted to believe that history was taking us away from wars, tyranny, and destruction in the first half of the twentieth century,” he writes, “but history and human nature may be taking us back toward them, absent any monumental effort on our part to prevent such regression.” Aggression could be built in to the way we evolved as a species, but so is altruism and cooperation.
Kagan’s prescription: support democracies, not dictators; return to a deep engagement with Europe/NATO; reengage in international trade agreements, and fund the military. “Americans need to remember that deterring a war is much less expensive than fighting one.” Great diplomacy must be backed up by hard power when necessary, he says.
“These attacks on the Enlightenment universalism on which the country was founded should not be dismissed as cranky aberrations. The United States also has its ‘subterranean stream’ running through its history from the slaveholding South to the Know-Nothings to the white supremacists of the Jim Crow era and the revival of the Klan of the 1920s to the alt-right of today. Although we prefer to forget or downplay the whole boiling cauldron of angers and hatreds and resentments which have been such a big part of our history, the jungle grows in America, too.”
Amazingly, this was written two years before the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Trump supporters attack police at the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021 (NPR).
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| A window of the Capitol after Jan. 6, 2021 |
Kagan concludes, “To sustain a foreign policy of enlightened self-interest requires enlightenment, a degree of generosity, a belief in the universalism of rights, and, yes, a measure of cosmopolitanism.”
Sustaining constitutional democracies, rule of order, and national/global cooperation requires vigilance and commitment.
“World order is one of those things people don’t think about until it is gone. The experience of the 1930s and World War II taught Americans that. They learned, and we have now forgotten, that when things go wrong, they can go very wrong very quickly, that once a world order breaks down, the worst qualities of humanity emerge from under the rocks and run wild.”After World War II, the world changed. With the United States leading, Japan and West Germany became democracies. Other nations gravitated away from autocracy and toward democracy. “None of his would have been possible, however, if Europeans had not fundamentally trusted the Americans,” Kagan says. “They did not fear American aggression.”
(I tracked down and read this book after reading Kagan’s recent OpEd in the Washington Post, "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here," which starts: “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three or four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”)
Top photo: U.S. Marines with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines, 23rd Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division (MARDIV), Marine Forces Reserve and Republic of Korea (ROK) Marines with 5th Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st ROK MARDIV exchange tactics and standard operating procedures for room clearing and patrolling during the Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) portion of Korean Marine Exchange Program 15-8 in Pohang, South Korea as a part of Peninsula Express 15, July 3rd, 2015. Peninsula Express is one in a series of regularly-scheduled combined, small-unit, tactical training exercises that demonstrates continued dedication to the ROK-U.S. relationship, contributing to the security and stability of the Korean Peninsula and Asia-Pacific region. (Sgt. Justin A. Bopp)
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