Power and weakness in "American Power in the 21st Century" by Robert Kagan

Résumé du document

Robert Kagan is a neo-conservative American scholar and political commentator. He was born on September 26th 1958 in Athens. After graduating from Yale University in 1980, he earned a Masters from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a PhD from American University in Washington.

Robert Kagan is the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (where he is director of the US Leadership Project). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1983, Kagan was foreign policy advisor to New York Representative and future Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp. Then, he worked at the State Department from 1984 to 1988 and was a speech-writer for Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1984-1985). He has also been foreign-policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Extraits

[...] In other terms, vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, especially after September If Europe and the US disagree on so many geopolitical questions today, it is not only because of the objective disparity of their military power but also because of the “ideological” gap that is the way they consider “strategic culture”. [...]

[...] Kagan thinks “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”. The major reason of this divergence is the power gap between the two sides of the Atlantic. America's that is its military capability, is not comparable to the European one. With its technology, its weapons and military forces, its finance, the US are much more powerful than the European Union, which seems today. Nevertheless, it doesn't explain everything and the reasons of the transatlantic gap have to be search also elsewhere. [...]

[...] His articles were published in The New Republic, the Policy Review or The Weekly Standard. He also writes a monthly column in the Washington Post. Most important of his books are A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua 1977-1990, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the new World Order, Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century and Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (co-edited with William Kristol). [...]

[...] Not only European and American policies are different, but also their way of thinking is. As Kagan writes, “Strong powers naturally view the world differently than weaker powers”. When, in the XIXth century, Europe, with its balance- of-power system, was military powerful, European states were more likely to use their military force, whereas the relatively weaker and more vulnerable America naturally preferred negotiation and didn't want to enter any conflicts. However, since World War strategic perceptions of both sides of the Atlantic changed: the US arose as hegemon, whereas European countries, more vulnerable after the world conflict, weren't powerful giants anymore and decided never to come back to their (that is the power politics). [...]

[...] The EU economic strength, which is even bigger than the American one, shows also Europe's will for independence. Even if recent “successful” meeting between Nicolas Sarkozy and George W. Bush has been described by many journalists as the beginning of better relations between France (Europe) and the US, American and European priorities haven't changed and remain different today. Although Kagan's thesis about the divergence between the US and Europe seems true to me, I disagree with some of his arguments. [...]