In one way, Robert Kagan’s recent “long-form” (7,000 words) essay in the Washington Post, “The strongmen strike back”, is an honest, intelligent examination of the rise of illiberalism in the modern world, a phenomenon as incontestable as it is dispiriting. In another way, Bob’s latest and longest is a bit of a con job, and certainly not his first.
Bob, you may (or may not) remember, was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George Schultz during the Reagan Administration. In 1997, he joined with Alan Vanneman non-fave rave William Kristol to form the “Project for the New American Century”, which should have been more accurately called “Project for the New American Invasion of Iraq,” because that was its purpose. In January 2002, Bill n’ Bob joined forces to sell their dream with a pack of lies headed “What To Do About Iraq”, which included the following whoppers:
Reliable reports from defectors and former U.N. weapons inspectors have confirmed the existence of a terrorist training camp in Iraq, complete with a Boeing 707 for practicing hijackings, and filled with non-Iraqi radical Muslims. We know, too, that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of September11, went out of his way to meet with an Iraqi intelligence official a few months before he flew a plane into the World Trade Center. As Leon Fuerth understates, "There may well have been interaction between Mr. Hussein's intelligence apparatus and various terrorist networks, including that of Osama bin Laden."
Well, I’ll do a little understating myself: any dish issuing from Bob’s kitchen should be consumed cum grano salis, if not a kilo.
Bob does some interesting, and not always inaccurate—though not always accurate, either—score settling from the early days of the Reagan Administration, pointing out that UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous essay “explaining” the different approaches the U.S. should pursue when dealing with right-wing authoritarian versus communist totalitarian dictatorships didn’t exactly hold up when examined in the cold light of experience. We didn’t have to prop up the right-wingers, turning a blind eye to their oppression. Instead, we could let them safely mutate into anti-communist democracies. And the communist dictatorships? Well, they could change too. And of course they did, to everyone’s amazement and joy.
As Bob “explains” it, getting rid of right-wing authoritarianism back in the days of Ronnie was pretty easy: “The Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, and the South Korean military junta were all forced out by a Reagan administration that had quickly abandoned the Kirkpatrick doctrine.”
Well, that’s pretty wrong. If you want to be picky, Pinochet and Stroessner were still in power when Reagan left office, but, more importantly, all of these thugs were essentially forced from power by domestic developments. What Reagan himself deserves credit for is letting himself be talked out of continuing to support them, by people like Bob and Paul Wolfowitz (another non-fave rave, though I don’t seem to have gone after him in print very often), particularly Marcos, and particularly particularly the South African apartheid government, of which Bob amusingly and unsurprisingly omits all mention. Reagan, unlike William F. Buckley, to whom Mr. Kagan administers a particularly extended and accurate beatdown,1 was not a racist (probably), although the Reagan White House contained not a single black staffer (one had to be borrowed from Vice President Bush for a photo op). But while Reagan (probably) did not believe in segregation, he hated the Civil Rights Movement, and, most importantly, he luved segregationists, and he luved luved the South African apartheid government, insisting that they had “stood by us in all our wars,” a “perfect” lie, because entirely inaccurate, unusual even for Ronnie.
Okay, I digress. But Bob had it coming.
Still, Ronnie did preside, quite competently, with a significant assist from Margaret Thatcher, over the demise of the Soviet Union, one of the great events of world history, and no one can take that away from him. But, as Bob notes, sadly, the euphoria of those days now looks painfully innocent. The problem is, Bob never asks himself why. At least, not in public.
Instead, Bob portrays the rise of authoritarian nationalism around the globe as though it were a sudden infestation of motivelessly malignant mushrooms, springing up from the earth for no rhyme or reason. He never asks himself how the ideals of the global elite, which he, and I, share with almost equal conviction, led us to this—because, of course, he doesn’t want to believe that they did lead to this.
A few fellow globalists can help. Fareed Zakaria has a nice post focusing on “The two issues that undermined the E.U.”:
The first was — after the Soviet Union’s collapse — the rapid integration of many new countries that were far less economically and socially developed than the E.U.’s original members. Since 1995, it has expanded from 12 countries to 28. Originally focused on opening up markets, streamlining regulations and creating new growth opportunities, the E.U. soon became a “transfer union,” a vast scheme to redistribute funds from prosperous countries to emerging markets. Even in today’s strong economic environment, spending by the E.U. accounts for more than 3 percent of Hungary’s economy and almost 4 percent of Lithuania’s.
This gap between a rich and a poor Europe with open borders inevitably produced a migration crisis. As Matthias Matthijs pointed out in Foreign Affairs,2 from 2004 to 2014, about 2 million Poles migrated to Britain and Germany and about 2 million Romanians moved to Italy and Spain. These movements put massive strains on the safety nets of destination countries and stoked nationalism and nativism. The influx into Europe of more than 1 million refugees in 2015, mostly from the Middle East, must be placed in the context of these already sky-high migrant numbers. And as can be seen almost everywhere, from the United States to Austria, fears of immigration are the rocket fuel for right-wing nationalists, who discredit the political establishment that they deem responsible for unchecked flows.
The second challenge consuming the European Union has been its currency, the euro. Launched more with politics than economics in mind, the euro has embodied a deep structural flaw: It forces a unified monetary system on 19 countries that continue to have vastly different fiscal systems. So when a recession hits, countries do not have the ability to lower the value of their currency, nor do they get substantial additional resources from Brussels (as U.S. states do from Washington when they go into recession). The results, as could be seen for years after 2008, were economic stagnation and political revolt.
Economist Paul Krugman has repeatedly written that when the idea of the euro was first discussed, he argued (repeatedly) to European economists that it would be a disaster in case of a significant recession, only to be laughed at for his pains. A mere American wouldn’t/couldn’t understand these things. Although there were many factors at work, I believe that the European elite, fearful that the American behemoth would bestride the world now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, thought to invent/restore a fantasy Europe—a sort of cosmopolitan cross between the 18th century and the “belle epoch” preceding the First World War—that would be equal in size and superior in sophistication to the U.S. They forgot that the cosmopolitan Europe of their dreams existed only for the upper class. Only the rich could afford to travel, “everyone” spoke French (more or less), and everyone was welcome, more or less, because they spent cash rather than collecting unemployment insurance.
I ran a post several years ago on Paul’s complaint, “Paul and the Europeans”. Since that time, Krugman has continued to bemoan the fact that the E.C. leadership seems impervious to criticism. Their mistakes are correctable, but they just won’t correct them. In his article for Foreign Affairs, Matthias Matthijs argues that Germany needs to recognize and accept its role as “benign hegemon” for Europe, as the U.S. did for Western Europe during the Cold War. The only problem is, the U.S. only did so in response to the Soviet threat. It’s not very likely that Angela Merkel’s successor will be “more European” than she is.
Of course, when it comes to retrograde nationalism, we in the U.S. are as bad as Europe, if not worse, so what happened here, other than what supposedly “can’t happen here”?3 Bob makes no mention of the constant disastrous interventions by the U.S. in the Middle East, a few of which I discuss here, in particular how the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War led to the seminal 21st century event, the terrorist attack on 9/11, as convincingly argued by Christian Alfonsi in his important (and neglected) book Circle in the Sand. I summarized Alfonsi a decade ago in the following manner:
U.S. policy makers received frequent warnings that presence of a substantial number of U.S. troops could lead to disaster. During the leadup to the first Iraqi War, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, warned the administration that “It remains our judgment that Saudi and Arab political realities preclude a U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land which appears to be open-ended or semi-permanent.” During the war itself, a report issued by a committee headed by Richard Clarke stated that “A permanent U.S. presence will provide a rationale for, and could become a target for, the terrorist threat that will outlive the war.” But the Saudi ruling class wanted us there, as did Israel, and the Israel lobby here in the U.S.
Bob says not a word about the endless U.S. interventions, hypocrisies, and disasters in the Middle East, about which (to repeat myself) I’ve ranted endlessly—for example, here—which have cost trillions of dollars, cost thousands of lives and disrupted millions, because he is complicit in them, and worked endlessly to make them happen. Over and over again, our activities have made things worse in the Middle East, not better, and have contributed to the flow of refugees to Europe, contributing to the destabilization of the West, damaging two cultures instead of just one. It was America’s “Military Intellectual Complex”, aka “Those Who Lunch at the Palm”, of whom Mr. Kagan is a lifetime member, who brought us all this, and who still dominate almost the entirety of the spectrum of “thoughtful opinion” allowed to find voice in the mainstream press. Anyone who dares to suggest that the second invasion of Iraq was anything other than an “honest mistake”, rather than a many-footed conspiracy to insert an American army in the Middle East for decades to come, is treated to another conspiracy, that of silence.4
The silence of the otherwise voluble Mr. Kagan on these issues is stunning, but he is in fact silent on many things—for example, the failure of the American elite to recognize, until it was too late, the possibility of catastrophic market failure in contemporary capitalism. Markets were supposed to be infallibly self-policing. Instead, Wall Street drove itself straight off a cliff. Worse, when the federal government intervened to save Wall Street from itself—and to save the entire world economy from Wall Street—this necessary action prompted an hysterical response from the populist right—the Rush Limbaugh, Drudge Report right—with which Bob and his fellow neocons had allied themselves back in the early days of their “war” against the Democratic Party in the days of Bill Clinton, an unholy alliance that I’ve repeatedly denounced, most recently in a piece declining to mourn the death of the Weekly Standard.
Bob, to his credit, parted ways with the Weekly Standard crowd during the Obama Administration, serving under Obama and defending the administration’s record against his former comrades in arms like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, who continued to pour vitriol on the administration at every opportunity. But Bob, while ceasing to sin, failed to offer confession for past errors. When Bob attacked the know-nothing populism of Donald Trump prior to his nomination, gadfly Fareed Zakaria remarked “Where were Republican moderates 20 years ago?”, skewering Bob in particular for his praise of everyone’s favorite Alaskan airhead, Sarah Palin: “I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” said Bob. “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.”
To be fair, liberals did their own share of sinning during the Obama years, another topic about which I’ve raged on a number of occasions, most extensively here. Obama was too kind to the billionaires, and neglectful of the middle class. Liberal intellectuals in the U.S. have always wished that they could run things the way intellectuals do in Europe, not noticing that the U.S. and Europe are, like, different. During the Obama Administration, liberals finally achieved their dream of “universal” health care, refusing to realize that most Americans didn’t want it. They already had health care, through their employers or through Medicare, and they knew that extending it to “everyone” simply meant that they would pay higher taxes to provide health care to the poor, largely nonwhite, and they didn’t want to do that, because, yes, a significant portion of the white working class in the U.S. is at least mildly racist, something that liberals don’t want to admit is true.
In both Europe and the U.S., there was an irrational blowback against the kind of countercyclical spending necessary to prevent the world economy from dropping into full recession. In the U.S., it was enhanced by the Democratic Party’s determination to enact universal health care. They had the votes, but they didn’t have the country, as they found to their sorrow in 2010, when the Tea Party hysterics took control of the House of Representatives. The stunningly incompetent rollout of the Affordable Care Act following Obama’s re-election in 2012 only made things worse, leading to a second blowout in the 2014 midterms, leading to Republican control of both Houses of Congress.
Unfortunately, Obama’s elitist tendencies were not confined to health care. Like the European elite whose influence they envy, the liberal elite in the U.S. has made a cult of environmentalism, not caring the extent to which increasing the cost of energy, which is always the effect and often the explicit goal of environmental programs, reduces economic growth and lowers the standard of living of the working and middle classes. If you’re in the top 20 percent, as almost policy makers are, you don’t notice so much, and, besides, it increases the value of your vacation home. I unloaded, a lot in my earlier link, on the sins of liberalism in general, and liberal environmentalism in particular, in a recent post, so I’ll just quote a chunk of it here, updated with added bile for flavor:
Environmentalism is the opium of the upper-middle class, transporting them into a world where “science”—science itself!—proves that they should be in charge. There is no doubt that there is ample scientific evidence to prove that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, and that it will have detrimental effects in the future, but this evidence provides no real guidance as to what “must” be done, and, above all, no proof that the endlessly prophesied apocalypse is approaching. To fill this politically inconvenient void, liberals have concocted an incoherent and self-defeating laundry list of policy prescriptions based on sentimental nature worship that prioritizes the “interests” of favored biota such as salmon and timber wolves over anyone who isn’t a comfortable member of the upper middle class—for example, the decision of coastal liberals in both New York and California to ban fracking, eliminating the sort of blue-collar jobs that they supposedly love, while keeping the price of natural gas from falling even lower than it already has, which would lead to the more rapid replacement of coal-burning power plants than has taken place while also stimulating economic growth.
If environmentalists were really concerned about, you know, the environment, they would embrace fracking, and they would embrace nuclear power. And they would also embrace genetically modified organisms. The worst nightmare for environmentalists, of course, would be a low cost method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, meaning that we wouldn’t have to change our evil ways at all!
I am what European “thinkers” refer to with the utmost scorn of which they are capable (which is a lot), a “Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberal”. I believe (correctly) that only capitalism can provide for everyone what it has provided for a very large percentage of the populations of Canada, the United States, western Europe, and Australia, a comfortable standard of living. However, I acknowledge that capitalism makes a much better “fit” with some cultures than others. It helps if you are Protestant or Confucian, and most countries are not. Free markets do not automatically function with the perfect efficiency that so many assumed back in the heady 1990s. Expanding the European Union did not mean that all of Europe would enjoy the “European miracle” that occurred in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, when a largely working class population became largely middle class. Furthermore, sadly, the narrowing of economic inequality that occurred at the same time seems to have been a product of a variety of unique historical factors rather than “progress” pure and simple, meaning that explicit measures of economic redistribution are necessary, as I argue here
There is no question but that the Digital Industrial Revolution is proving as disruptive as the earlier one driven by steam, boosting the incomes of literally billions of people around the world but also filling their lives with uncertainty and doubt. Authoritarian governments have arisen to fill the vacuum. Bob (remember him?) devotes the closing paragraphs of his essay to the particularly worrisome case of China, which is worrisome indeed. But, Bob, I don’t think “invasion” is the answer.
Afterwords
Bob, of course, does not advocate invading China. But he, recycling his denunciation of the “Kirkpatrick doctrine”, warns that, in light of the ever-expanding techniques of social control provided by digital technology being exploited by both Russia and China, we should “reconsider the idea of supporting “friendly” dictatorships. Well, I didn’t know we were “supporting” them. We’re just not trying to overthrow them. And, in the past, Bob has been pretty impatient with anything less.
I’ve explained here (well, around paragraph 15 or so why I think trying to kick the ass of a country four times our size is a bad idea. I also think just harassing Russia and China is a bad idea as well. I remember that, back during the Cold War, splitting the Soviet bloc by befriending China, as Nixon and Kissinger did, worked out pretty well for us, so well, in fact, that while many presidential candidates promise to “get tough” with China, no president has been similarly inclined. Even Cap’n Bad Ass keeps losing his nerve, because every time he talks tough, the stock market goes down.
Like Bob, I believe in liberalism. But I believe that the policies he has advocated have been massively counter-productive, and that he has frequently been grossly disingenuous in his advocacy, making league with massively illiberal types such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, and various other assorted airheads and plug-uglies. Isn’t, you know, “truth” supposed to be something of a liberal value?
1. Many paleocons and other anti-Trumpers of various hues are asking themselves rather pathetically, “what would Bill Buckley do?” Kagan’s answer, hardly unjustified, is “try to prevent black people from voting.” My own take on Buckley’s racism is here.
2. This is an excellent article, examining the flaws of the EU in detail.
3. Back in the thirties, Sinclair Lewis, then America’s most famous novelist, wrote “It Can’t Happen Here”, a not very good and not often read dystopia describing the rise of fascism in the U.S.
4. In a followup to his essay, Bob answered selected questions posed by readers. None of the questions selected pertained to the long record of deceit and incompetence in the Middle East that Bob and his pals have compiled over the years.
