George Rebane
Robert Kagan is a historian and political scientist with an endowed fellowship at the Brookings Institute. He perches a bit left of center from where he has been a foreign policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents. Dinesh D’Souza is a conservative political commentator, author, and filmmaker formerly associated with the Heritage Foundation, who continues as a lightning rod for critiques of rightwing ideology. Not so surprisingly, these two intellectuals share many insights into America’s post-war role in the world and the state of the world were America to “retreat” from this role.
Of D’Souza’s many books, his America: Imagine a World Without Her (2014) contains assessments that tie closely with Kagan’s sentiments as expanded in a major essay ‘The Cost of American Retreat’ in the 8sep18 WSJ. (Essay based on Kagan’s latest book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World, that comes out later this month.) My commentary on this highlights that the Rebane Doctrine on foreign policy espoused here over the years also ties closely with what these essayists have gleaned from their studies and experience. I believe that, in these times, the tenets from both bear repeating emphatically and often. (Graphic by Brian Stauffer)
Kagan points out how the period of liberalism under the hegemonic umbrella of the United States has given rise to a most unusual epoch of human history. During this epoch “liberal ideals triumphed because, for the first time, they had power behind them.” And all this, because “a new player arose on the international scene: the United States. It possessed a unique and advantageous geography, a large, productive population, unprecedented economic and military power, a national ideology based on liberal principles, and a willingness, after the war, to use its power to establish and sustain a global order roughly consistent with those principles. … That order – with its mutually reinforcing security, economic and political components – has created a geographical and geopolitical space in which liberalism has taken root, spread and evolved. But it was always artificial and tenuous, challenged from within and without by natural forces – the always potent antiliberal aspects of human nature and the competitive and anarchic tendencies of geopolitics.”
