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Tag Archives: Robert Kagan

Making News: Detailed Breitbart Report on Last Week’s Globalism Radio Interview

18 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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., Breitbart News Tonight, Breitbart.com, globalism, John Binder, Making News, Robert Kagan, Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that that “Breitbart News Tonight” radio interview of mine last Friday on the recent Washington Post tome defending globalism was featured today on the Breitbart “print” website.  You might be especially interested in this detailed summary by Breitbart reporter John Binder in part because his piece seems to have generated lots of buzz in social media – and lots of traffic for this blog.

All the more reason to keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Podcast On-Line of a New National Radio Interview on Globalism…& More!

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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Breitbart News Tonight, China, globalism, Hong Kong, Making News, nationalism, Robert Kagan, South China Morning Post, The Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that a podcast of a national radio interview from last night is now on-line.  Conducted by the folks at Breitbart News Tonight, it addresses the wide range of issues raised by a (revealingly) humongous article by Robert Kagan defending globalist approaches to domestic and foreign policy (and singling out nationalism as a particular evil) that appeared yesterday in the Washington Post.  Go to this link and click on the March 15 entry with my name for a fascinating conversation that literally has it all – politics, world affairs, economics, history,  philosophy, and more!

Also, it was interesting, to put it mildly to be described as “anti-China” in this article from the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post by an author who “researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view.” Hong Kong, you’ll recall, is now controlled by China, and although Beijing has permitted the locals to maintain a modicum of free expression and self government, the range of permitted liberties keeps narrowing all the time.

For the record, I’m perfectly fine with the Chinese people in general, and with much of Chinese culture.  But the country’s government and leaders?  Not nearly so much

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Where a Neocon Gets it Right – and Why Progressives Should Listen

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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Congress, conservatives, defense budget, foreign policy, internationalism, libertarians, national security, neconservatives, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, progressives, Republicans, Robert Kagan, sequester

I’ve never had much use for foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan, though I have admired his talent for framing run-of-the-mill neoconservative foreign policy views in ways that others, especially liberals, for some reason feel compelled to take seriously. But a new column by the Brookings Institution fellow and Washington Post columnist provides a great opportunity both to praise him for injecting some needed intellectual honesty in the nation’s defense and foreign debate, and to clarify some of my own views on the subject.

Kagan, like his fellow neconservatives, has long urged the United States to seek and maintain an unabashed global leadership role. They believe that nothing less than countering aggression everywhere and actively seeking to expand the ranks of pro-Western countries is needed to achieve adequate levels of American security.

Encouragingly, moreover, for the neocons, most Republicans and other conservatives seem to agree – thanks no doubt to Vladimir Putin’s moves to enlarge Russia’s influence in its backyard, to stunning terrorist advances in the Middle East, and to Iran’s growing influence in the region and nuclear ambitions.

Yet Kagan has rightly upbraided this critical mass of the American Right – especially in Congress – for not putting its wallet where its mouth is. His March 19 column observes that, for all their hawkish talk lately – including sharp criticisms of President Obama – most Republican Senators and Congressmen still favor the so-called sequester that leaves U.S. defense spending woefully short of the resources that their apparent agenda requires. As a result, Kagan writes:

“one is left to wonder whether the new tone is based on genuine conviction about the nature of the threats facing the world and America’s essential role in meeting them, or whether many Republican politicians just figure that hawkishness is a great way to run against the Democratic nominee in 2016.”

At least as important, he warns that pushing the nation into a tougher foreign policy posture without adequate funding would leave America in the worst of all possible positions, courting greater risks and dangers without the ability to handle them.

Where Kagan errs – profoundly, in my opinion – is in continuing to insist that Americans have no choice but to play this hyper-active global role, and that Republicans, conservatives, and other U.S. leaders must rally their somnolent countrymen to the cause with Churchillian displays of leadership.

As I see it, Kagan makes the same fundamental mistake made for decades by the internationalists of both the Left and Right who have completely dominated U.S. foreign policymaking.  He completely misses the geopolitical and related economic advantages that make greatly reducing global engagement (along with measures to strengthen homeland defenses and maximize economic self-sufficiency) the only sensible course for the nation’s diplomacy. But I completely agree with his calls for higher defense spending for this crucial reason: As implied above, they are absolutely essential for giving not only “hawkish” conservative foreign policy strategies any chance of success, but for giving President Obama’s strategy and others on the Left any chance of success.

For just as the Right has propagated the dangerous myth that American foreign policies would be more successful and the world made a much safer place if only the president would show some actual and rhetorical muscle, Mr. Obama and the rest of the Left have propagated an equally dangerous myth: that America (and the world) would realize the same (vital) benefits simply by shifting more existing resources from the military to foreign aid, human rights promotion, environmental protection, international institutions, and other programs and actors that can achieve the same aims in benign rather than bellicose ways.  (Libertarian conservatives of course have peddled their own variation of these claims.)

And these progressives pay no attention to homeland security and economic independence, either. In fact, their enthusiasm for Open Borders-style immigration policies can only weaken the former.

It’s true that, as Kagan notes, Mr. Obama supports military spending levels higher than those provided for in the Republican-backed sequester. But it’s also true that, as Kagan also notes, such spending levels cannot possibly advance and protect the interests the United States continues to declare.

Which brings us to my own views on the president’s record overseas. I have indeed strongly criticized Mr. Obama’s policies in the Middle East, toward Russia, and in East Asia (where he believes a combination of new military deployments and new trade deals can contain Chinese influence) for reasons that have struck many as at least neconservative-friendly. But I’ve tried to specify that I’m not endorsing anything like neoconservative goals. I’m simply trying to point out that the president’s blueprints and actions can’t possibly achieve its own objectives, and are all too likely to leave the nation needlessly exposed to danger.

Kagan’s critique of mainstream conservatives and Republicans is similar, and he deserves credit for making it. Now we need folks on the Left (and on the libertarian Right) to point out their own fellows’ delusions. And above all, politicians across the board need to pay attention. Until they do, America will be saddled with a leadership class divided not by rival viable foreign policy blueprints, but by rival foreign policy fairy tales. If you’re wondering why the world looks like a more dangerous place, that’s where the answer starts.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Robert Kagan’s Recipe for (Continued) Confusion

17 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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military force, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert Kagan

I’ve never understood why the liberal and conservative, hawkish and dovish wings of the American foreign policy establishment have long made such a big deal out of Robert Kagan. With the Washington Post’s publication of his latest monthly op-ed piece earlier this week, his reputation is even more of a mystery.

According to Kagan, a neoconservative interventionist hawk who has found a home at the liberal internationalist (and sometimes interventionist) Brookings Institution, America “needs a discussion on when, not whether, to use force.” Obviously, Kagan is thinking of the recent rash of crises in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the South China Sea, and the muddled American response to each. But the idea that this confusion mainly reflects inadequate national debate on using force is baffling.

Maybe Kagan hasn’t been paying attention, but since the height of the Vietnam War ended, Americans, and especially their foreign policy elites, have debated nothing but the use of force. (Contrary to Kagan’s above suggestion, the view that the nation should never use force abroad has been completely marginalized.) It’s gotten the nation exactly nowhere, because discussing the use of force amounts to discussing tactics, or means.

What’s really been missing from the national foreign policy debate has been a rigorous discussion of goals – that is, national interests. Without a reasonable consensus on the objectives that using force are supposed to achieve, it’s impossible to examine the use-of-force issue in even a minimally coherent way. Put differently, as with any tactic, the utility or desirability of military force can’t be usefully examined in a strategic vacuum. One might as well discuss the pluses and minuses of swinging a baseball bat without considering whether this act will be taking place on a diamond or in a crowded supermarket.

I wrote most comprehensively about this subject way back in the 1980s, in an article in FOREIGN POLICY magazine titled “The Real National Interest.” I couldn’t find the piece on-line, but here’s a pretty good summary. If I find the full text, I’ll let you know.

In its absence, however, think of the matter this way. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, there wasn’t much of a American debate about whether a forcible response was warranted. Ditto for 9-11. When the nature of U.S. interests is screamingly obvious (i.e., defending the American homeland from attack), and the threat is serious enough, the imperative of responding with force is equally obvious.

Yet when, say, the murderous dictator of Syria used poison gas against his own people, but made no moves threatening the United States itself or even American allies, a heated debate over using force broke out nation-wide. It was resolved only operationally – not intellectually – when President Obama decided ultimately not to act. Indeed, once the Syrian civil war spilled over into neighboring Iraq, and presented the threat of a new terrorist sanctuary emerging in the Middle East, the Syria debate erupted again.

This blog will return to the subject of defining interests repeatedly. For now, let’s applaud Kagan for hoping that Americans can “move away from the current faux-Manichaean struggle between straw men and caricatures “ when they debate using force – and presumably the rest of our foreign policy. But let’s also recognize that, until he starts defining national interest in some reasonably precise way, he’ll continue to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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