The odd couple: Europe and America
In a long Policy Review article called Power and Weakness, Robert Kagan argues that only American military power has made it possible for Europe to develop an attitude of moral superiority towards the United States:
The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.
Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.
This essay struck a chord because it emphasizes the hypocrisy and inconsistency that underpins most human behavior. “When the United States was weak,” writes Kagan, “it practiced the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do.” Kagan seems to be suggesting that for those of us who shelter under the umbrella of American power, comic book clichés like the Axis of Evil and pompous sermons about moral clarity might be a small price to pay.
