Robert Kagan: Power and Weakness (Policy Review, June & July 2002)

Kagan: Power and Weakness (Policy Review, June & July 2002)


Policy Review, June & July 2002, No. 113

Power and Weakness

By Robert Kagan

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common
view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the
all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of
power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are
diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little
differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws
and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a
post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization
of Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in
history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where
international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the
defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and
use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international
questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They
agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of
affairs is not transitory - the product of one American election or one
catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long
in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national
priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and
implementing foreign and defense policies, the
United States and Europe have parted ways.
...

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