Robert Kagan’s monumental error is his failure to acknowledge that Americans, like the rest of mankind, are made of crooked timber craving power for its own sake, writes Bruce Fein.
Robert Kagan. (Brookings Institution/Flickr)
By Bruce Fein
Special to Consortium News
Prolific author Robert Kagan’s latest elevation of Americans to God’s new chosen people leaps from the 688 pages of his new book, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941. It is probable that none wish it were longer, as sage Samuel Johnson said of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The lion’s share of Kagan’s handiwork is a workmanlike chronicling of United States politics and foreign policy from the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba, in 1898 through Pearl Harbor in 1941. The chronicle is meticulous but no literary equivalent of the Hope Diamond.
The gist of Kagan’s intellectually stimulating and imaginative argument goes something like this: Americans are endowed with a disproportionate percentage of angelic, altruistic DNA compared with non-chosen others. Uniquely among nations, the United States wishes to make other people happier, freer, and wealthier by fighting against corruption and tyranny abroad.
The United States is capable of engineering those wonderful results if supported by sufficient money, staying power, and military force. Thus, the United States, among other wonderful things, could have brought a prosperous peace to Europe and prevented World War II if only it had brandished its military and financial might to compel Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and Great Britain to follow its design for a new world order under the auspices of the League of Nations, which the U.S. should have joined. No Hitler, no Anschluss, no Munich, no Pearl Harbor.
John Quincy Adams. (Matthew Brady/Wikipedia)
Further, Kagan maintains, emancipating foreign nations from the Dark Ages is the optimal path to optimal democracy, liberty, and prosperity in the United States. He has no moment for Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ July 4, 1821, address to Congress expounding the foreign policy of the United States contrary to Kagan’s gospel:
“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force….
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….”
Defending Imperial Conquest
Kagan defends the 1898 Spanish-American War (including the conquest of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico) as substantially inspired by a benevolent objective of rescuing the Cuban people and Filipinos from the atrocities or cruelties of Spanish rule. Is that benign motive credible?
Let us set the scene. Blacks then fought in segregated units. (The United States Armed Forces remained segregated until an executive order issued by President Harry Truman in 1948). Celebrated Col. Theodore Roosevelt maintained, “Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go as far as they were led by white officers.”
Do you think Cubans and Filipinos viewed racist American military forces as their salvation? Moreover, the urgent need to relieve human misery and racist persecution at home was then far greater than the nation’s plausible supply of altruism or magnanimity for the world.
White supremacy was in the catbird’s seat. Lynching blacks with impunity after Reconstruction was commonplace. Blacks were de facto or de jure disenfranchised through discriminatory laws or terror. The odious separate-but-equal doctrine was constitutional law.
KKK in Gainesville, Florida, 1922. (Unknown/Wikimedia Commons)
The Ku Klux Klan was thriving. President Woodrow Wilson would later give a rave review to the racist film The Birth of the Nation which incited more black lynching after a screening in the White House: “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
Treaties with Indian tribes were broken as routinely as the rising and setting of the sun. The Wounded Knee Massacre of the Lakota people was less than a decade old.
The Chinese Exclusion Act and unforgiving discrimination against Japanese and Chinese immigrants in jobs, professions, and property ownership was worthy of a Charles Dickens novel. Women were consigned to second-class citizenship, and generally denied the franchise or jury duty.
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley opined in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873): “The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.”
How could the United States ever be Dr. Jekyll abroad if it remained Mr. Hyde at home?
For the Sake of War
Kagan’s mind is locked shut against the idea that all Empires and self-proclaimed chosen people like the United States fight wars for the sake of war and amour propre, not over genuine national security or benevolence for mankind.
The latter is facially absurd because war not in self-defense constitutes the legalization of first-degree murder ordinarily punished by death. The economist Joseph A. Schumpeter was right on the money in describing the Roman Empire as emblematic of all Empires in fighting pointless wars for the sake of domination and control:
“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted.”
The greatest beneficent influence the United States can assert abroad is by example, not by bayonets in search of monsters to destroy. Senator Henry Clay, in rebuffing Hungary’s plea to enlist the United States in support of its defense against a Russian invasion in 1848-49, elaborated:
“Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our wise, pacific system, and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.”
It is difficult to discern what beneficence the United States brought to Cuba or the Philippines or itself through the Spanish-American war. The United States forced the Guantanamo Bay naval base perpetual lease onto Cuba. It chronically intervened in Cuba’s internal affairs for decades.
Then the U.S. boosted the military-political fortunes of dictator Fulgencio Batista, who yielded to Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution in 1959. Then came the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the brink of extinction. Cuba remains to this day an impoverished military dictatorship.
Slaughtering Filipinos
U.S. soldiers pose with Filipino Moro dead after the first battle of Bud Dajo, March 7, 1906, Jolo, Philippines. (U.S. National Archives/Wikimedia Commons)
The Philippines fared no better. The United States crushed Filipino self-determination in the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902, featuring waterboarding, massacres, 200,000 Filipino civilian deaths, and the killing of 20,000 Filipino combatants who had the audacity to subscribe to the universal principles proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence.
The United States ruled the Philippines as a colonial possession until 1946 shortchanging its opportunity for political maturity. The United States supported the dictatorship and plundering of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos in exchange for Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base. The hatred that Marcos awakened in the Filipino people occasioned his fall from power in 1986. Today, the Philippines is ruled by Marcos’ son offering little breathing room for democracy.
Kagan’s monumental error is his failure to acknowledge that Americans, like the rest of mankind, are made of crooked timber craving power for its own sake.
Kagan, like hundreds of millions of other Americans, has deluded himself into believing that we are a chosen, exceptional people tasked by God to expand good in the world and to contract evil – by force of arms if necessary. We will succeed if we only try hard enough.
How Empires Die
Senator Albert Beveridge. (Library of Congress)
Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana captured the essence of Kagan’s thinking about the United States as a white knight in a Jan. 9, 1900, speech defending the American conquest of the Philippines:
“God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.”
Senator Beveridge’s chosen people orthodoxies, echoed by Kagan albeit in lower octaves, remains ascendent in contemporary America. In President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, for example, bugled, “The great objective of ending tyranny [in the world] is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.”
All Empires, including the American strain, die from an insatiable craving for power, like Napoleon’s fatal blunder in marching to Moscow in winter and torching the city. The epitaphs of Empires are alike: “Here lies a chosen people.”
Kagan is blind to the calamitous destination he is urging on the American people.
The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941, by Robert Kagan, Knopf (Jan. 10, 2023)
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and research director for Republicans on the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran. His twitter feed is @brucefeinesq. His Substack feed is brucefein.substack.com. His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com
Kagan and his wife are using the United States of America as a Mother to launch their holy wars against Russia for the pogroms against the Jews over 100 years ago. They are literally waging personal vendettas using the taxpayer money of the USA to destroy Russia via the gin platform of Ukraine. They are criminally insane and should be tried for many war crimes they have supported via Azov, Right Sector and other Nazi groups. But what is amusing is they will never achieve their objectives as Russia destroys their 30 years of work in 12 -18 months.
“All Empires, including the American strain, die from an insatiable craving for power, like Napoleon…”
Mostly correct, and there are classic examples, but the “insatiable craving for power” has a more insidious side than calamitous expeditions, Athens to Sicily, Napoleon to Moscow etc. Non-ephemeral start with a creative period, improvements in production, administration, engineering, public works, and of course, arts of war. As a result, while elite luxuriates with goods resulting from those improvement and imperial loot, the population experiences improvement too, and so do the conquered people. But with time, internal and external power games consume too much of mental energy, useful creativity wanes, and so the benefits of belonging to the empire.
With few benefits to offer, a decaying empire can offer punishments for disloyalty to the empire, but as punishments hit the “guilty and not guilty” alike, the “offered benefits” evaporate and the instability deepens.
Correction: Non-ephemeral EMPIRES start
Mr Kagan is Puff the Magic Dragon attempting lipstick on a monster.
Physical danger, massive censorship and an existential emergency for everyone else
Every empire has considered its own greatness and righteousness as necessary and sufficient conditions for domination, and cultural survival at all costs. The only thing that ever changes, is what each empire defines as greatness. Militarism? Rome. Communism? The USSR. Capitalism? The USA. Genetic determinism? Nazism. If any of these were truth, rival empires would drop their own Manifest Destiny dreams, and adopt the One True Hope. There would be no need to consider military expansionism or mercantile empire-building. But none of them have it. Only superhuman authority can put down the ethnocentric rivalries and philosophical jousting that drive nations to war. This is why Jesus said to pray, not for our own kingdoms to come to dominate, but for His.
The horrors of the Western Empire started long before the sinking of the Main.
The United States of America flowing from over 400 years of European war and slaughter first against themselves and then outward toward the barbarians and savages of inferior peoples who are unworthy of the Greek Ideal and unenlightened.
The USA is a colonial, expansionist, genocidal, white supremacist, settler state.
The state and its power is justified by the worship on a single god by its three religions which it claims rules over all of humanity giving justification for unlimited slaughter.
Strap that blob and another couple dozen Washington neocons to the front of the 30 year old tanks we send to Ukraine.
The author’s curious comment that Cuba remains an impoverished dictatorship to this day omits more than 60 years of American sanctions on the island and … that despite this … the Cuban revolution has invested in a health care system that sends doctors around the world and has achieved lower infant mortality rates than their neighbor to the north.
Indeed. Cuba has no for-profit health care industry and NO INSURANCE INDUSTRY. Imagine! Two of the greatest sources of corruption ever, don’t exist there. And BTW, for a military dictatorship it is remarkably benign — Cuba has never invaded anybody! No Cuban death squads anywhere teaching Nazi methods of torture…….hmmm. Remind anybody of anyone else….?
Reading the many comments along the lines of “Why do we allow such disgusting people into the corridors of power?” or “All politicians who got elected inevitably turn into lying, conniving devils who does the opposite of their election promises and always end up serving the rich.” or “We need a honest-to-goodness person who really has the gumption to change things for the better for ordinary Americans and also the world!”, I would like to pose a question: If you randomly take an apple from a barrel and it is rotten, maybe you’re just unlucky. But if many of the apples in a row out of that same barrel that you call USA are all rotten, what does that tell you? It doesn’t matter which candidate you choose if all of them are rotten. And why are all the candidates rotten? Because most, if not all, of the people in the population are rotten. That belief in “capitalism is the best for humanity” will just result in an innate worshipping of those with the capital. Which means worshipping the rich. That belief in American exceptionalism will just result in a behaviour that other people are less important than Americans and therefore fair to trample on their fears, their needs and their lives. Combine these 2 and you have the perfect servants of the rich who will kill others to serve the interests of their rich masters, which is the essence and belief of almost every American. Please prove me wrong and tell me how is this conclusion not inescapable when these are the 2 most fundamental American concepts of self identity? Save yourself and the world by changing these 2 beliefs or else the world will have to save themselves by forcing change on you.
I offer this 27 second clip of Ronald Reagan in further support of this article:
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwnQln510AA
These are examples of pure fascism
Excellent article, and a further rebuttal of Kagan (and the other mediocrities and psychopaths like him) was spoken by Calgacus almost 2000 years ago:
“Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.”
To the author: Cuba is not a military dictatorship and its impoverishment is the result of the illegal/immoral sanctions and embargoes that the US has imposed since 1062!
Quite right.
It’s a mystery, to me anyway. I believe that most of the peoples of the planet actually want the best, the most intelligent and empathetic leaders to run their countries. Instead we invariably end up with the looney tunes refugees who make a career based upon self aggrandisement, lies, corruption and incompetence. How do they reach these levels, why do we vote for them ?
Answer to your first question is at the end of your previous sentence, and to the second: because there is no one else to vote for with any possibility of success. Ranked choice voting would help somewhat, along with the elimination of the obscenity of Citizens United.
Do not include me in your “we”. I do not vote for them, nor do a great many Americans. Why do you think voter turnout is so low? We despise all of them.
Mark Twain was vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League from 1901-1910. To Mr. Kagan I offer this excerpt from Twain’s “The War Prayer.”
O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love … .
Thank you for quoting this.
Great comments here, I don’t have anything intelligent to offer but: I almost retched when I saw the giant pic of Kagan, Jabba the Hut is way more handsome, and a much nicer guy. (sorry for my biased assessment :-)
You may be biased, but for what it’s worth, if you are, I am too and probably most people who see this photo and know what these NEOCONS are doing to this country.
Remember the pigs in Animal Farm?
The only ray of light from wiser heads (outside the White Supremacist, Racist, Sinophobic, Russophobic Collective WEST hegemons ) to end the madness might be for the rapidly expanding BRICS and SCO countries representing most of the rest of the world to use their economic power to undo the PETRO$’s grip replacing it with bilateral trade in their own currencies on route to the shift to a multi-polar world of cooperation, respect for sovereignty of each country big and small, and win/win/win policies.
A huge shift away from perpetual war, sanctions, theft of $deposits from any country that doesn’t buckle to our whims.
With our $31Trillion debt that relies on trading partners to use their PETRO$ to buy our Treasury Bond debt, we’re vulnerable to their turning off that spigot.
Sure the PETRO$ would crumble so we couldn’t import so much but is the alternative to let these greedy delusional fools blow up the world?
just saying….
“The Calamity of America’s ‘Divine Mission’” is contemporarily identical with other settler colonial missions; Israeli Zionist, and the recently past mission of the “self-chosen” settler colonial Europeans of South Africa, in their ideas of keeping themselves ‘Apart(hate)’ from the indigenous ‘savages’; in order to lead them on their way to ‘civilization’?
The very notion itself of “a chosen people” is, at best, a self-delusion – a glib construct of the fickle nature of the binary, more critically conscious, vis-à-vis unconscious – instinctive acting-out of the human mind, nothing more!
Interpretation, these days, in a truly free and legitimate international democratic order, where the application of an unbiased universal law reigns, has rather devolved, it seems to me, into an “in the eye of the beholder” commodity; the only valid term being where “anything goes”!
Instead of the rule of a truly uniform International Law, the lawlessness of the International Wars instigated by the unilateral hegemonic MICC has for far too long ruled the roost.
Who the hell is Kagan to think he can speak for the USA.
His “chosen-ness” ideas are anathema to justice, democracy, and basic fairness.
Pfui!
The kingdom of Satan is always tempted by force. Kagan expressed high ideals but believes that lesser humans must be ruled by force. As such his philosophy is both useless and demonic.
I’ve never seen a photo of Robert Kagan before. It appears that ideology is not the only thing he and Victoria Nuland, his wife, have consumed too much of. I had a dream about her once–wearing that 1940s cardigan around her shoulders, at the dinner table, and tearing apart the carcass of a bird. I couldn’t envision who sat across from her, watching her down-turned, disapproving mouth, until now.
And so it goes, – Kurt Vonnegut, may you rest in Peace.
The insecure white man wraps himself in the illusion that One must believe, above all else, One must believe displaying commitment by the prostration of ones self and unfettered devotion. Never question the power of deity and One will be delivered to a higher being.
Good luck with that.
We see now what delusional power combined with super wealth results in. It isn’t a great look for the Human.
Kagan’s living self is an affront and pox upon us all.
The likes of GHW Bush & his progeny snake oil salesmen.
Thanks Mr. Fein one more voice for the choir of freedom!
Well said! In a completely monetized society such as ours, all taboos are forsaken for the totem of money. We now live in the shadows of past cultures, and grasp at the sterile light of every decaying civilization that went before us. We seek the light only to find the darkness that still pays out.
Both KAGAN AND NULAND are overfed and under brained . No one could have ,” a more perfect union,’ with those two. They deserve each other—-but America does not deserve these 2 in any government position . After Nuland’s comment of “…..fuck the EU,” I am amazed and quite sorry that she still exists on the planet. Government can attract such awful creatures. : (
Yes, their “pillow talk,” if it occurs, would be horrifying for America and the rest of the world, particularly for Russia, China and Europe.
I admit that the visage of Kagan (and to a lesser degree, Nuland) is a tempting target for mockery, but one should strive to resist the temptation. Former Secretary of State, Pompeo, lost weight and improved his looks, for which he deserves credit, but did he became a better human being? So far, it does not seem so. Many venomous imperialists have at least average looks… say, Bernard-Henri Lévy.
IMO global conditions have changed from any historic report or survey… as I hold in my hand an info device connecting to it’s entirety.
Freedom inherent to this phenom also implies responsibility: to learn.
While the jury is still out as to response… the fact remains harmony, not conflict, could result.
No Secrets… so… Time to get busy?
Tnx Bruce, CN for using & contributing to this system.
This element can be found in both American political parties–in their cabinets where they run things for the deep state.
Kagan like all the other self-important blowhards in Washington, like Trump, is a malignant narcissist. He like the others, believes his own BS. How is it at this late stage of our demise, we haven’t figured out how to prevent these loonies from gaining access to power?
These loonies, especially “honorable” wife Victoria Nuland, are gaining more and more power and seem to be the only members of the Democratic Party with any influence at least in the last decade.
Yes, but Nuland (and hubbie) have served both D and R regimes. Vicki worked for Icky Dick (Cheney) himself. Vicki, Dick, Robbie Kagan and a host of other sociopath think-tankers and kakistocrats run the show…. besides, call them “liberal interventionists”or “neoconservatives” they all advocate for mass murderer, war and attempted Full Spectrum Dominance. If the so-called rule of law were applied equally, many of these folks would be in prison for life, or worse.
This just in: The Mass Media Cartel is reporting that an unidentified high-altitude object has been shot down over Alaska…
I have no idea, but this seems like more BS hysteria distraction. Meanwhile, the US govt. is on a dangerous course that, unless something changes, could well lead to full-scale nuclear war. (intentional or not)
Than is right JJ, sure signs they have no allegiance to tony one or thing other than their cause. Something that evidently neither party is overly concerned about.
Such is living with the two party system.
Thanks CN
Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, and his wife, Victoria Nuland, the “fuck the European Union” Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs,are described by POLITICO magazine as ” the ultimate American power couple”. They are also rated high on the list of the top 50 most influential people in Washington,DC.
And two of the ugliest, both outside and inside. Ugh.
An unpleasant mirror that bears serious reflection and introspection as a means of understanding the current United States administration in the Clinton-Obama-Biden cycle of terror, at home and abroad.
My sincere apologies to Bruce Fein for this OT.
Today’s Crosstalk program finds Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, and Gilbert Doctorow discussing the consequences of the “philosophy” which Robert Kagan espouses.
For those who may not know, Robert Kagan is Victoria Nuland’s husband.
The Democratically elected president of Ukraine) Yanukovitch was ousted in an outrageous American coup filmed and shown to the world with the Neo Nazis doing the spade work of killing and injuring civilians in the Maidan square. Victoria Nuland, standing beside VP Biden, Geofry Pyatt Ambasador to Ukraine, John Brennan CIA, and of course John McCain in the maiden square in 2014 exclamed ” we have spent 5 billion dollars to finally get this result. When asked how the EU would respond she said “F ***” the EU. She later apologised but she said it. This was the lit match that started an 8 year process of Putin being lied to during the discussions between Merkel, Macron and poroshenko during the Minsk accords to give Kiev time to bolster it’s military which it did. The resulting war with Russia and Ukraine was provoked to say the least with America backing it all the way. Russia at the time was not as well prepared as it should have been and it showed on the battle field initially.
The key to understanding the mental gestures churned out by the likes of Kagan (I won’t dignify them by calling them “arguments” or “thoughts”) is to realize that everything these people say or write is driven by a crass, utilitarian interest in protecting the wealth and power of the ruling class. They are completely bereft of principles. At heart, they are nihilists. Contrary their religious and/or idealist/utopian disguises, they are extreme relativists in every sense: epistemological, aesthetic and ethical. They have no concern for truth, beauty, or goodness. They manipulate words with one goal in mind: practical, on-the-ground, push-comes-to-shove preservation of existing bourgeois patriarchy, hierarchy, wealth and privilege. They pretend to be “traditionalists” while they destroy all traditions through war and environmental devastation. The only “tradition” they wish to preserve is the tradition of the rich enslaving the poor. Violence is the only “reason” they believe in.
For me, the only credible response to their mental gestures is to ignore them. I am grateful, however, to writers such as Bruce Fein, who take the time to state the obvious, for those who still struggle to recognize the obvious.
Nobody could have said it better.