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NEWS & REPORTS
    
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Review of Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
by Cliff DuRand
Robert Kagan is a leading neo-conservative intellectual. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a columnist for the Washington Post. He also is a contributing editor for the leading neo-con publication The Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, with whom Kagan co-authored an earlier book.
His latest book, Dangerous Nation, is a scholarly study of U.S. diplomatic history from before the founding of the U.S. up to the end of the 19th century. He plans to give us a continuation of that through the 20th century. As a piece of scholarship it is an impressive 416 pages of text with another 64 pages of footnotes and a 26 page bibliography. But for all of its scholarship, it is not an objective, neutral study, but an argument for a point of view –something to be said for most scholarship.
What Kagan is arguing for is an understanding of the national character of the American people. The history that he analyzes is one of expansionism and interventionism as the new nation spread across the North American continent and then beyond as it sought to build a global empire. In short, it is a history of imperialism. But rather than critiquing this imperialist history, Kagan embraces it as defining the national character. In effect, he claims that imperialism is an American as apple pie.
This understanding of who we are as a people is foreshadowed in his previous book, Of Paradise and Power. That more polemical volume contrasts Europeans and Americans. The former are committed to building a world of perpetual peace a la Immanuel Kant based on negotiated agreements between nations, multilaterialism in foreign affairs, and building international institutions. On the other hand, he claims Americans live in a more Hobbesian world of conflict between nations acting unilaterally in pursuit of their own self interests where the most powerful militarily are dominant. As Kagan puts it, Europeans are from Venus, Americans are from Mars.
Dangerous Nation has to be read as an effort to ground that view of who we are in an interpretation of our history from the very beginning. The unstated implication is that the invasion of Iraq somehow flows from our national character and thus is an intervention that we do not need to be ashamed of. It is a well intentioned effort to extend our universal principles as a democratic republic to a part of the world in need of civilization –a kind of messianic vision of our role in the world.
State and Nation
I want to dispute Kagan’s central claim that the American people are essentially imperialistic, while agreeing with him that the United States has been and is now imperialistic. I think it is important to distinguish between the actions of the U.S. government and the political elites that control it and, on the other hand, the American people, between the U.S. state and the American nation. It is the former that conducts foreign policy and that makes wars and usually has to cajole and trick the people into accepting those decisions. The present war in Iraq is a classic example of that. So too was the U.S. war on Vietnam, the invasions of Panama, Granada, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, etc., etc. In all these cases incidents were created, public opinion was manipulated, and enemies were invented to get a reluctant people to accept the decisions made by our political elite. What Kagan does is treat those decisions as a consequence of the American character and there lies his central error. If we the people were in fact imperialistic, our political elites would not have to manipulate us into going to war.
The fact that it was elite decisions rather than the popular will that has driven U.S. militarism is revealed in the naval rearmament program during the 1880s. It was this that set the stage for the imperialistic thrust abroad at the end of the century as that power was used to finish off Spanish colonialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Philippians. Kagan acknowledges that
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“If American security was threatened,… it was not because other powers were advancing against American interests but because the United States was … pushing out into the world in pursuit of a whole spectrum of commercial, strategic, ideological, and moral interests…. The point… brought angry condemnations from both ends of the political spectrum. The idea that the United States might itself be the instigator of conflict by virtue of its expansive policies ran too violently against the popular perception of American innocence and passivity.” (p. 348) |
Kagan sees this as a question of national character, as did the advocates of a strong naval force.
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“What kind of nation was the United States… if its citizens gave so little regard to preserving a respectable level of military power and the will to use it? ‘Gilded Age’ America, they worried, seemed to have become obsessed with the selfish pursuit of wealth and personal gain and possessed too little of what [some] called the ‘masculine combative virtues’.” (p. 352) “Later historians have treated this celebration of war and ‘masculine combative virtues’ as a novel development of the late nineteenth century.” (p.353) |
He goes on to point out that the same celebration of martial virtues are found earlier in Clay, Calhoun, Madison, John Quincy Adams, etc. It should be obvious that the voices in this paragraph are those of the political elite. The people, we are told, were obsessed with personal gain rather than international power. So, which is the national character? Is it the character reflected in “the popular perception of American innocence and passivity” or the “masculine combative virtues” the elite sought to impose on them?
In a telling historical speculation that resonate with us today, Kagan opines
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“the United States might not have gone to war with Spain in 1898, and therefore would not have acquired a colony in the Philippines, had it not possessed a navy deemed capable of readily accomplishing those tasks.” [cf. Iraq in 2003 --Cliff] “But the navy that President William McKinley sent into battle in 1898 was not conceived in the 1890s. [cf. Bush ---Cliff] … It was authorized by Congress between 1881 and 1892, in response to ambitions and insecurities that had begun to emerge in the years following the Civil War.” (p. 356) [cf. Cold War --Cliff] |
So what I am arguing against Kagan is that it is not the nation, by which I mean the people as a collective entity, that is imperialistic. Such policies are not rooted in the American character. They come from certain elements of the political elite, more concerned with promoting special interests which they seek to identify with the national interest.
Go West Young Man
That is not to say that military action has never come from popular demands of the people. The clearest example of this was the expansion of the country westward in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This was driven by land hunger of a settler population for whom the American Dream was to become independent landowners –yeomen farmers. Indeed it was this land hunger that drove our Founders to seek independence from England, as Kagan correctly points out. That founding elite were land speculators eager to extend their claims across the Allegheny Mountains into the Ohio Valley. Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and even Jonathan Edwards were enthusiastic British imperialists as long as Briton sought to extend its dominion over that territory.
But then in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 “the British … agreed to let France keep its imperial outposts in North America and … established an Indian ‘buffer’ between their respective colonial holdings.” This ‘just equilibrium of power’ “was the last thing [the colonists] wanted.” (p. 21) “The most articulate and vigorous lobbyist for aggressive imperial action against France was Benjamin Franklin.” (p. 24) He feared French control of the land westward to the Mississippi would hem the colonists in and so he advocated “a preemptive strike” (Kagan’s term) in order to win ‘lebensraum’ (my term). (pp. 24-25) It was the British ban on further territorial expansion that persuaded the colonists to seek their independence. Thus, we might say that the Revolution was not against imperialism. It was to make their own imperialist expansion possible.
It was this that led to the invention of the modern liberal republic called the United States wrapping it in a universalist ideology. As Kagan argues:
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“foreign policy and national identity were intimately bound together…. Most nationalisms are rooted in blood and soil…. Americans were now tied together not by common ancestry, common history, and common land but by allegiance to the liberal republican ideology…. The classic definition of national interest –the defense of a specific territory and promotion of the well-being of the people who live on it—was not perfectly suited to a nationalism that rested on a universalist ideology. Americans… believed their own fate was in some way tied to the cause of liberalism and republicanism both within and beyond their borders.” (p. 42) |
This universalist ideology would provide the rationale to justify many an intervention and win popular support for many wars in the centuries since.
The expansion of the country across the continent that occupied the energies of the people through the 19th century was fueled by the land hunger “of many thousands of interested individuals and groups under the influence of a liberal worldview, rather than by statesmen operating on a separate plane of geopolitical thought.” (p. 77) Kagan argues that westward expansion was the result of a “restive and energetic American people, not the Machiavellian designs of their statesmen,” (p. 79) adding “a government constructed by the people for the purpose of protecting their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness could not easily stand in the way of their efforts to acquire and settle new lands, or to trade in overseas markets.” (pp. 74-75)
Thus Kagan absolves the political elite and presumably the commercial class who started this expansion of responsibility for the conquest of the continent. It was the popular classes that made them do it.
I can accept this general characterization of the dynamics that came to extend the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The elite and the people were both expansionary. But then Kagan takes this as a template to understand further expansions of U.S. dominance abroad. I would contend that for most Americans, once they had their homestead on the prairie or had staked their claim in California, were content to settle down and had no interest in expanding the power of the U.S. in other lands. It was then that the elite had to find ways to manipulate people into supporting their imperial projects abroad.
In saying this I am reflecting the common image Americans have of themselves “as by nature inward-looking and aloof, only sporadically and spasmodically venturing forth into the world, usually in response to external attack or perceived threats.” (p. 5) It is this self-perception that Kagan calls a myth and which this book is intended to dispel. As he says in his introduction “The pervasive myth of America as isolationist and passive until provoked rests on a misunderstanding of America’s foreign policies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.” (pp. 5-6) Nevertheless, whether myth or reality, this self-concept is a part of the American character, of who we think we are as a people. Thus, we are more from Venus than from Mars. It is that self-concept as a nation that Kagan seeks to change and which we in the peace movement have to appeal to against the machinations of our elites.
The importance of Kagan’s book and the larger neo-con project that it is a part of is that it is an attempt to redefine who we are. This is a struggle for the soul of America. Another neo-con thinker, William Pearl, in speaking of the impact of their project in the Middle East says “we are no longer the people we once were.” We have been transformed by them. Is that true? One might well ask whether after 70 years of warfare and the militarization of American society by what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial-congressional complex, whether we are still a people who are from Venus. And if not, can we yet reclaim a national identity of a peaceful, democratic people, respected (rather than feared) around the world? If not, we will indeed be a dangerous nation.
Precursors of Globalization
There is one more aspect of the book that deserves attention, if only because it anticipates what is likely to be in the sequel he is now writing and because it pre-figures the present era of globalization. This has to do with the vision of the U.S. role in the world expressed by William Seward, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State. Kagan tells us
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“Seward was an unabashed American expansionist, … [who] looked to the ever-expanding British Empire as a model to be emulated…. Mastery of the continent… was only a prelude to achieving global hegemony…. The aim of American foreign policy, Seward declared in 1853, should be mastery of ‘the commerce of the world, which is the empire of the world.’… America’s real and lasting influence would come through the power of trade itself –‘political supremacy follows commercial ascendancy.’” (p. 250) |
This is an early expression of the unique form of imperialism followed by the U.S. in the 20th century, based not on direct rule of colonies, but dominance through a ‘commercial hegemony’, which later came to be called neo-colonialism. That was the approach to achieving dominance in Latin America after those countries achieved independence and since World War II on a global scale. Seward along with Lincoln believed that the U.S. had a moral responsibility founded in the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence to promote equal rights for all, not just for oneself, but for others as well. Following the Civil War, the political elite and their associated commercial classes came to see the “’Opening’ [of] other nations to commerce [as] in American interests, … not only because there was money to be made but because in time commercial penetration would hasten the progress of backward peoples toward civilization.” (p. 296) This “was an internationalized version of the American dream: every nation and people had the inherent capacity to advance to the highest stages of civilization if given the freedom and opportunity to do so.” (p. 297)
It can be argued that such neo-colonialism, or what we might call ‘soft imperialism’, is consonant with an American character of a peaceful people who believe in progress and the universal value of a liberal commercial republic. It is this national character that ambitious elites have been able to take advantage of to win public support for messianic projects to extend U.S. power and commercial dominance around the globe by peaceful means when possible and military means when necessary –all to the enrichment of the corporations they have come to serve. We the people must come to understand that is not identical with the interests of the American nation –something that Kagan conceals from our view.
March 14, 2008
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