Robert Kagan's New Book
I have already linked to several stories by Robert Kagan, an advisor to John McCain, and his new thesis regarding the rise of tensions between the liberal democracies and the resurgent authoritarians (China and Russia most prominently). Here are several items on the book , The Return of History and the End of Dreams, he is soon releasing that goes into more detail on this. Kagan is, in my opinion the most effective "neoconservative" writer out there. I may not always agree with him as his theses tend to be somewhat simplified and the real world will require more complex policymaking than is often suggested by him.
However, he does an important service by creating legitimately debateable frameworks that are provocative and do have substantial elements of truth. In a nutshell, he is more right than wrong. One can debate the fine points (of which there is a multitude), but he seems to point in a direction and that is what is most important when trying to organize our approaches to the world.
Here and here are two reviews that are not all that all that friendly, though not brutal either. The second, however, is the most interesting given that it is expansive in its critique not so much of the new book by itself but the entire process by which political theorists have been trying to impose an understandable order on the world ever since the Berlin Wall fell. To some extent, that's what I have been doing, but I know full well that we don't really know where its all heading.
Here's a good quote:
"If there was a the unipolar moment it has passed. The US will most likely remain the pre-eminent global power for some time yet, but it is already an insufficient one. The multilateral system designed in the middle of the last century no longer fits geopolitical realities. New powers might be accommodated in a reformed system or they might choose to shun it.
Likewise multipolarity could foreshadow a new era of great power competition that might well have seemed familiar to the politicians of 18th century Europe. But the nature of interstate war changed irrevocably with the splitting of the atom.
Most importantly, nothing is pre-ordained. The shape of the (dis)order that eventually emerges from these tumultuous changes will be determined by the decisions and choices of statesmen and women, peoples and governments. As for history, well, it never went away."
As I said in a previous post, no matter how momentarily accurate they may depict events, all theories are truly paradigms in the dark because they can only illuminate for a time... Yet we must try to understand and try to make sense, lest how can anyone attempt to make policy?
Finally, here is an interview Kagan did with Newsweek.
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