Return of History: Power Politics and Nationalism Here To Stay

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	• The Return of History and the End of Dreams Robert Kagan Knopf, 2008 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Important Book

An insightful review of where we are in the US today. Should be required reading for all voters.

The Malignity of Multipolarity

This is a perceptive and far-sighted examination on the state of global politics as the decade approaches its end, in the form of an extended essay. A new axis of evil is rising in opposition to the West, one not guided by a shared ideology except in so far as hostility to the rule of law and democracy might be considered ideological. Kagan predicts that the future will see the return of nationalism, growing tensions and confrontation between the forces of democracy and autocracy. What matters is a nation's nature of government, he observes, not its culture, religion or geographic location; and this will determine its international alignment. While not dismissing the terrorist threat, he does not consider it a primary menace as history proves that modernity has never lost against the traditionalism represented by the Islamists. True, but terrorism might have unintended consequences in the formation of alliances and the development of state structures.

It is interesting to compare Kagan's analysis with Margaret Thatcher's Statecraft, published in 2002, in which she assessed the state of the world and possible future trajectories. In chapters 3 and 4 of her book Thatcher looks at Russia and the Asian Giants China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) and India. Rogue states, religion and terrorism are discussed in chapter 6, with particular reference to North Korea, Islam, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran. Another must-read: The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West by Edward Lucas, already confirms Kagan's view. Russia is pursuing policies that threaten its own citizens, neighboring states and the world at large. Lucas takes a hard look at the ruling elite which emerged almost entirely from the ranks of the old KGB. This dominant class harbors resentment against the West as a whole in an interesting parallel to the hostility of the Brussels Eurocracy towards the USA and Israel. The Russian government now openly competes with the West on the economic and political fronts.

Freedom of expression and the rule of law exist in name only; the state controls all the economic activity, political institutions and media that matter. Putin's term "managed" or "sovereign" democracy really means a malignant form of Czarism. Despite Russia's demographic implosion, pervasive corruption and widespread lawlessness, a new cold war is being waged. Not only has the country displayed thuggish behavior against Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Georgia and the UK in the Litvinenko case, it is supplying arms to rogue states Iran and Syria and their terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia exposes the mentality and incompetence of the ruling class.

The geopolitical implications are staggering, as the Putin gang eagerly befriends all enemies of the West. Evidence is accumulating that Russia seeks an alliance with the Islamic world and a partial restoration of the Soviet Empire through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) of which China is a member. The Kremlin ignores the long-term threat from China despite the particularly drastic demographic and infrastructural implosion in Russia's Far East. Whatever other evils follow from Russia's abandonment of Western values, it is sure to become a more barbaric society for its citizens and a considerably more dangerous international player. One may confidently expect it to supply Iran with nuclear weapons technology and to support every loathsome thugocracy that defiles the planet.

Russia is pursuing an energy policy aimed at strangling the liberal democracies by e.g. establishing a gas cartel. An expanded SCO that includes Iran, other Middle Eastern and African states like Libya and Sudan, plus Venezuela is a real possibility. Kagan correctly identifies it as a revived Warsaw Pact. The SCO will lock the Turkic speaking states of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (plus Persian Tajikistan) firmly in the bear's embrace. The future role of Turkey will be crucial; it remains to be seen how its current pro-religious government will adapt its foreign policy as reaction to the country's certain exclusion from the European inner core. Economic ties to Europe are of course assured but the country might significantly upgrade relations with the Central Asian states and the SCO.

Kagan foresees closer future ties between the USA, India and Japan, rather than a larger role for NATO. Echoing the idea expressed in The UN and Beyond: United Democratic Nations (edited by Anne Bayefsky), Kagan proposes the same type of international organization consisting of democratic states co-coordinating their policies. Perhaps he underestimates the ambition of the Brussels Eurocracy and its resentment of the US. The likelihood of all 27 states uniting is slim, but prospects for closer union of a core group including Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Italy, Spain and a few others are bright. Such a restructuring could be triggered by many factors like the refusal of current member states to relinquish further sovereignty, economic problems or security concerns. While retaining nominal autonomy, the other countries of Europe will undoubtedly accept the Superstate's foreign policy. The loss of the UK will diminish the Anglosphere whilst an alliance with India and Japan might formidably enhance its influence and assure its strategic advantage of continued dominance over three of the world's oceans.

One fact is certain: the USA follows the siren calls of isolationism at its great peril. And the paranoids that tried to demonize the "Hyperpower" will look back on the period of American "hegemony" with affection and nostalgia once the dynamics of the new multipolar world become clear. What distinguishes Kagan's conclusions from the discredited popular notions of the 90s - Fukuyama's fatuous futurology and Huntington's culturally based theory - is that elements of it have already begun to unfold. How comfortable the decade of the Clintons now seems in comparison to contemporary trends. Kagan's book is alarming and unsettling but a much needed tonic for identifying, and preparing for, the coming challenges.

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Has History Returned?

Yes, history has returned according to Kagan. This is an even handed, concise discussion of the geopolitical struggle today between the democratic world (the west etc) and the autocratic world (China, Russia, etc). I am not a fan of Kagan and the neocons, however this is a book that is well worth the read from any political persuasion. Authors would be well advised to indeed give us more of these concise, yet thoughtful books.

Return of History: Power Politics and Nationalism Here To Stay

At barely over a hundred pages this book contains a wonderfully wise and judicious summary of the diplomatic, foreign policy conundrums facing the world today.

On the day I began reading Robert Kagan's Return of History I heard on the news that Russia had begun patrolling the Arctic region with nuclear submarines, something they had not done since the fall of the Soviet empire.

This datum ties in very nicely with Kagan's succinct, well-written book putting current-day foreign policy in its precise qualities: we're certainly not in an era that's "the end of history." Rather, it's a return to power politics and nationalism, when inhabitants of a country feel pride when their country is powerful.

It helps to explain, for example, the rise of Russia, which I hardly hesitate to call fascist, what with the murdering of dissident journalists and former spies, even those residing outside of Russia.

Just before I have written this, I listened to a BBC podcast, NewsPod of 30 July 2008, describing the launching of subs to delve the depths of Lake Baikal, where 20 percent of the world's freshwater is located. The lake I believe is 5,000 feet deep. The Russian sailors chanted "Glory to Russia!" when they emerged from the sub after the dive. Odd-sounding to Westerners, I think.

Kagan, whose previous book Dangerous Nation was very influential for me, changing my ideas of foreign policy--which had been more in line with Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul--is a wonderful, knowledgeable writer who impresses. People are interested in more than being reductionist homo economicus. Reminding me of my college reading of Plato, we possess a soul spiritedness, a thymos, "a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state." (page 8) So actors, be they individuals or states, act in ways that may be irrational or counter-productive. That's not always the point.

This spiritedness often manifests itself as simple patriotism, nearly a dirty word to Europeans. Kagan agrees, calling it a "dirty word in the postmodern Enlightenment lexicon, but there is no shame in a government restoring a nation's honor." (30) Indeed. The naiveté of postmoderns will be their undoing.

Russia opposing the United States, even if they may lead to reaction contrary to Russia's immediate interests, is explained very well in The Return of History. Russia is determined to be accepted as a Great Power, even if its economy doesn't warrant it. It's what it once was, and it--led by Vladimir Putin--aims to be thought of once again.

Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) proves feckless and incompetent to contain this traditional ugly behavior (at least from their perspective): "Russia and the EU are neighbors geographically. But geopolitically they live in different centuries. A twenty-first-century EU, with its noble ambition to transcend power politics and lead the world into a new international order based on laws and institutions, now confronts a Russia that is very much a traditional, nineteenth-century power practicing the old power politics." (20) The result is that "Europe may be ill-equipped to respond to a problem that it never anticipated having to face." (22) You think? It's almost humorous watching Germany trying to be passively diplomatic, for example, to Russia's bullying over its natural gas supplies, while it arbitrarily cuts off certain countries like the Ukraine or Belarus.

In regards to China, Kagan asks a good question: "In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run?" (57) The theory with China is first let it become a thoroughgoing capitalist country, and political liberalizations will follow. We may have to wait a long time on that.

"As China scholar Minxin Pei has pointed out, when Chinese leaders fact the choice between economic efficiency and the preservation of power, they choose power. That is their pragmatism." (61)

NATO is more benign to Russia than a few years earlier, yet is engendering much greater hostility. (61)

"The mistake of the 1990s was the hope that democracy was inevitable." (99)

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains ?unipolar,? but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong.

For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.

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