The National Interest

Neoconservative pundits have an unfortunate tendency to take a world characterized by shades of grey and reduce it to stark tones of black and white, with no room for nuance and complexity. This can produce impassioned pieces of rhetoric but is a poor way for a superpower to conduct strategy.

Robert Kagan’s latest work, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, takes a series of problematic trends—among them the resurgence of Russia, the rise of China and the petering out of the third wave of democratization—and creates a Manichean narrative where the twenty-first century is to be defined by the titanic struggle between the children of democracy and the children of autocracy. It’s a stirring, passionate call to arms. Unfortunately, it is a caricature of what’s happening in the real world. And if a future John McCain administration were to use this slim volume as its guide to grand strategy, the damage to the global position of the United States could be catastrophic. Trying to shoehorn America’s friends into an “axis of democracy” could very well wreck many of our country’s vital relationships. And pushing countries like China and Russia to formalize their relationship and to actively develop a global anti-American bloc would be foolhardy. Thus far, their cooperation to put obstacles in the path of some U.S. objectives has been opportunistic and haphazard. Do we really want to facilitate the emergence of a Eurasian entente?

This is not to minimize or ignore the problems Kagan rightly calls attention to. Russia and China do not share a community of values with the United States nor do they share the American worldview, especially in how the international order should be constructed. In contrast to the world of 1994, other states now have considerably more wherewithal to put limits on our freedom of action. It is a world that has become much more frustrating for Americans who thought that the end of the cold war solved everything.

Indeed, one of the grave weaknesses of the book is the assumption that a country’s “identity,” as a “democracy” or as an “autocracy,” is one of the most important factors—if not the paramount one—in determining its foreign policy—trumping even vital national interests.

Let’s take the treatment of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. More pro-American than his predecessor, yes. But Sarkozy is committed to his vision of the trans-Atlantic relationship, and that does not include any sort of global association of democracies. He also has a different view of how France—and by extension Europe—should deal with Russia and some of the North African non-democracies. One year after his election, the Atlantic Community asked how “American” Sarkozy had turned out to be, and the record is decidedly mixed—and areas of disagreement with the United States have tended to be in areas where Sarkozy perceives there are critical French interests at stake.

A real test of the thesis that a country’s commitment to a particular form of government drives its foreign policy is India. And yet, the discussion of India in this work is remarkably unnuanced. India is indeed a democracy—and it does seek a much closer relationship with the United States. But India also sees itself as a developing country, an Asian power, an emerging global power and as a leader of the non-aligned group. India shares with Russia and China a belief in the importance of a highly centralized form of government that makes the state the ultimate legitimizing authority (at its Constituent Assembly, it was proclaimed that India “is one integral whole, its people a single people living under a single imperium derived from a single source …”)—even if it is willing to entrust this state to competitive elections. Along with much of the non-European world, India places a high premium on state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

So India’s foreign policy is remarkably layered. Kagan cites approvingly India’s joint naval exercises with the United States, Japan and Australia in 2007 as a sign of the growing alignment of democracies against the autocracies. That is only one facet, however. A good deal of India’s military equipment used in those war games is produced jointly with Russia. India regularly sides with China against the West on a variety of issues relating to climate change and energy; it has, as of this writing, continued to oppose independence for Kosovo on the grounds of protecting state sovereignty and territorial integrity; India’s foreign minister meets on a regular basis with his Russian and Chinese counterparts in the trilateral Russia-India-China (RIC) format and, for the first time, later this month, the four foreign ministers of the BRIC—Brazil-Russia-India-China—will meet in Yekaterinburg, Russia. And when it comes to acquiring the resources needed to fuel India’s economic growth, New Delhi, no less than Beijing, is willing to deal with autocracies around the world. After Kagan’s book went to press, India welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

India’s “problematic behavior” also calls into question, at the end of the book, that the U.S. would have more tolerance for a rising China that is democratic. Perhaps in the conduct of some of its internal affairs, yes—although India’s democracy has also shown no hesitation to use force in putting down internal unrest. But a democratic China would no more accept the U.S. position on a variety of international issues than an autocratic China. Nor would Sino-Indian rivalries be automatically diminished just as Indo-Pakistani hostility was never ameliorated when there were democratic governments in both New Delhi and Islamabad. Indeed, the thaw in relations took place only after the military coup of 1999. I must also quibble with his assertion, early on in the book, that “a democratizing Russia did not fear the United States or the enlargement of the alliance of democracies”—a remarkable statement. Russia in the 1980s and 1990s argued that NATO should either disband, or that Russia should join as a full member, fully consulted on all matters. I cannot find official statements that support this claim—and I am not reassured that Kagan’s footnote to this statement is not to any Russian document but to Francis Fukuyama.

Democracy matters; values matter. But they are not the only factor.

But shades of gray don’t have a home in this work. Everything, in the end, is reduced to a binary choice. We either are supporting autocracies, or we are supporting democracies. But it is not that simple, as Jean Kirkpatrick recognized more than thirty years ago. Ronald Reagan preferred to support an autocrat like General Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea rather than the democratic activists pushing for rapid democratization, in part because of his sense that Chun was laying the basis for a stable transfer of power, beginning with the 1981 constitution that limited the president to a single term of office. Reagan defended his position against sometimes very spirited and harsh criticism from the Congress of the time. (Reagan took a similar approach to Taiwan’s Chiang Ching-kuo as well, and this was the source of his faith that Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos might also begin reforms.) Most Europeans today prefer the modernization of Russia undertaken by Putin and likely to be continued under Medvedev to the specter of a “Red-Brown” dictatorship running Russia; the United States signaled it prefers modernization in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, even under non-democratic rulers, to pushing for sudden, rapid change.

Interest-based relationships remain the best way for the United States to conduct its foreign policy, especially in a world where economic and military power are accumulating around several centers. Shared values can help underpin such relationships, but cannot serve as a substitute. A simplistic appeal to “democracies of the world, unite” didn’t work at the Bucharest NATO summit and has had mixed appeal among the rising southern democracies like India, South Africa and Brazil.

America’s global position is sustained not only by its allies but even by countries that right now are neither clearly friends or foes (such as China) because of the benefits they obtain. Kagan is right—most states do not want to replace the United States in its leadership role. But they are more willing now to restrain the United States or raise the cost for American action if they feel Washington is acting as a dysfunctional hegemon or directly challenging their interests.

In assessing Kagan’s work, Lee Hamilton’s advice comes to mind: “All of our policies should be able to pass the basic test of pragmatism: not just how proposals sound in speeches or what they would accomplish with limitless resources—but how they work out in practice?” At the close, I’m not convinced that we have a strategy that would lead to success.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is editor of The National Interest.