We see it all the time. A well-known columnist and author of Important Books, who has a new tome out on the market, teams up with a magazine to run a piece by said author summarizing the book. Everyone wins: The author gets some free publicity, the magazine gets a big-name byline and a piece that probably doesn’t need all that much polishing.
Of course, things could always turn out differently. As evidence of this, witness Robert Kagan’s curious — and cloying — cover story in this week’s New Republic. His contribution is noteworthy in several respects, not the least of which being his ability to exemplify all the worst aspects of editorial writing in one fell swoop: a litany of unproven, unsourced assertions, hollow — yet sweeping — observations and a series of contradictory claims. It’s almost enough to scare us away from cracking Kagan’s new book, (which the piece is designed to promote), the unwieldy-sounding, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, which actually just arrived in the mail yesterday.
The book, whose premise is a bit of a straw man, holds that contrary to what Kagan says many Americans believe, the United States has not been an historically isolationist country, but rather has a long history of being a meddlesome, expansionist military power. (A point you probably wouldn’t have to make to generations of Native Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Filipinos, Serbs or Iraqis, but Kagan is talking to Americans here.)
Kagan kicks the piece off with the well-worn editorial device of claiming to be arguing against a group of unnamed critics who hold conveniently vague opinions. For example, in response to our current unenviable position in the international arena, Kagan writes, “many call for the United States to return to its foreign policy traditions, as if that would provide the answer.”
As if, is right. But what we would like to know is who exactly is making this call, and moreover, what tradition are they clamoring to return to? We’re not saying that people haven’t called for the United States roll back its foreign policy — it was a big part of John Kerry’s failed presidential bid, after all — but the blanket statement “many,” without any particulars, just doesn’t pass muster.
But that’s small beans compared to what follows. A few paragraphs on, Kagan drops this gem: “What [Austrian prince] Metternich understood, and what others would learn, was that the United States was a nation with almost boundless ambition and a potent sense of national honor, for which it was willing to go to war.”
Sounds about right. Problem is, while that sounds like something Kagan would normally celebrate, (see his last book, Of Paradise and Power for evidence of this), he muddles the issue a few paragraphs later: “Our religious conscience makes us look disapprovingly on ambition — both personal and national,” he writes. “Our modern democratic worldview conceives of ‘honor’ as something antiquated and undemocratic.”
To his credit, Kagan says that Americans are still ambitious despite their alleged disapproval of the fatal flaw, but that doesn’t help this mish-mash of platitude and evidence-free punditry pass the smell test. Conveniently, there’s nothing here that can be either proved or disproved, since he’s relying on a series of rhetorical bells and whistles to paint the American character as one of pious benevolence, unencumbered by the messy realities of history or scholarship.
For an article that seems to want to smash national creation myths, Kagan sure goes a long way in holding up these myths as the gospel, and his editors at TNR apparently had no desire to restrain him from some myth-making of his own. Kagan continues his “Aw, shucks” version of American history with this benevolent view of the American character: “We are, and have always been, uncomfortable with our own power, our ambition, and our willingness to use force to achieve our objectives.” And why is this? Because “our religious conscience makes us look disapprovingly on ambition — both personal and national.”
While Kagan is busy trying to destroy one myth — that of the United States as an historically isolationist country — he more than enthusiastically upholds several more: That of a country of innocent do-gooders, casting about the globe for wrongs to right, while feeling unease with the wealth and power that our ambition has delivered to us. That’s hardly the stuff of serious history, and despite his habit of quoting from the Founding Fathers to back up this argument, Kagan seems to have completely forgotten — at least in the TNR summation of his book — the role that economics have played in the American story. It’s an overly simplistic argument, and one that is worthy neither of the magazine that published it, nor of Kagan himself.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.