A few thoughts:
Kagan's piece is interesting - I think he's right to argue that the "tipping point" on Sino-Russian hostility wasn't the Iraq war. The date I use is 1999, but that's my argument. What he fails to recognize, however, is that even after a tipping point, change is still possible, and that the Bush Administration indeed accelerated the trend.
Of course, there's a lot of Kaganesque boilerplate in here, such as that this is completely consistent with US history. He's pretty lousy, with his sourcing, though, because I think you can question many of his assertions, for example on Russian activity, and on reactions to Russia and China - I think he's wrong, and I don't see him providing any data to support himself.
On the stability of the Russian and Chinese regimes, Kagan's out of his damn mind on this one. The Russians, for example, don't want democracy - they want stability and economic benefits. They're sick of the 1990s - thanks to Jeff Sachs and the Clinton Administration, democracy has a bad name in Russia. China's a little different, but not by much. And Kagan's recommendations are counterproductive - when liberals on the outside push on internal Chinese and Russian politics, they look like what they are - American proxies. On this, Dan, I think you're spot freakin' on.
Ross Douthat has some commentary up as well:
http://
rossdouthat.theatlantic.c...rous_nation.php
http://
rossdouthat.theatlantic.c...s_nation_ii.php
(h/t) http://pomoco.typepad.com/postmo...of-future-
.html
Dan
Thanks for pointing such an interesting article.
He has some good points, some rather overstated perhaps, and some bad ones. Even if his major points were hold up I am not sure why we should be that excited.
One thing that seems to underlie is thesis is that the major regional powers do not have to accept heterogeneous contracts offered by a US/European block. They will be able to explicitly or implicitly negotiate more balanced contracts on items of a regional level and perhaps working together on an international level. Nor do they have to be the intermediaries for this block either to smaller countries or internally.
What he draws form that seems, at best, to be overstated.
And some shameless self promotion. I pulled one of his items to support a rather different A March Up Country??
The link didn't post
http://eclecticmeanderings.blogs...up-
country.html
"One thing that seems to underlie is thesis is that the major regional powers do not have to accept heterogeneous contracts offered by a US/European block" (Hank).
This is definitly correct. But what worries me is that the US and Europe do not even seem to be capable of acting complementary to a certain degree.
It is demanded be many (e.g.Mathiopoulos in her article first published in the IHT), but Sarkozy's latest deal with Libya and the German reactions to it demonstrate that the EU itself is far from being a halfway helpul unitary foreign policy actor (which could strengthen US efforts by applying its economic leverage).
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