ANGELO M. CODEVILLA: Caricature of America Dangerous Nation
Kagan, Robert
BOOKS IN REVIEW not a metaphor; on peyote there are no metaphors. From the tenor sax issued festive, gorgeous silk bands of the brightest richest red, whirling and dancing and filling the...
...Kagan transmutes the Monroe Doctrine’s renunciation of intervention in Europe’s affairs, coupled with the statement that European expansion in the Western hemisphere is dangerous to the United States, into an assertion of empire and “a statement of international republican solidarity...
...When it comes to moral clarity, however, Stone’s memoir disappoints in the end...
...To say that Florence King doesn’t suffer fools gladly is an understatement akin to suggesting that Fred Astaire could maneuver quite nicely on the dance floor...
...Moreover, Kagan’s suggestion that Lincoln would have followed the war with a “reconstruction” policy aimed at full equality for Negroes flies in the face of all the evidence...
...Quite so...
...Caricature of America ROBERT KAGAN WRITES that “despite four hundred years of steady expansion and ever deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite numerous wars, interventions, and prolonged occupations of foreign lands… Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity...
...Kagan notes that the Founders thought that the Declaration of Independence was relevant to “all men” at all times and in all places...
...I was never able to advance (if that’s the word) beyond the old boring liberalism of the twocheers-for-democracy sort...
...government’s first venture in “nation building...
...John Winthrop’s Massachusetts was a “theocracy”—a fashionable present-day pejorative...
...But Stone went to Vietnam in 1971 as a reporter for a London weekly tabloid modeled on the Village Voice, and he also has his quarrel with the prevailing liberal press coverage of the war...
...Kagan describes Americans as “Lockean,” meaning, to him, driven by the desire to acquire...
...If you want to know what the sixties really mean to one of the finest minds of his generation, read the novels instead...
...Dangerous Nation aims to correct this “lack of selfDangerous Nation awareness,” by showing us By Robert Kagan how our “liberal ideology” (KNOPF, 527 PAGES, $30) makes us a “frightening power” bound to remake Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla the world in our image or die trying...
...This is the “self-awareness” that limits the dangers to which Progressives’ overactive imaginations expose America...
...Kagan deconstructs American history’s protagonists as representatives of impersonal forces and presents them without regard for their own understanding of what they were doing...
...Ordinary decency, like the writing of good novels, requires that the whole truth be told...
...Hence it counsels that we commit to meddling in others’ affairs—indeed to imperialism for the Angelo M. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute...
...Until the 20th century American statesmen practiced geopolitics without confusing America’s interest in being itself with any other nation’s or mankind’s...
...The immediate results were electoral rotten boroughs on one side, and the Ku Klux Klan on the other...
...In 1968, the North Vietnamese Army, briefly in control of Hue, treated the city and its inhabitants the way the special Kommandos of Totenkopf SS treated the average Byelorussian shtetl...
...Really...
...Kagan’s America was a place of “ugliness” that provided “fortunes for a few and misery for many… [and] treated men as things” until “laws and institutions modeled after England’s” made it livable...
...In 1960 Stone worked for the New York Daily News, which he loathed as a right-wing political instrument unconcerned with the truth and bent on rallying the conservative multitudes...
...That is essential to sober statesmanship, because no conceivable set of means can secure mankind’s well-being, and because Americans have learned from experience that the grander the enterprise sketched out for them, the worse the resulting disaster is likely to be...
...For Kagan, American culture was never “godly” or “peaceful...
...Dropping peyote has its moments...
...or to read Dog Soldiers...
...Thus we read a chapter on Lincoln and the Civil War in which the words “Dred Scott” do not appear...
...The brass produced great fat waves of frost, ice-lightning it appeared, with a razor-sharp serrated edge—the waves expanding and contracting marvelously along the bass line...
...Which may be why any collection of her writings goes off like a fireworks display...
...One wishes someone with as fine a mind as Stone’s would have just taken some wasted loser’s word for it...
...This is a limited time offer...
...He even calls these ideas “civilizationism” ( just like racism, of which all are guilty except the author) and suggests that the Americans were the real savages, but that these Lockean savages had ideological consciences somehow related to the Declaration of Independence...
...Kagan takes them at their word...
...His peroration enumerates the accomplishments of his generation, and once he gets past “destroying the letter of the laws of racism and sexual discrimination,” the encomium is mainly purple gush about the virtues of Romantic excess...
...When evidence of this was unearthed, as they say, the business went a little underreported in Europe and the United States...
...For this there is zero evidence...
...Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail...
...Americans’ devotion to God was either “reactionary revivalism” or cover for worshiping “at altars [of ] mobility, growth, and the enjoyment of life...
...Ordinary decency, I thought, was about the best of which I, and again most people, were capable...
...901, Arlington, VA 22209 Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again – Selections from National Review and The American Spectator Get the very best of Miss Florence King from both National Review and The American Spectator in our new book, Deja Reviews...
...Kagan smuggles into history the view of America fashionable among today’s fashionable historians by failing to explain why the reader should find the quoted passages authoritative, and sometimes not even identifying the authors in the text...
...Thus whenever he mentions Americans’ belief that the lands into which they were expanding were “empty,” or inhabited by “savages,” or that they were “civilizing” the country, he puts these words in quotes, belittling the ideas behind them without disputing them...
...Please call 800.524.3469, visit www.spectator.org/DejaReviews, or mail a check to: The American Spectator, 1611 N. Kent Street, Ste...
...Dangerous Nation is part of that imagination...
...Instead of Lincoln’s mutual binding up of wounds, it rubbed salt into those wounds and nursed corruption...
...NO MEMOIR OF THE SIXTIES is complete without a political summa...
...For a far clearer picture of the sixties’ cost in human wreckage, which demands not only regret but even remorse, one would do well to consult the title essay in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which ends with the description of a five-yearold girl tripping on acid in High Kindergarten...
...as the hemisphere’s center of attraction, Kagan sees Adams as a hemispheric imperialist...
...Never mind that the Civil War would have gone on and on...
...But because Adams preferred republican to monarchical institutions, as well as because he saw the U.S...
...Washington hoped that strength would enable America to deal with foreigners as “our interest, guided by our justice” might counsel...
...Kagan thinks that thus he set America on the path of imposing its justice on the world...
...For him, the Radical Republicans should have pushed harder, stayed the course longer...
...The Revolution was really a capitalist, imperialist plot...
...It roughly coincided with the American massacre of villagers at My Lai...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW not a metaphor...
...Prime Green generally shows far more intelligence in its description of experience than in the conclusions Stone reaches about the significance of that experience...
...In fact, the 1848 movement to take “all Mexico” also contained Northerners (including Walt Whitman) eager to spread the blessings of liberty...
...Since most newspapers are into telling readers what they are used to hearing and think they already know, any suggestion of congruity in the cruelty of despera tion would have been the occasion of moral con fusion...
...As they dealt with the world, they sought the maintenance in the United States of a freedom as fragile as it was unprecedented...
...PERHAPS MORE CORRECTLY than he knows, Kagan describes “reconstruction” as the U.S...
...The Southern savages wanted empire in Latin America for the sake of slavery, while Lincoln’s progressive imperialists wanted the Civil War to cleanse America of slavery...
...And it was not so easy at that, not so ordinary...
...For just $24.95 (includes S&H) take a trip down memory lane, or begin the journey anew with these delightful selections of Miss King’s voluminous collection of essays from 1991-2002...
...but then so does schizophrenia...
...Kagan, however, argues that there was too much peace, too soon...
...Kagan acknowledges Adams’ conviction that Spanish Americans lacked “the first elements of good or free government...
...People magazine “The lady knows nothing of mediocrity...
...For him also, immigrants came to the New World not so much to leave the Old World behind as to go back to meddle...
...Stone’s is brief, sensible, and contrary to the spirit of the age he describes...
...From the beginning, Americans differed from Europeans only in their greater capacity to get their way...
...Meanwhile 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 BOOKS IN REVIEW Congressman Alexander Stephens, who became the Confederacy’s vice president, opposed taking any part of Mexico because he thought Mexicans had the same rights as Americans...
...A generation of Northerners waved the bloody shirt and touted their moral superiority, while Southerners retaliated against the Negroes for a hundred years...
...Washington’s warning about inordinate affection or distaste for other nations was mere anti-French propaganda...
...As for Lincoln, Kagan gives no hint of his willingness to appease the South with everything except expansion, including a constitutional amendment explicitly protecting slavery...
...However, he argues that the Founders understood it to mean that they had the right and duty to deprive other peoples of their independence and liberty as they might understand it...
...Among this book’s many failings is neglect of the fact that the stewards of American foreign relations in the century from John Adams to William Seward were masters of the balance between ends and means...
...For him, the Founders were closet Wilsonians...
...Without relating ends and means, he assumes, but does not argue, that Negro equality would have resulted, and racists would have learned their lesson once and for all...
...But this too is a caricature...
...MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 BOOKS IN REVIEW sake of liberty...
...But they did not require Ken Kesey in the White House in order to prevail in many crucial respects, few of them salubrious...
...Kagan dismisses “the quintessential American yearning for aloofness from a corrupt and corrupting world” by noting, “This is not the way others viewed Americans in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries...
...In this volume, which takes us from “America’s earliest beginnings” to the 1898 Spanish American War, Kagan argues that, false consciousness notwithstanding, America was created in the image and likeness of what today we call “Neoconservatism...
...but even so it rarely touches the brilliance of his best fiction...
...This is a long way from the Navy’s liturgical bells, and the synaesthetic glories have their price: Stone bolts from the jazz club with “a grinning rictus of terror” on his face...
...He takes that absence to mean that early Americans were merely too weak, but were salivating to abandon concern with their own rectitude in favor of rectifying others...
...Hence for Kagan, the Civil War really was Northern Aggression...
...Like most people, I never trusted anyone who offered a formula that transcended the instincts of ordinary decency...
...Paul Greenberg, Introduction to Deja Reviews MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...
...Any attempt at transition between the blasts would be ludicrous, like playing a waltz between artillery barrages...
...For Kagan, George Washington’s Farewell Address was a set of Federalist cheap shots at his Republican opponents...
...And because Adams’ famous 4th of July speech urged Europeans to look at Americans and “do likewise,” Kagan believes that Adams and Monroe’s legacy was not geopolitical priorities (what is nearest is dearest), but rather “ideological distinctions...
...From the tenor sax issued festive, gorgeous silk bands of the brightest richest red, whirling and dancing and filling the space with scarlet bows and curls...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 4
