A very dangerous man...

Robert Kagan and Interventionism’s Big Reboot

 
Robert Kagan and Interventionism’s Big Reboot | The New Republic

After the Iraq War, Kagan and his fellow neoconservatives earned the fury of American liberals for instigating one too many catastrophic foreign interventions on these principles. Kagan explained the mission in his Washington Post column on the very day of the September 11 attacks, calling on Congress to declare war on all enemies. “It does not have to name a country,” he suggested. (It didn’t.) Within three months of that comment, Kagan clarified that the case for invading Iraq did not require “linking Saddam directly to the Sept. 11 attack.”

No American foreign policy school has crashed from the heights of influence as hard and quickly as neoconservatism did in the mid-2000s, when American body bags and a failed occupation caused many voters to give Venus her due. 

Situated uneasily between conservative and liberal parties, Kagan understood that neoconservative elites had lost influence in their home, the Republican Party.

Kagan was always looking for a “climate to again make the case for interventionism.” He began taking “considerable pains” to describe his “advocacy as broadly bipartisan,” uniting interventionists of center-left and center-right in a common front, which included teaming up with Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s future secretary of state, to reclaim the U.S. mission. 

Kagan has several connections to the Biden administration. Not only is his former co-author, Antony Blinken, now Biden’s secretary of state, but Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, has been deeply involved in Ukraine policy under the last two Democratic presidents. She has recalled that she and Kagan fell in love “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world.”