We Must Fight Terror

America [has] a special job to do for mankind and the world . . . because America is the world in miniature and the world is America writ large.

--Martin Luther King (1965)

Robert Kagan has written a long article, published in Policy Review, called, “End of Dreams, Return of History.” The piece seems to push back at the pre-9.11 American optimism one finds reflected in the bible of this blog, Mandelbaum’s The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets. Yet Kagan defends, without so branding it, American exceptionalism, our desire to spread to the rest of humankind the good fortune equal opportunity has brought us. While today exceptionalism is associated with Bush, conservatives, and Republicans, Martin Luther King’s quotation above shows how basic exceptionalism is to the ideals of America.

Kagan becomes more “realist” when he defends the nation-state system as securely in place today with Russia, China, Japan, India, and Brazil as major actors (though Kagan somewhat contrarily tends to treat the supernational EU as a single entity). An idealist such as Mandelbaum believes democracy is the inevitable final form of national government, even in Russia and China. Kagan defends autocracy as an accepted way to run a country, the normal way to govern until the 20th Century. By challenging autocracy, we unnecessarily threaten Russia, China, and other nations we should be seeking to get along with. Kagan feels we should rally the democracies to our side, and with the autocracies, work on détente (not his word, but his parallels to Kissingerism are too strong to ignore).

Here’s a big reason we need to get along with Russia and China. Kagan wants to promote democracy in the Middle East, a big job that means we have to minimize our battles elsewhere in the world. We should promote Middle East democracy, Kagan writes, “as part of a larger effort to address the issue of Islamic radicalism by accelerating and intensifying its confrontation with the modern, globalized world.”

Kagan believes the Islamists' struggle “poses by far the greatest threat of a catastrophic attack on the mainland of the United States. . . the radical proponents of Islamic traditionalism. . . have deployed the weapons of the modern world against it. Modernization and globalization inflamed their rebellion and also armed them for the fight."

Kagan recognizes that the great powers won’t turn over control of the Middle East to Islamic fundamentalist forces, “if only because the region is of such vital strategic importance to the rest of the world.” So the world faces a protracted struggle in which the goals of the extreme Islamists can never be satisfied because “neither the United States nor anyone else has the ability to give them what they want.”

That means the best course for the West is to “hasten the process of modernization in the Islamic world: more modernization, more globalization, faster. This would require greater efforts to support and expand capitalism and the free market in Arab countries, [and] increase public access to the modern world through television and the internet.” Also, the West should “promote political modernization and liberalization; support human rights, including the rights of women; and use its influence to support repeated elections that may, if nothing else, continually shift power from the few to the many.” In other words, promote democracy.

According to Kagan, “the United States and others will have to persist in fighting what is, in fact, quite accurately called ‘the war on terrorism.’ . . . [G]iven the high stakes, it must be prosecuted ruthlessly, effectively, and for as long as the threat persists. . . One need only contemplate the American popular response should a terrorist group explode a nuclear weapon on American soil. . .Nor, one suspects, will the American people disapprove when a president takes preemptive action to forestall such a possibility -- assuming the action is not bungled.”