WORLD VIEW: Today's transatlantic problem . . . is not a George Bush problem. It is a power problem." So writes Robert Kagan in a brilliant essay which has become the principal talking point in foreign policy discussion on both sides of the Atlantic,* writes Paul Gillespie
He explains the diverging attitudes towards international affairs in terms of US military power and European military weakness, arguing that the reasons for the divide are "deep, long in development and likely to endure". His article is highly topical in a week which saw growing alarm in European capitals about the consequences of a US invasion of Iraq this autumn.
Kagan straddles the ground between government and think tank that typifies Washington foreign policy intellectuals, having worked in the State Department and now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A neo-conservative, he is an associate of William Kristol, the influential advocate of unilateralism, and has argued previously that US hegemony must be actively maintained to promote its interests and the principles of a liberal world order in which they can flourish.
What is refreshing about this essay is its frank acknowledgment of diverging interests and values between Europe and the US and the sophistication with which it locates them in their differing and changing historical experiences of military power and weakness.
He insists that as a result the US and Europe are fundamentally different today when it comes to the use of force, despite partisan disagreements: "Powell and Rumsfeld have more in common than do Powell and Hubert Védrine or even Jack Straw" - and the same applied during the Clinton years.
Whereas both societies originated in the 18th-century Enlightenment, their strategic cultures are historically determined, rather than by their mutual exposure to that rationalist philosophy.
It took nearly two centuries of war and imperial force projection to convince the Europeans to abandon those means in favour of the blend of multilateral politics, soft security, diplomacy, economics and international law which they now typically prefer. During that period the US, not Europe, tended to advocate such means.
Since the second World War, after which the Americans took over Europe's global imperial mantle, the power equation has shifted dramatically.
As Kagan puts it, "When the European great powers were strong, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different points of view, weak versus strong, have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing threats, and even differing calculations of interest."
Kagan goes on to recognise that the very success of European integration over the last 50 years, relying on the same mix of multilateral methods which the EU now seeks to project in foreign policy, has produced an ideological gap which reinforces the power one.
Europe's comparative military weakness was obscured by the Cold War and its aftermath. The collapse of the USSR, by contrast, reinforced US global hegemony and made it more willing to use force unilaterally.
The ideological gap ensures there is an increasing European reluctance or aversion to doing so. It creates "a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn't matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behaviour."
Projecting such values to the rest of the world becomes the new European mission civilitrice, to which US unilateralism is a standing threat and rebuke. This insight into the psychology of the contemporary transatlantic divergence is one of the most valuable aspects of Kagan's essay. Unlike much US commentary, it takes seriously the genuine achievements of European integration and the scale of the changes brought on by the peaceful unification of the continent through EU enlargement.
But it comes with a sting in its tail. He says that within the confines of Europe "the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed." The continent inhabits a post-historical or post-modern "paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realisation of Kant's 'perpetual peace'." In contrast the rest of the world still operates according to Hobbes's brutal laws of anarchy, where power is the ultimate determinant of national security and success.
Just as US power underwrote European integration and the Franco-German reconciliation which is the key to it (a fact that many Europeans are reluctant to concede) so do most of them not see the great paradox "that their passage into post-history has depended on the US not making the same passage."
Someone has to control that anarchic world in the name of a liberal world order. It falls to the US to do so. Necessarily that requires it to operate according to a double standard in which it reserves the right to act unilaterally, including by projecting force, unconstrained by too much international law.
Kagan believes this is tacitly conceded by Europeans, who acknowledge the US world role in dealing with rogue states such as Iraq. That makes such states much more of a threat to the US than to other powers.
The Europeans should be grateful that the US "has never accepted the principles of Europe's old order, never embraced the Machiavellian perspective" and is committed to a common morality based on liberal principles rather than to pursuing its own interests.
It is precisely here that Kagan's analysis is most flawed. This week Europeans were increasingly alarmed at the Bush administration's determination to go ahead with an attack on Iraq in a context where its own interests are to the fore.
The Financial Times argued in an editorial that Washington's European and Arab friends feel that the "campaign to bring down Saddam Hussein is in reality part of a strategy to reorder the Middle East in America's interest and for Israel's benefit, using control of Baghdad as the lever."
This could include reduced dependence on Saudi oil by sharply increasing Iraqi output in a successor regime, maintaining pressure on Iran, Syria and Egypt and engineering political change in other failed states.
It is an audacious programme, based on virtually unconditional support for the Sharon government in Israel. It assumes European powers would help stabilise a post-Saddam Iraq, preventing it breaking up in a further war and overseeing peaceful political change in the region.
Kagan says such audacity is a natural concomitant of overweening military power. Others say it is a dangerous neo-imperial adventure based on US interests which undermines the supposed commitment to common liberal values. The next few months will tell which scenario is the more accurate.
Kagan relies on a crude enough military model of power and weakness. Liberal US critics of his approach to international affairs, such as Joseph Nye and Stanley Hoffmann, say hard military strength accounts for only a small proportion of power in today's world.
Economic interdependence and the softer area of environmental and social inter-relatedness thrown up by globalisation require multilateral governance, in which the Europeans are much more skilled.
If that is so another great paradox arises, which neo-conservatives such as Kagan do not see: that the acceptability and therefore the use of US military power depends on an accompanying commitment to political, economic and social multilateralism.
*"Power and Weakness", Policy Review, June-July 2002, published by the Hoover Institution, available at www.policyreview.org/JUN02