Current Affairs: Here in New York, one dare not enter a room full of the politically aware without some knowledge of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. For it will, in these times of transatlanic disagreements, surely come up at some stage, writes Dermot O'Brien.
Yes, Robert Kagan, ex-State Department hand, now foreign policy wonk at the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has a hit on his hands.
That Kagan's book is a success shouldn't surprise. It is brief, well-written, and, perhaps most importantly, its thesis can be easily stated and grasped: the US lives in the real world, a place of brutality and violence, and it knows that it must sometimes use its position of military and economic eminence to assert its values, even if the rest of the world doesn't happen to agree. Europe, on the other hand, believes that international law will solve virtually any problem, and is much less inclined to spend money on defence or to engage in military action. As Kagan puts it, "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus". Or, to get even more pithy, "Europeans are sissies", as Kagan told the New York Times in February.
Fortunately, Kagan's book is considerably more sophisticated than his interview technique, and he marshalls a considerable amount of evidence in support of his argument. These arguments, speaking broadly, focus on history and philosophy.
Historically, Kagan claims, it has always been the case that the more powerful nations of the world have ignored international law, while the powerless have sought to bind the powerful to international norms. Thus when the great powers of Europe were in the ascendancy, essentially from the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 to the first World War, and America was weak, the US sought adherence to law, while France, Britain and Prussia's view was similar to the view expressed by Kagan: "Geopolitical logic dictates that Americans have a less compelling interest than Europeans in upholding multilateralism as a universal principle for governing the behavior of nations. Whether unilateral action is a good or a bad thing, Americans objectively have more to lose from outlawing it than any other power . . ."
Today, with "communism" defeated, the US stands as the world's only "hyper-power". It must, therefore, operate as the world's policeman. Where Kagan's book is perhaps strongest is in arguing that this has long been US foreign policy whether the president was Democrat or Republican. It was, after all, Kennedy who launched the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Clinton who went into Kosovo. Where others have seen differences between the post-first World War presidents, Kagan rightly points to a remarkable degree of continuity. This continuity has, for Kagan, deep philosophical roots in the worldview of Thomas Hobbes.
For Hobbes, human beings, and the nation, exist as a "restless sea of appetites", and the result is a "war of all against all" in which, famously, "life is nastish, brutish and short".
The problem, and it's one that Kagan never adresses, is that Hobbes also thought that if each one of us laid down our arms and gave our power to a "Leviathan", then we would achieve peace. Or, to put it more plainly, today the UN looks ineffectual to Americans only because they don't play a role in trying to make it more worthwhile.
Kagan is not, to his credit, arguing that the US will launch an attack on Paris anytime soon. This is not the mid-1980s, when the shelves of US bookstores groaned with volumes about "the coming war with Japan", then thought to be America's most serious opponent. But that praise is, of course, a double-edged sword. For the problem is that Kagan cannot imagine a different future.
Consider, for example, his often-stated claim that the American public, in essence, gets off on the sight of "bombs blasting in air" and are, therefore, willing to spend around 3.5 per cent of GNP on defence, while Europeans spend less than 2 per cent on average. Why believe that it will always be thus? It seems at least worth considering that someday the US electorate will wonder if better use could be made of that GNP gap, for improved social services, for infrastructure and so on. If that begins to happen, perhaps the US will become more committed to international law and to the UN.
But until then, Kagan's account of the world stands as the ideal introduction to the currently dominant position in US foreign policy.
Dermot O'Brien is an Adjunct Professor at New York University, where he lectures in International Relations and Political Philosophy
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. By Robert Kagan. Atlantic Books, 103 pp. £10