Kagan lauds Bush for revolutionary foreign policy detached from national defense

Here are the first words I posted on January 20th about President Bush’s speech:

There are no words to express how off-putting, arrogant, and offensive Bush’s inaugural is, with its theme of America as the ideological boss and transformer of the world. When President Kennedy spoke about defending freedom, he was opposing expansive Communism. But Bush is saying that America must simply make the world conform to our idea.

Uber-neocon Robert Kagan not only agrees with me about what the speech is saying, he supports the speech for that reason:

[Bush] has grounded American foreign policy in universal principles, in the Declaration of Independence and what Lincoln called its “abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times.” The goal of American foreign policy is now to spread democracy, for its own sake, for reasons that transcend specific threats. In short, Bush has unmoored his foreign policy from the war on terrorism.

This is where Bush may lose the support of most old-fashioned conservatives. His goals are now the antithesis of conservatism. They are revolutionary. But of course—and this is what American conservatives have generally been loath to admit—Bush’s goals are also deeply American, for the United States is a revolutionary power. Bush has found his way back to the core, universalist principles that have usually shaped American foreign policy, regardless of the nature of the threat. “The great struggle of the epoch [is] between liberty and despotism,” James Madison asserted in 1823, and Americans from the founders onward have viewed the world in terms of that struggle.

Calling neocons “Trotskyites” is usually a cheap slogan, a substitute for thought. But when Kagan talks about America as a revolutionary power spreading universal revolution, what else are we to think? At least, after this, he can’t go on pretending to be any kind of conservative. Yet somehow, though Kagan and his frequent co-author William Kristol have repeatedly let on that they’re not conservatives, and even, as here, expressed their opposition to conservatism, they’re still generally considered to be such and are called such. What will it take for these neocons to have their Arianna Huffington moment, when the world finally realizes that they’re leftists, not conservatives?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2005 01:01 PM | Send