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kagan, robert

neo-con

never? trumper?

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AN 2 26

Republicans on social media are admitting the truth behind Democratic accusations about the SAVE Act — namely, that they want to pass the SAVE Act requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

“The writing on the wall,” tweeted Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida in a message in which Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is tagged. Luna attached a flowchart which showed two paths from “Gain majority”: The first, in which the SAVE Act is not saved, equals “lose majority,” “resist other team’s agenda” and needing to fundraise “back to gain majority.”

The flowchart also shows, as an alternative if the SAVE Act fails, is a “one-party state.” This, perhaps not coincidentally, is what historians and political scientists observe could occur to Republicans’ advantage if Trump nationalizes the 2026 midterms. Because Americans with low incomes, disabilities and other disadvantages often struggle to obtain citizenship documents and photo ID despite being legitimate citizens and voters, scholars are concerned the SAVE Act would disproportionately target Democratic constituencies.

Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, who once said “I don’t care if someone is a liberal, conservative, an atheist, or whatever: don’t be the mean girl,” tweeted “Yep” in response to Luna’s flowchart post to Thune. In a similar spirit, conservative activist Scott Presler posted on Twitter/X and told Thune that “if you do not bring the SAVE America Act to the Senate floor and ultimately pass the bill into law, Republicans will lose both the House and Senate this November.” After threatening that Republicans will not vote unless the SAVE Act is passed, Presler ordered Thune to “either wield power and be remembered as a hero in the majority or lose it all with a democrat takeover as the minority.”

According to one veteran political journalist, this is Republicans “quiet part out loud.”

“The quiet part out loud,” tweeted New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni on Wednesday morning while sharing Luna’s flowchart. “Fail to pass Save Act -> lose majority.”

In a similar vein as Karni, Politico columnist Jonathan Martin pointed out in regard to Presler’s tweet that there were “14K likes for arguing Repubs will lose midterms if they don’t pass a voter ID and citizenship bill. Not, ya know, bc the president is hovering at or below 40% and Dems have a massive off-year turnout advantage in this era.”

He concluded, “Preposterous, sure, but is only gonna put more pressure on Sen Rs bc many of their voters are swallowing this nonsense.”

Martin posted his tweet on Tuesday at 9:18 PM Eastern Time. As of the time of this writing, at 1:10 PM ET on the following Wednesday (roughly 16 hours later), it has 54K likes.

In addition to political journalists, some of Trump’s fellow Republicans are alarmed that the president is planning on stealing the upcoming midterm elections.

“This is the first instance in which I could begin to believe that something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been,” Stephen Richer, a former Republican county recorder of Maricopa County when Trump attempted to steal the 2020 election, recently told The Atlantic’s David Frum.

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” conservative historian Robert Kagan recently told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

Former Republican consultant and Pulitzer Prize winner George F. Will summed up Trump’s midterm schemes by comparing them to his failed efforts to prove the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“Trump’s batting average?” Will wrote “.016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” As such Will wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

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an 2 26

A conservative columnist is blasting President Donald Trump for continuing to spread the baseless conspiracy theory that he actually won the 2020 presidential election.

“Donald Trump’s belief in widespread fraud in the casting and counting of 2020 ballots is entailed by his belief that it is theoretically impossible for him to lose at anything,” wrote George F. Will, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and columnist to The Washington Post. “His certitude infects millions of Americans, some of whom think it inconceivable that he could ever be mistaken. Others doubt that anyone could win the presidency while obsessing about a complex conspiracy for which there is no evidence.”

Will correctly pointed out that Trump has a long history of claiming something was stolen from him when he loses — and it started well before politics. During a 2016 debate, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accurately pointed out Trump accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged against him when he was snubbed for his work on the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” Earlier that year, after losing the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz in the 2016 GOP primaries, Trump baselessly alleged fraud and demanded a new election. Throughout the 2016 campaign Trump said he would only accept the result if he won, and after winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote that year, he falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots and established a voter fraud commission that eventually disbanded without finding evidence of his allegations.

In 2020, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, prematurely declared victory on Election Night and falsely claimed votes were being "dumped" against him. Biden ultimately won by a clear margin in the popular vote (81.3 million to 74.2 million) and the same Electoral College margin (306-232), but despite this Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. To this day, Trump continues to falsely claim he won the 2020 election.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Will is not alone among conservatives warning about Trump’s authoritarian election-denying tendencies. Linking his 2020 denialism to his efforts to discredit Democrats if they win the 2026 midterms, a Republican who served as Maricopa County, Arizona county recorder explained Trump’s strategy.

"Almost every single Republican that I spoke with after the 2020 election ... knew that there was very little to Donald Trump's allegations of a stolen election,” Stephen Richer, who served when Trump attempted to steal the 2020 election, recently told The Atlantic. “At best, they stayed quiet. At worst, they went full-throated along with it because they knew it was a path to political riches."

He also said Republicans are planning to dispute however many number of Democratic victories they need to stay in power, then demand House Speaker Mike Johnson reject their seats.

“Speaker Mike Johnson, the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections,” Richer said.

Conservative historian Robert Kagan expressed the same concern, arguing Trump has trained Republicans to oppose democratic outcomes unless they get what they want.

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan said. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

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got attn

The gravity of the situation cannot be overstated. As Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a one-time advisor to John McCain, wrote in a Washington Post column published on September 23:

"The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

"First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

"Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump's charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way...

"Meanwhile, the amateurish "stop the steal" efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020."

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https://carnegieendowment.org/2000/03/20/why-rush-to-favor-china-pub-236

robert kagan wkly std

Clinton was right when he said last Wednesday that the decision to grant China permanent most-favored-nation trading status will have a historic significance equal to Richard Nixon's opening to China and Jimmy Carter's normalization of relations. But if that's true, why is the president rushing Congress to make a hasty decision, with almost no time to consider the merits and consequences of this momentous step?

There are a whole host of good reasons to slow things down. Many members don't even know what's in the trade deal the United States struck with China last November. Meanwhile, the Europeans are negotiating their own agreement with China and probably won't complete negotiations for several months. The administration argues that there's no reason to wait and see if the Europeans get a better deal than our own negotiators, since American businesses will benefit anyway. What the administration doesn't point out is that rapid passage of permanent trade status by Congress will strengthen the Chinese hand and weaken the European negotiating position. It would be better for Congress to to wait and give the Europeans maximum leverage to extract concessions from Beijing.

Then there is the problem of implementation. In any trade deal, the devil is in the details. This is especially true in China's case, because Beijing has a miserable record of implementing the deals it strikes. (The United States is still trying to get China to abide by the agreement it signed on intellectual property rights almost a decade ago.) We won't know the terms of implementation until China reaches an agreement with the WTO much later this year.

By far the most important reason to delay any vote, however, concerns China's recent threats to attack Taiwan if that government does not move more rapidly toward reunification. President Clinton seems to believe that America's very first official response to a Chinese threat of war should be to give Beijing the largest economic gift we have to offer: permanent, low-tariff access to our markets. What kind of signal could that possibly send to Jiang Zemin and his military chiefs? Threaten war against an American ally and a democracy, and the first thing Washington does is lavish gifts upon you. Extreme belligerence, they would have to conclude, is good for business. (Incidentally, guess what two words never appear in last Friday's Wall Street Journal editorial supporting President Clinton's rush to favor China: Taiwan and democracy.)

Some responsible Democrats see what a disaster it would be to approve China's trade status so soon after Chinese threats against Taiwan. Congressman Jack Murtha, an influential centrist Democrat, has informed his colleagues that, in light of Beijing's recent behavior, he will not support permanent MFN for China this year, even though he consistently supported annual renewal of MFN in the past. "It is not in our national security interest," Murtha declared, "to condone and reward grossly irresponsible conduct." Meanwhile, some Republican senators are considering linking any vote on permanent MFN to passage of the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act. The House approved the Taiwan measure overwhelmingly. At the very least, the Senate should pass the Taiwan legislation before it even considers voting on permanent MFN for China. If we want to avoid tempting Beijing into future aggressive actions against Taiwan, the United States must convince the Beijing government now that belligerence carries a real price.

And what are the good reasons to rush through a vote? There aren't any. The president's demand for a hasty decision is purely about politics. Clinton held off making his pitch for permanent MFN until Al Gore had sewn up the Democratic party's nomination, thereby minimizing the pressure that could be brought to bear on the vice president by his big labor allies. With the primaries out of the way, Clinton now wants Congress to rush approval through before the general election campaign goes into full swing, calculating that election-year politics will dim chances of passage.

To put it another way, the White House and the Republican leadership in both houses want to get this thing done before the American electorate gets a chance to look at it. The big corporations want to use their big money to frighten members of Congress into supporting permanent MFN before those members have a chance to hear from their constituents. Polls show that a large majority of Americans oppose China's entry into the World Trade Organization and oppose granting China permanent trade relations. In fact, they don't much like China, period. The White House wants to make sure that this overwhelming public opinion does not influence congressional deliberations. That's one reason the administration has kept secret the terms of the WTO deal it reached with China last November. Keeping the public in the dark was also the hallmark of Henry Kissinger's and Jimmy Carter's China diplomacy in the 1970s.

Of course, there's another reason to rush through a vote in Congress: Bill Clinton's "legacy". The truth is, Congress can just as easily vote on China's permanent trade status next year. After all, China can't even become a WTO member until it cuts its deals with the Europeans and completes negotiations with the WTO authorities on the terms of implementation. In short, it is almost inconceivable that China could join the WTO much before the end of the year. American business will not lose out if the vote is delayed. Therefore, it makes no practical difference whether Congress votes this year or next. Except to Bill Clinton, who wants to leave a trade deal with China as one of his presidential legacies. We can understand why some Democratic leaders in Congress would find this a compelling reason to vote quickly. Why do Republicans?

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neocons

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/trump-clinton-neoconservatives-220151

... interviews with POLITICO, leading GOP foreign-policy hands — many of whom promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable — said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.

“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's election would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably.”

Cohen, an Iraq war backer who is often called a neoconservative but said he does not identify himself that way, said he would "strongly prefer a third party candidate" to Trump, but added: "Probably if absolutely no alternative: Hillary."

In a March 1 interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations who backed the Iraq War and often advocates a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton over Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She would be vastly preferable to Trump."

Cohen helped to organize an open letter signed by several dozen GOP foreign policy insiders — many of whom are not considered neocons — that was publishedWednesday night by War on the Rocks, a defense and foreign policy website . “[W]e are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head,” the letter declared. It cited everything from Trump’s "admiration for foreign dictators” to his “inexcusable” support for “the expansive use of torture."

The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including Boot; Peter Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick, a former deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Pentagon official; and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department official.

Several other neocons said they find themselves in an impossible position, constitutionally incapable of voting for Clinton but repelled by a Republican whose foreign policy views they consider somewhere between nonexistent and dangerous — and disconnected from their views about American power and values abroad.

"1972 was the first time I was old enough to vote for president, and I did not vote. Couldn't vote for McGovern for foreign policy reasons, nor for Nixon because of Watergate," said Elliott Abrams, a former national security council aide to George W. Bush who specializes in democracy and the Middle East. "I may be in the same boat in 2016, unable to vote for Trump or Clinton."

Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, something of a dean of Washington neoconservatives, said he would seek out a third option before choosing between Trump and Clinton.

“If it's Trump-Clinton, I'd work with others to recruit a strong conservative third party candidate, and do my best to help him win (which by the way would be more possible than people think, especially when people — finally — realize Trump shouldn't be president and Hillary is indicted),” Kristol wrote in an email.

Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of several neoconservatives, who admire his call for "moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on human rights and democracy.

Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last week, when Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American global might, wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination would force him to cross party lines.

“The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton,” Kagan warned. “The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”

In an interview, Kagan said his opposition to Trump "has nothing to do with foreign policy."

"What it has to do with is the health and safety of American democracy," he added. "I don't even know what Donald Trump's foreign policy is. I don't think anybody does."

Though Trump's foreign policy views don't fit any familiar category, he has outlined several clear positions at odds with neoconservative doctrine.

While neoconservatives believe America plays a unique role in defending global order and Western values, Trump has long complained about America's military presence abroad and the protection the U.S. provides to prosperous allies like Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea.

Neocons depict Russian President Vladimir Putin as a sinister tyrant challenging America; Trump calls Putin a strong leader with whom he'd "get along very well" and proposes a more cooperative relationship with Moscow.

Neocons believe the U.S. must forcefully defend Israel. But while Trump insists his presidency would be "the best thing that could ever happen to Israel," he has alarmed pro-Israel Republicans with his pledge to be a "neutral" arbiter in talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Trump has shown little interest in the neoconservative cause of an interventionist foreign policy guided by principles like democracy and human rights. And he says the neocon project of invading Iraq may have been "the worst decision" in presidential history.

Some conservative foreign policy insiders opposed to Trump stop short of saying they would vote for Clinton, despite elements of her foreign policy record, such as her 2002 Senate vote to authorize force against Iraq, that they find appealing.

“I could never vote for Clinton under any circumstances,” said Abrams.

“I would ask Bob [Kagan] what job he thinks Sidney Blumenthal will have at the NSC before pulling the lever for Clinton,” he added — a reference to the longtime Clinton adviser and bete noirof the right.

Danielle Pletka, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute said she, too, would seek some alternative to Trump and Clinton.

"[W]hile I will never vote for a Democrat in wolf’s clothing like Trump, I will also never vote for a candidate as dishonest, as rapacious, as Hillary Clinton," she wrote in an email. "My vote is a precious thing, and while I will certainly go to the polls, if those are my choices, I will write someone in. And no, it won’t be Bloomberg. :)"

The word "neoconservative" is subject to interpretation, and some conservatives consider it pejorative. Originally used to describe Democrats who adopted hard-line anti-Communist views during the Cold War, the word's colloquial meaning roughly amounts to “hawkish GOP foreign policy intellectual.”

Neocons have shown little enthusiasm for Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has singled them out for scorn. Speaking to Iowa voters in December, Cruz bashed what he called the "crazy neocon invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” element of his party.

Cruz has also attacked Rubio in debates for supporting military action to topple Middle Eastern dictators in Libya and Syria, and has said the world was better off with former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in power.

But the neocons reserve special scorn for Trump.

"A Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power," Boot writes in the March 7 issue of the Weekly Standard, along with Council on Foreign Relations economist Benn Steill.

Steill and Boot — who also has advised Rubio — call Trump "singularly ill-equipped to manage the resulting turmoil" from his policies. They recall the September radio interview in which Trump confused the Kurds with Iran's elite military Quds force and admitted he was unfamiliar with the leaders of major Islamist terror groups.

Cohen also added that he doesn't oppose Trump solely on foreign policy grounds, calling the Manhattan mogul “the most dangerous demagogue in American politics in my lifetime.”

Several other prominent neoconservatives, including former Bush Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz and Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, did not respond to requests for comment.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/2020-democrats-dont-only-have-to-face-trump-they-must-say-how-theyll-take-on-the-blob/

If a Democrat is elected president in November 2020, he or she will have two challenges: one global and one municipal.

The first challenge will be how to run the worldwide $643 billion a year military empire of the United States, which surveils the planet while fighting four undeclared wars. The second challenge is much smaller but still formidable: what to do about “the Blob” in Washington, D.C.

No, this isn’t a science fiction joke. The Blob is the nickname that Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s speechwriter, gave to America’s foreign policymaking elite in a May 2016 interview. According to Rhodes, the Blob included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other supporters of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

More generally, Rhodes was referring the coterie of operatives who have made U.S. foreign policy under every president from Truman to Trump. With his unkind epithet, Rhodes suggested these men and women responsible for the U.S. foreign policy record are a shapeless mass lacking a coherent identity yet somehow ominous.

While Rhodes was reviled inside the Beltway, his coinage has stuck. The Blob is useful shorthand for a recognizable and powerful group: the former officials, analysts, diplomats, writers and military officers who espouse orthodox U.S. foreign policy views.

They are not a secret cabal. They work at think tanks and elite universities and consulting firms. They talk to reporters. They opine on cable TV talk shows. And they rotate in and out of government positions. They range from multilateral liberals to hawkish neoconservatives. While they have had deep differences, they have collectively promoted a broadly consistent set of policies that has defined the United States in the world over the last 30 years.

Right now, they favor a hard line on Russia, intervention in Syria and Venezuela, bolstering NATO, and promoting free-trade agreements. They oppose defense spending cuts, rapid denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and a jobs-driven foreign policy.

At its best, the Blob gave us the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, Cuba normalization, the Millennium Challenge to address global poverty, and the now-abandoned treaty on nuclear weapons in Europe.

At its worst, the Blob gave us proxy wars (leading to failed states) in Central America; expansion of NATO (to the fury of Russia); free-trade agreements (which did little for Americans living inside the East and West Coasts); invasion of Iraq (on false pretenses); the (unsuccessful) occupation of Afghanistan; the implementation of a torture regime (and its removal); the furtive implementation of mass surveillance (since abandoned); the illusory “two-state solution” in Israel/Palestine; and unauthorized wars in Libya, Somalia, Niger, and Yemen, the last with catastrophic human consequences.

What should President Sanders (or Warren or Biden or Buttigieg or Gabbard) do upon taking office on January 21, 2021? Should they follow the Obama strategy of implementing incremental course corrections in the trajectory of current policies? Or force a fundamental change of direction on issues of war and peace?

The answer depends, in large part, on how she or he thinks about the Blob.

The Blob Today

Trump has marginalized the Blob. He has abandoned the orderly policymaking process they revere. He ignores their briefings. He scorns their expertise. He demonizes their concept of a (neo)liberal world order. Instead, he uses the U.S. foreign policy apparatus for his own ends: to feed the family business, withdraw from land wars, collaborate with like-minded autocrats, stimulate arms sales, demonstrate belligerence, and dominate the news cycle.

The Blob fears Trump, for good reasons and bad ones.

This is the Democrats’ dilemma. Trump’s successor cannot run, much less reorient, America’s global empire without a policymaking elite. Yet the existing elite—the Blob—is wedded to the status quo ante Trump, and adamant in defense of its unimpressive-to-awful record since 9/11.

Exhibit A: Robert Kagan, liberal-minded neoconservative, adviser to both George Bush and Hillary Clinton. He is using the platform of the Washington Post to offer an alternative to Trump’s foreign policy. Since Trump has no use for the Blob, Kagan is appealing to Democrats and post-Trump Republicans to return to the foreign policies of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era. He wants America to face the challenge of the populist authoritarianism.

Kagan doesn’t spend much time defending the Blob’s record on Iraq’s non-existent WMD, torture, mass surveillance, election-meddling, Libya, or Yemen. He doesn’t spend any time addressing what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have said about the roots of today’s authoritarianism.

Kagan’s eloquent disquisition on the course of world history ends with the argument that to oppose his policy prescriptions is to oppose democracy itself:

“A broad alliance of strange bedfellows stretching from the far right to self-described ‘realists’ to the progressive left wants the United States to abandon resistance to rising authoritarian power. They would grant Russia and China the spheres of influence they demand in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. They would acquiesce in the world’s new ideological ‘diversity.’ And they would consign the democracies living in the shadow of the authoritarian great powers to their hegemonic control.”

One could describe the same reality by saying the repeated failures of the U.S. foreign policy elite—two unsuccessful trillion-dollar wars, the use of torture and mass surveillance, and near-total indifference to the impact of foreign policy on the U.S. economy have generated widespread opposition to the pretensions of the foreign policy elite. It is a “broad alliance” indeed.

The idea that post-Trump U.S. policymakers will act in defense of democracy is belied by the failures of democracy that have occurred on their watch. Kagan’s rhetoric of democracy is about as convincing as when Hillary Clinton tweeted “America is already great.”

What Is to Be Done?

The position of the three leading Democratic candidates on the Blob are pretty clear.

Joe Biden, who has not yet announced, was among the most dovish of Obama’s advisers, but he seems comfortable with the national security status quo. He might invite Kagan for an interview but not give him a job.

Bernie Sanders, gruff socialist, is an outsider. Along with his foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, he insists on a fundamental change from Blob policies. Sanders wouldn’t return Kagan’s phone calls.

(See David Klion’s “Who Is Matt Duss, and Can He Take On Washington’s ‘Blob’?” on the Nation.)

Elizabeth Warren, impassioned Harvard professor, is a policymaking insider par excellence (she almost single-handedly created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). She too wants to break with the Blob. Warren would return Kagan’s phone call—and tell him to hold her beer.

In short, Biden would most likely embrace the Blob, Sanders would purge it, and Warren would bend it to her will.

Another Democratic aspirant who has signaled their independence from Blob thinking is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who served two tours in Iraq as a medical specialist. She is an outspoken anti-interventionist, who has flouted liberal sensibilities with her willingness to take meetings with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a brutal dictator. She serves on the board of a foreign policy group funded by the Koch Brothers. She’s a Blob-buster.

Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso congressman, has shown an independent streak. According to Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, O’Rourke “bucked Obama on several important issues, pressuring him to close Guantanamo, supporting legislation to curtail NSA spying, opposing war in Syria and arming the country’s rebels, and demanding Obama get congressional authorization for his continued war on ISIS.” O’Rourke looks like a Blob skeptic.

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, served as naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, but has not focused on foreign policy or national security issues. He did endorse the suggestion of Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent that all Democratic presidential candidates pledge to abide by the War Powers Act. The oft-ignored 1975 law requires the president to get congressional approval for U.S. military action lasting longer than 90 days. That’s the kind of useful reform the Blob would never propose but could probably live with.

Jay Inslee, governor of Washington state, is running a one-issue campaign: climate change, which implies a U.S. foreign policy agenda very different than the Blob consensus. He’s a Blob skeptic.

The foreign policy views of John Delaney, a Maryland congressman and former businessman, flow from his belief in free trade, long a staple of semi-official Washington thinking. He’s Blob-friendly.

The other declared candidates—Sen. Cory Booker, former HUD secretary Julian Castro, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Kamala Harris, Senator Amy Klobuchar and entrepreneur Andrew Yang—have said little about issues of war and peace beyond platitudes. What they have (or have not) said about Venezuela indicates they are Blob-friendly.

Of course, the 2020 campaign has just begun, and voters are notoriously uninterested in foreign policy issues, at least until they become issues of war and peace. The candidates have just begun to face questions about how they would administer the American empire after Trump. And those questions begin with: What do you think of the Blob?

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

This article was produced by the :{Deep State:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

==

Robert Kagan is a neoconservative writer and historian based at the Brookings Institution. A longtime proponent of an aggressive, interventionist U.S. foreign policy, Kagan has played an influential role in shaping the neoconservative agenda for more than two decades.

Kagan was a cofounder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a now defunct pressure group that helped build Beltway support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. In the early years of the Obama administration, he reprised this role as a cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a PNAC successor group.

He has also served as an adviser to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a board member of the U.S. Committee on NATO, an “international patron” of the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and a foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Despite Kagan’s GOP bona fides, during the 2016 presidential primaries he described himself as a “former Republican” because of his disappointment over the party’s 2016 presidential candidates. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Kagan expressed particular concern about the rise of Donald Trump, whom he called “the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics.” Blaming the Republican Party for the creation of Trump and the emergence of other disastrous candidates like Sen. Ted Cruz, Kagan wrote in thePost, “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”[[1]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn1)

In 2014, Kagan foreshadowed his endorsement of Hillary Clinton during an interview with the New York Times. “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” he said. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”[[2]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn2)

Kagan has also maintained a number of bipartisan affiliations. He has visited the Obama White House, for example, and helped establish a bipartisan civilian advisory board for Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.[[3]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn3) According to one report, “Kagan has also been careful to avoid landing at standard-issue neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute” and has “insisted on maintaining the link between modern neoconservatism and its roots in muscular Cold War liberalism.” Kagan has even shied away from the “neoconservative” label, saying he prefers to be described as a “liberal interventionist.”[[4]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn4)

U.S. Intervention and the “Global Order”

A key theme in Kagan’s work concerns the maintenance of the “liberal world order,” which as he perceives it amounts to a U.S.-enforced international state system. “In my view, the willingness of the United States to use force and to threaten to use force to defend its interests and the liberal world order has been an essential and unavoidable part of sustaining that world order since the end of World War II,” he wrote in a 2014 column for the Washington Post.[[5]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn5)

Kagan spelled out this view in a long 2014 essay for The New Republic. Entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” the piece argued that active, forceful U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries had reshaped the international system for the better. “In the twenty-first century, no less than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, force remains the ultima ratio,” he claimed. “If there has been less aggression, less ethnic cleansing, less territorial conquest over the past 70 years, it is because the United States and its allies have both punished and deterred aggression, have intervened, sometimes, to prevent ethnic cleansing, and have gone to war to reverse territorial conquest.”[[6]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn6)

Kagan warned darkly that if the United States didn’t enforce its will on the international system, other powers would. “When Vladimir Putin failed to achieve his goals in Ukraine through political and economic means, he turned to force, because he believed that he could,” Kagan wrote. He added: “What might China do were it not hemmed in by a ring of powerful nations backed by the United States? For that matter, what would Japan do if it were much more powerful and much less dependent on the United States for its security? We have not had to find out the answers to these questions, not yet, because American predominance, the American alliance system, and the economic, political, and institutional aspects of the present order, all ultimately dependent on power, have mostly kept the lid closed on this Pandora’s box.”

Lamenting public war weariness and the Obama administration’s reluctance to intervene in Syria and Ukraine, among other venues, Kagan warned that “there is no democratic superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters.”[[7]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn7)

Some liberal hawks and neoconservatives hailed the piece as a rejoinder to the prevailing public skepticism in the United States about the use of force overseas. According to the New York Times, it “struck such a nerve in the White House that many in the foreign policy establishment considered part of Mr. Obama’s speech [in June 2014] at West Point outlining a narrower vision for American force in world affairs to be a rebuttal, and the president even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views.”[[8]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn8)

However, Kagan’s critics argued that he had badly exaggerated the role of the United States in shaping world events throughout the post-World War II period and glossed over many of Washington’s more morally dubious policies. Calling Kagan a “polemicist and an ideologue,” Andrew Bacevich argued that the piece’s central assertions about the benevolence of U.S. foreign policy failed to stand up “to even casual scrutiny.” Among other things, Bacevich said Kagan had overlooked Washington’s steadfast support for violent, anti-democratic forces in its own sphere of influence, as well as neglected to seriously consider the fallout from catastrophic interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. “If Americans appear disinclined to have a go at overthrowing Syria’s Assad or at restoring the Crimea to Ukrainian control, it’s due to their common-sense assessment of what U.S. policy in very recent years has produced,” Bacevich concluded. “On this subject, astonishingly, Kagan has almost nothing to say.”[[9]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn9)

Writing for the realist National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn observed that Kagan’s 2014 ode to American superpower “is not a novel thesis. Rather, it is Kagan’s latest variation on a theme that he has consistently sounded on behalf of American global activism” since at least the 1990s. “Superpowers don’t retire,” Heilbrunn quipped, “but Robert Kagan should.”[[10]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn10)

Kagan followed on the New Republic essay with a September 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “America’s Dangerous Aversion to Conflict,” which bemoaned the “yearning for an escape from the burdens of power and a reprieve from the tragic realities of human existence.” He compared the current world order to pre-World War II Europe, writing: “As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s, we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.”[[11]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn11)

In response, John Heilbrunn of the National Interestwrote: “The military solution that Kagan appears to endorse, first and foremost, is hardly the best ambassador for freedom and democracy. Quite the contrary. … Maybe Kagan should have more confidence in America and its values. For all his disdain for declinism, Kagan, in blaming America first, comes dangerously close to submitting to it himself.”[[12]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn12)

Hawkish Track Record

Kagan hails from a well established neoconservative family. He is the son of the conservative classicist Donald Kagan and the brother of Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who helped promote the U.S. “troop surge” in Iraq. His spouse is Victoria Nuland, a veteran diplomat and former deputy national security adviser to Dick Cheney who is often credited as an editor of Kagan’s work.[[13]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn13)

Kagan launched his career in the early 1980s as a foreign policy adviser to Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), a future vice presidential candidate who was closely associated with the hawkish wing of the Republican Party. Then, after a stint on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Kagan was appointed by _{Elliott Abrams}_ in 1985 to head the Office of Public Diplomacy, which was created to push for U.S. support of the anti-communist “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua. (In his 1996 book A Twilight Struggle, which was touted as the “definitive history” of the U.S. anti-Sandinista campaign, Kagan neglected to mention Abrams’ subsequent criminal conviction for lying to Congress about the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras).[[14]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn14) Kagan served in the State Department until 1988, leaving the government to become a public scholar.

In 1997, in a bid to press the Clinton administration to pursue a “Reaganite” foreign policy, Kagan and veteran neoconservative activist William Kristol cofounded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Among other hawkish policies, the group played a key role in building elite support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, issuing an open letter after the 9/11 attacks arguing that the United States should respond by invading Iraq “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack.”[[15]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn15)

Resistance to the movement for war in Iraq from Europe and elsewhere spurred Kagan, who was then based at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to sharpen his theses on U.S. interventionism. In a 2002 article for Policy Review that became the basis for his book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), Kagan argued, “On the all-important question of power—the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power—American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace.’ The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”[[16]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn16)

Of Paradise and Powerwas widely panned for its support of U.S. unilateralism. Reviewing the book, leftist historian Howard Zinn wrote that “it is part of the corruption of contemporary language that an analysis of American foreign policy by a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace should argue for the right of the United States to use military force, regardless of international law, and international opinion, whenever it unilaterally decides its ‘national interest’ requires it.” Zinn opined that Kagan’s book supplies “intellectual justification, superficial as it is, for the bullying and violence of United States foreign policy.”[[17]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn17)

Kagan maintained his support for the Iraq War even after many of his assertions about the conflict—including that it would come to an early close and that the Bush administration’s claims about WMDs in the country would be vindicated—proved wildly inaccurate.[[18]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn18) Instead of walking back his support, however, Kagan called for a troop escalation. “It is precisely the illusion that a political solution is possible in the midst of rampant violence that has gotten us where we are today,” he wrote in November 2006. “What’s needed in Iraq are not more clever plans but more U.S. troops to provide the security to make any plan workable. Even those seeking a way out of Iraq as soon as possible should understand the need for an immediate surge in U.S. troop levels to provide the stability necessary so that eventual withdrawal will not produce chaos and an implosion of the Iraqi state.”[[19]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn19)

In March 2009, around the time that President Obama announced a plan to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, Kagan and Kristol launched the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), which liberal blogger Matt Duss dubbed “The Project for the Rehabilitation of Neoconservatism.”[[20]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn20)Among Kagan’s early forays on behalf of the group, he promoted the escalation of the war in Afghanistan[[21]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn21) and criticized the Obama administration for not taking a more confrontational line on Iran.[[22]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn22)

FPI’s platform “is a watered-down version of the bellicose neoconservative program that worked so well over the past decade, producing a disastrous war in Iraq and a deteriorating situation in Central Asia and bringing America’s image around the world to new lows,” wrote Harvard international relations professor Stephen M. Walt for Foreign Policy. “The new group’s modus operandi is likely to be similar to the old Project for a New American Century: bombard Washington with press releases and email alerts, draft open letters to be signed by assorted pundits and former policymakers, and organize conferences intended to advance the group’s interventionist agenda.”[[23]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn23)

Kagan has on occasion broken with some of his neoconservative colleagues.

One notable instance occurred in 2013, following a coup in Egypt that toppled the country’s elected Muslim Brotherhood government and restored the military to power. While some neoconservatives argued that the Egyptian military would be a more reliable U.S. ally than the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, Kagan argued unequivocally that support for the military’s dictatorial rule was short-sighted. It has become “fashionable,” Kagan wrote, “to argue that Muslim Arabs are incapable of democracy—this after so many millions of them came out to vote in Egypt, only to see Western democracies do little or nothing when the product of their votes was overthrown.” He went on to call for “a complete suspension of all aid to Egypt, especially military aid, until there is a new democratic government, freely elected with the full participation of all parties and groups in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood.”[[24]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn24)

Kagan’s critique was notable in part for its direct confrontation with the U.S. “Israel lobby,” which largely supported sending aid to Egypt’s coup government. “To Israel, which has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel,” wrote Kagan, “the presence of a brutal military dictatorship bent on the extermination of Islamism is not only tolerable but desirable.” But, he added, “in Egypt, U.S. interests and Israel’s perceptions of its own interests sharply diverge. If one believes that any hope for moderation in the Arab world requires finding moderate voices not only among secularists but also among Islamists, America’s current strategy in Egypt is producing the opposite result.”[[25]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/#_ftn25)

Kagan is the author of several books on U.S. interventionism, including A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990(1996), Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century(2006), The Return of History and the End of Dreams(2008), and The World America Made (2012).