A Transcendence of Exhaustion? :: Free Essays Online

A Transcendence of Exhaustion? In his article "Power and Weakness", Robert Kagan offers an insightful explanation of recent trends in transatlantic relations. He puts forth a very elegantly systemic explanation for this unraveling, or at least schism, of the West that seems to be taking place under our very noses. And yet for all its apparent clarity, Kagan's underlying argument is a myopic one, a model in need of a corrective lens in order to gain any significant predictive power. Luckily, current events offer an indispensable laboratory for testing some aspects of Kagan's ideas, while even our class' very circumscribed readings in the field equip us to spot major shortcomings of the argument. Kagan posits that a Kantian "perpetual peace" has emerged in Europe in the decade after the Cold War's demise. (211) America, in many ways a Western European nation but in many ways not, has found itself straddling a sort of a boundary between ideologies. (239) On the one hand, it espouses the same liberal values held by the Europeans, of forming economic and diplomatic ties, the establishment of the liberal "separate peace," so to speak. However, even as it speaks these noble words, it finds itself stomping on Panama and Chile, reaching out to slap at Iraq. It is not free from the need to act in the Hobbesian world of anarchy and strife. (211) This fundamental disagreement drives much of the tension over foreign affairs that has arisen between Washington and the European governments in the recent past. (Ibid) It is in offering a historical explanation for this state of affairs that Kagan excels. He dismisses outright the possibility that some abstruse national character might be to blame, pointing out that in many respects Europe and America have recently switched places, and behaviors accordingly, on the world stage. (214) Europe from the time of the Westphalian peace until the World Wars was the bloody realm of machtpolitik, the constant power plays at home and abroad that characterize especially the colonial period. As the locus of power in the Hobbesian sense, the Europeans historically believed in it and wielded it without hesitation. The timid young America, subject to the persecution of hostile European empires for much of its early life, learned accordingly to make use of the weapons of the weak: political and economic diplomacy. (215) However, Europe laid waste to itself in the two World Wars that can rightly be called the climax of machtpolitik, eliminating the concrete basis it once held for world domination.