Spring Break
Robert Kagan speaks on political theory
Issue date: 3/12/09
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"I want to talk about the world that Barack Obama has inherited," he said. "Even setting aside the current financial crisis, it's very complicated."
Kagan, a former member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Schultz and deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, focused most on what he described as a common theory that the U.S. was in decline.
"I think that view is mistaken," he said. "If the economy resembles what things were like in the 1930s, it would a great tragedy if foreign policy followed suit ... because there is no doubt that the world depends extraordinarily on the U.S."
Although Kagan served as foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain during the recent presidential election, he acknowledged that Obama's global popularity had the potential to help reshape the United States's interaction with the rest of the world.
"He is in the unique position of being more popular than most countries' own elected leaders," Kagan said. "I think our image has been substantially repaired by the results of the presidential election."
He jokingly referred to former president George W. Bush as "the ogre in the White House," but also went on to more seriously discuss the historical image of the U.S., stating that prior to Bush, there were many other issues that had caused it to suffer.
Then he moved on to discuss the rightful place of the U.S. in the world.
One of the key concepts that he stressed was that although after the Cold War many believed that the geopolitical struggle between great powers had become a "geoeconomic" conflict and that money had replaced political theory in importance, this has not come to pass. He felt that the popular belief had been that democracy was taking root around the world and would almost develop of its own accord.
"Obviously it seems that neither of those assumptions were quite true," he said.
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