Chun Han Wong, C&A Editor
11th December 2007
America’s track record as “persistent disturbers of the status quo” since its independence marked it as a “dangerous nation” in the eyes of contemporaries, said Dr Robert Kagan, an American scholar and political commentator.
The senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also asserted that the American tendency towards “political, economic and strategic dominance” is not a historical aberration but a trait “imprinted in the nation’s DNA.”
Dr Kagan, author of the book “Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century”, made these comments in his public lecture at the LSE last Wednesday.
Identifying the Declaration of Independence as the most important foreign policy statement in US history, Dr Kagan asserted that the liberal Enlightenment ideals which the Declaration embodied drove the US to political, territorial, economic and cultural expansion.
Contrary to the American self-image as a “status quo power” and reluctant nation forced into wars by circumstance, Kagan asserted that the US has been a traditionally expansionist power. The US, he argued, is predisposed to exercise its power in pursuit of its national interests as dictated by its liberal ideals.
The militaristic US foreign policy in post-Cold War era, which amounted to nine significant military interventions in fourteen years, is illustrative of this interventionist trend, said Dr Kagan. The multilateralism that marked US foreign policy during the Cold War, he argued, masked an underlying tendency towards unilateralism that had been consistent in American history.
In response to questions from the audience, Dr Kagan highlighted the significance of the interventionist tradition on recent US foreign policy towards Iraq. The absence of the US defence budget from the 2008 presidential debates is also indicative of a general consensus that US foreign policy should remain interventionist in nature, he added.
Dr Kagan, co-founder of the conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century, was a signatory of the 1998 open letter addressed to then-US President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.