Sorry, but why are we still listening to Bob Kagan? (UPDATED)

I’ve had my share of complaints about Kagan in the past, but this one might take the cake. The President, we’re told, needs Ahmadinejad to win.

His extremely guarded response to the outburst of popular anger at the regime has been widely misinterpreted as reflecting concern that too overt an American embrace of the opposition will hurt it, or that he wants to avoid American “moralizing.” (Obama himself claimed yesterday that he didn’t want the United States to appear to be “meddling.”)

But Obama’s calculations are quite different. Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis.

Wallerstein on American primacy

A number of IR theorists have long warned us about the specter of balancing coalitions to counter U.S. influence, resulting in global multipolarity.  (Realists, unfortunately, have been among the most confident forecasters of this alleged inevitability.) Unfortunately the expanding financial crisis is giving everyone a reason to resuscitate this argument.  The subject is a tired one, and I’m not going to spend words and energy going into it at the moment [if you care, look here, I guess]. But reading this poorly-executed piece on the competing theories about American preeminence, one particularly egregious claim jumped out at me. 

Gelb on uniting the realists

Further rebuke for Kagan’s shallow mischaracterization of realism, however indirect, can be found in Leslie Gelb’s piece in the September/October National Interest.  The venue is appropriate: published by the Nixon Center, the National Interest is the field’s most prominent realist journal.  Gelb writes of the possibility for consensus among realists on both sides of the political divide, noting that Republican foreign policy practitioners like Kissinger, Scowcroft, Baker, and Eagleburger have little in common with the “latent isolationists with dogmatic slants on good-and-evil in the world” who populate the rightward corners of the party. Dogmatic slants on good-and-evil… sound like anyone we know?

Robert Kagan Tries to Slander Realism, Fails

Robert Kagan is a serious, clear-headed man. While the rest of us have been distracted by the orgy of internationalist optimism, he’s been fixing his keen eye on foreign intrigue in places we scarcely knew existed (a la Ralph Peters). Lest you forget, “the nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today’s political realists” – and chumps like you and me – “say that economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows us otherwise.” And you can bet that Kagan is going to tell us how. [A warning before the jump: I went a little crazy, to the tune of 2,300 words.]