The Assassins' Gate (3 page)

In their grim worldview, there wasn't much room for human rights outside the Soviet bloc—especially when President Carter put talk of human rights at the center of his foreign policy. This talk seemed to the neoconservatives truly dangerous, for it undermined friendly regimes (Nicaragua, South Africa, Iran) whose behavior we might not like (they were corrupt, they tortured and killed their own citizens) but whose survival was essential for the resistance to communism. In 1979, one of the neoconservatives, Jeane Kirkpatrick, published an essay in
Commentary,
“Dictatorships and Double Standards,” arguing that the tendency of human-rights do-gooders to undermine America's friends and leave the way open to our enemies turned both grand strategy and morality on their heads. Our friends might be nasty, but our enemies were worse; the difference between them was the difference between benign and malignant cancer. It was America's mission to prevent authoritarian friends from becoming totalitarian enemies, which by their essence locked whole populations in eternal prisons that could never be opened from the inside. The essay caught Reagan's eye and the following year won Kirkpatrick an appointment as UN ambassador under the newly elected president.

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IN REAGAN
the neoconservatives found their champion. His election and his administration's policies, which were partly inspired by the ideas of men like Podhoretz and Kristol, showed the neoconservatives that ideas could lead to power, and that power required ideas. This was not a lesson that came naturally. Their earlier lives in left-wing sects in the 1930s and '40s had been studies in political futility, all the more intense for their impotence, carried on as if New York was St. Petersburg and Toledo Kiev, and America itself on the verge of its own dialectical orgasm of revolution. But these fights at least taught the participants to take themselves and their ideas very seriously, to treat intellectual combat as an extension of the political and even the weaponized kind. In 1980, the long training of their younger years paid off.

To the neoconservatives' ideas about American power Reagan added a quality of his own: a benign disposition. This wasn't a mere quirk of temperament. Reagan's character, his comfort with the plain American idiom of optimism, gave the confrontational worldview a smiling face that suggested something higher than grim combat. American power, Reagan said, was a force for good in the world—this at a time when respectable opinion, in America and elsewhere, was still riveted by the memory of napalm igniting the jungles of South Vietnam. In 1976, Reagan won a fight at the Republican convention against the establishment forces of President Ford and his cold-blooded secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to put a “morality in foreign policy” plank in the party's platform. To large numbers of Americans, including Republicans, morality in foreign policy meant minding our own business. At best it meant speaking up for dissidents in the Soviet Union or Chile. Reagan meant something far grander: confronting and defeating communism all over the world. And though he lost the nomination battle to Ford in 1976, he won the war for his party's soul.

In 1981, the first year of Reagan's presidency, Elliott Abrams, who was Reagan's aggressive assistant secretary of state for Latin America and, later, human rights, wrote a memo arguing that the administration shouldn't simply oppose communism; it should also promote democracy, in communist and noncommunist countries alike. The memo contradicted the harsher view expressed two years before by Jeane Kirkpatrick in the magazine edited by Abrams's father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz. Out of personal inclination as well as strategic calculation, Reagan in his rhetoric embraced the idea of promoting democracy. In 1982, speaking before the British parliament at Westminster, he presented a vision of democracy expanding across the globe. The words inspired a new generation of young officials orbiting around Reagan's sun.

One of them was Robert Kagan. The son of a Yale professor of Greek history, Kagan is about the same age as I, but we learned the opposite lesson from the historical moment of our early years: After Vietnam, I (and everyone I knew) feared American overreach; Kagan (and the new generation of conservatives) feared American drift. “When I was in college in the late seventies, I remember all of us thinking that those hippie antiwar guys who came before us were a little ridiculous,” Kagan said when we met in Washington in early 2004. “That somehow wasn't the way to be. I came of age really after Vietnam. The seventies were my formative experience in the broadest sense, because then it was all—at least as far as I saw—American weakness, leading to these catastrophes: Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua. Just the weakness and the embarrassment of Jimmy Carter.”

So in his twenties Kagan became a soldier in the Reagan revolution. He first wrote speeches for Secretary of State George Shultz, then helped to develop Nicaragua policy under Elliott Abrams. But in the small proxy fights of the late Cold War, the choice was between two kinds of armed ugliness. The Nicaraguan contras made unconvincing founding fathers; and when the Salvadoran military agreed to hold an election in 1983, the Reagan administration played a double game—midwifing the democratic process and ensuring victory for our man in San Salvador, José Napoleon Duarte. Despite his close involvement in the Nicaragua policy, Kagan emerged unscathed from the Iran-contra scandal that tainted Abrams with a perjury conviction (he was later pardoned by the first President Bush). In practice, morality in foreign policy looked less inspiring than the shining city on the hill. The Reagan administration's policy on Iraq was no different from Henry Kissinger's: to support the Baathist regime in the name of the national interest, even when the regime was committing genocide against the Kurds.

Still, the idea and the language took hold in the minds of younger thinkers like Kagan: Anticommunism was only half a worldview; the other half was democratic idealism, a faith in the transformational power of American values. At the end of the decade, after Reagan left office, communism collapsed in Europe; the following year, in 1990, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas lost power in a democratic election; and in 1991, Kagan watched the demise of the Soviet Union up close in Moscow, where his wife was stationed as a diplomat. All of this confirmed for the Reaganites that history was on their side. But the Cold War was over, and most of them no longer knew how to think about America and the world, and the neoconservatives started to drift.

A few years later, in the relative silence and obscurity of the Clinton era, Kagan began to publish a series of articles that outlined a vision for post–Cold War foreign policy. They appeared in
Commentary,
the house organ of neoconservatism. But by the mid-1990s the tone and some of the content had changed. Kagan, the ideological son of Reagan, was shaped by the experience in Nicaragua (which, in his book
A Twilight Struggle,
he described as a great success for Reagan's foreign policy) and the fall of communism—not by Vietnam. He was a man of the '80s, not the '60s; his tone was affirmation, not warning. In our conversation, Kagan brushed aside the term “neoconservative,” and when I asked whether he ever wondered if he was a liberal, he shot back, “I
am
a liberal. In foreign policy I'm a liberal. The conservative tradition in foreign policy is the minimalist, realist tradition.” The liberal tradition, in Kagan's genealogy, has upheld an activist foreign policy that reflects American ideals as well as interests, and it runs from Hamilton through John Quincy Adams, Lincoln (the Civil War was a pivotal case, as the Union embraced a liberal “foreign policy” toward slavery in the South), Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and ultimately to Reagan.

The real target of Kagan's
Commentary
articles, published between 1994 and 1997, was the Republican Party. He regarded with dismay the party's turn away from activism in foreign policy after the end of the Soviet Union. One by one, he watched his idealistic comrades from the Reagan years drop their former commitment to global democracy under the pressure of partisan politics or changed world circumstances or their own shifting views—until the only one left standing to support, for example, the invasion of Haiti on behalf of its elected government, was Robert Kagan. Everywhere he looked, both in the administration of the first Bush and in the congressional opposition to Bill Clinton, Republicans were in tired retreat. Interventions in messy little wars like Bosnia's would lead to quagmire, warned such foreign-policy titans as Senator John McCain, sounding like a liberal Democrat still recovering from the trauma of Vietnam (rather than a war hero for whom the trauma was not at all figurative). Without Reagan and the Soviet Union to focus its mind, the party had wandered back into cautious realism. Its wise men warned about “imperial overstretch” and invoked that indispensable phrase from the Nixon-Kissinger years, “vital national interest.” So much for morality in foreign policy. If Yugoslavs and Rwandans were determined to slaughter one another, if Somalia was plunging into chaos while its people starved, these unhappy events were probably outside our power to remedy and certainly outside our concern.

Against this timidity Kagan launched a powerful analytical attack. The end of the Cold War, he argued, was precisely the moment not to withdraw but to extend. America shouldn't mourn the loss of a balance of power but instead use its unrivaled power all around the world to pursue its interests and its values—which almost always go together. No corner of the earth is too distant or obscure to be allowed to fester dangerously or be deprived of the benevolent effects of American hegemony, namely democracy and a stable peace. Seeking to revive the spirit of Reagan, Kagan reached farther back to Theodore Roosevelt and “the idea that the American people should take a hand in shaping mankind's destiny, that playing such a role accords honor, and that the right to such honor must be earned.” For Kagan, the extension of democracy around the world was as much about America's national destiny as it was about doing good things for unhappy people in foreign countries. The values might be universal, but only one country could secure them. Kagan was expressing a kind of nationalism, not so different in ambition from the British nationalism of Kipling's white man's burden (without the racial baggage), the French
mission civilisatrice
(without the religious baggage), and the antique
Pax Romana
(without an actual empire).

This strain of national messianism is as alien to the hard-boiled realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and the first Bush as it is to the Wilsonian utopianism of liberals who believe in international law. Though they supported many of the same interventions in the nineties, Kagan dismissed these liberals as “a shrinking camp of internationalists with nothing but airy ‘humanitarianism' on their side.” Unlike them, he was a nationalist, and he had no faith that the Clinton administration would carry out the call to greatness. “The present generation of Democratic leaders simply does not have the stomach for world leadership,” Kagan wrote. The only hope lay in the Republicans. His mission was to purge the party of realism and restore the higher aims of the great ex-president who was disappearing into the sunset of senescence out on the coast.

One of Kagan's articles mentioned the original draft of the Defense Planning Guidance—“unfortunately rejected,” he lamented. The areas of convergence between the internal Pentagon memo and the journal articles are obvious: Top Republican officials and neoconservative foreign-policy thinkers were sketching similarly large plans for the party and the country. But there are differences, perhaps not so obvious at the time, but ones that would prove critical a few years later, when these plans and ideas became the foreign policy of the second President Bush and laid the groundwork for a second war with Iraq. Though the DPG acknowledged that the Cold War was over, it was a document of Cold Warriors—the hard-liners of the 1970s who rejected accommodation with the Soviet Union. Paul Wolfowitz had been a member of the famous Team B, the group of outside experts that was appointed in 1976 by CIA director George Bush to review intelligence on the Soviet Union, and that came to far more dire conclusions about Soviet capabilities and intentions than the pro-détente officials of the Nixon and Ford administrations. The DPG, written in 1992 under Wolfowitz's guidance (though he claims not to have read the draft before it was leaked), was very much a continuation of the neoconservative thinking that had spawned the Committee on the Present Danger. The skies were always ominous, threats always loomed on the horizon; even though the Soviet Union was no more, the sunlit vistas of the Reagan years had gone dark again. To officials like Wolfowitz, it was always 1979. And what were the new threats? They were everyone and everywhere: European allies, Arab dictatorships, Muslim terrorists, resurgent Russians, Chinese and North Korean communists, weapons proliferators. And what was the remedy? American power, everywhere—but not in the cause of democratic values. The DPG duly advocated “the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems,” but only as a gesture. When it came to the Middle East, “our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil. We also seek to deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways.” This is the language of realism, not Reaganism. It's the balance of power without a balance. “With regard to Pakistan,” the document continued, “a constructive U.S.-Pakistani military relationship will be an important element in our strategy to promote stable security conditions in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.” The possibility that continued access to oil and good relations with Muslim dictators might ultimately be the cause of instability or worse didn't occur to the DPG's authors. The prospect of democracy in this dangerous region was never mentioned.