Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America s Foreign and Defense Policy

by Robert Kagan (editor), William Kristol (Editor)

This original collection of essays offers hope to those who believe that the cause of world peace requires a new American foreign policy and repairing our depleted military. The twelve contributors to this book show why America must take another look at our possible adversaries and real strategic partners. Present Dangers offers practical strategies for policymakers eager to disarm adversaries like North Korea and Iraq and head off the terrorist threat. Intellectuals, historians and policy-makers such as James Ceasar, Ross Munro, Peter Rodman, Richard Perle, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Nicholas Eberstadt, Jeffrey Gedmin, Aaron Friedberg, Elliott Abrams, Frederick Kagan, Willliam Schneider, William Bennett, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Kagan all challenge America to make sure that foreign affairs, a sleeping issue for the last eight years, gets a wake-up call in election year 2000. Table of contents, notes, bibliographic essay.

Genres: Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Robert Kagan is an American historian and foreign policy commentator. Robert Kagan is the son of Yale classical historian and author, Donald Kagan. He is married to Victoria Nuland, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and has two children. He is the brother of political commentator Frederick Kagan.

Kagan is a columnist for the Washington Post and is syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate. He is a contributing editor at both The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, and has also written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, World Affairs, and Policy Review.

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of neoconservative type writings from 2000 evaluating the Clinton administration and outlining challenges for the next president. It's useful in that it provides a snapshot of the foreign policy thinking of a lot of important neocons right before 9/11 (Kristol, Abrams, Perle, Wolfowitz, the Kagans) and shows that their vision of the US role in the world didn't change that much on 9/11; it just became more urgent.

This book's main message is that while the US lacks a clear geopolitical competitor at the moment, this does not mean that it should step down from its global commitments or reduce military readiness. The Present Danger, in fact, is that the US will lay off its Atlas-like upholding of the world order and fail to deter rising challengers and asymmetrical threats from reaching the point of being able to threaten US interests. The book clearly draws from the unipolar moment concept, but it goes further than Krauthammer by asking the US to spread democracy as well as lock in a permanent US hegemony in key regions of the world. There's something to be said for the US upholding world order and deterring challengers, but the Present Danger writers go way too far in their perception of threats to the US. Dozens of threats, state and non-state, lurk at the door in their view of the world. Their response is always the same: avoid engaging with these regimes (they'll just take advantage rather than reciprocating), don't "appease" them (code for almost any incentive offered or form of negotiation), have massive military force at the ready to stop them. Their interpretation of history is that countries like GB and the US could have stopped many wars in the past by maintaining military strength, alliances, and clear red lines against rising powers like Germany, Japan, the USSR, and others. Again, there's something to be said for this view, but the opposite view of tough statements creating a cycle of fear and posturing (the security dilemma) doesn't seem to factor in to their thinking as an alternative route to disaster. If there's one thing I've learned from diplomatic history, it's that both appeasement and strong stances of opposition can trigger war. It's hard to know at the time which world you are in. Furthermore, I also don't trust neocon thought because it doesn't seem capable of differentiating the big from the small threats, and it almost always picks the hammer as its main foreign policy tool.

This book also suggested that neocons aren't actually that keen on Francis Fukuyama's End of History idea, or at least what they think that idea is. They seem to be okay with the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism part, but they don't like the implication that the world is just moving on its own towards this end point. They would argue that hegemonic powers like the US made this triumph possible by defending the open world order against small and large challengers. The world could revert back to nationalism, religious extremism, communism, etc if not defended by the US. They repeatedly say that order in the world is not the default position; chaos and competition are (Hobbes, and I, tend to agree). I don't necessarily think FF would disagree with this, but I think I'll look more into the relationship of neocons and the end of history.

Another important theme in this work is the neocon belief that US interests and ideology usually point in the same direction. I've always thought this was true in a very broad sense: the US has an interest in an open, human rights-respecting, mostly democratic, mostly free-trading international order, and those things basically align with American ideals as well. However, the writers in this volume tend to cherry pick their examples. There are also lots of cases where US interests and ideology conflict. All through the Cold War, for example, the US allied with pretty nasty regimes to contain communism, often because there was no better option. The US has also had to use military tools that deeply conflict with its stated ideologies. The uncritical way these writers approach the interests/ideology problem in foreign policy is disconcerting. You can see the roots of their "democracy will solve everything" approach to problems like Iraq.

This volume goes a long way in defining the neocon persuasion on foreign policy in my mind. A huge part of their thinking is the focus on threats, and their elevated sense that threats are everywhere. They are highly risk-intolerant. They advocate intervention to stop threats before they emerge or get too big. Really, strategic prevention was a part of their arsenal long before the Bush Doctrine. All of this seems to derive from the heightened sense of threat, which has defined the neocon view of the world since the 1970's (Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger). I think any understanding of neocons as foreign policy thinkers must start with threats as one of their foundational beliefs.

This book is not particularly well-edited, and it is a little old by now, so I only recommend it for scholarly purposes. However, for teachers, the intro by Kagan and Kristol is an excellent snapshot of neoconservative strategic thinking in the 1990's.