OP-ED: Power Play, By ROBERT KAGAN, Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2008; Page W1

I read the piece and found it disappointing: too inside-baseball, as if the entire argument exists solely within the field of international relations. Worse, Kagan's straw-manned his opposition to an absurd degree, stating his archetype as basically, "Man will always war, for it is in his nature"-- not exactly a hard notion to defend but also so baseline as to be meaningless.

Note also how Kagan leaves out current history and economics, so the only explanation left is: Russians are simply like this. Again, that's not particularly helpful.

Kagan is much smarter than this. Great Powers was in many ways inspired by Dangerous Nation, but his last book and his writing since the campaign began seem to be a thinly-veiled promotion of certain neocon concepts--to wit, the resurrection of pre-9/11 ideas of "taking them on."

In that regard, Kagan just seems bored with the Long War and ready to re-embrace the old neocon agenda of working the big pieces aggressively, and to me, that's just unimaginative in the face of everything that's going on with globalization's continued advance.

There's simply a bigger agenda out there than fighting China and India and waiting passively for a fascist wave to subsume globalization. To me, that's just too defeatist and fatalistic--and a bad reading of current events.

(Thanks: Florian Widder)