Still angry about Justice Kavanaugh? Or are you anxious about the latest UN climate report, warning of faster-rising oceans? Or do you fret about wrong-headed immigration laws? Or can’t we just talk about the Red Sox getting to the World Series?
No, we can’t. Read Robert Kagan’s new book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (Knopf, 2018), and you’ll find a full-throated case for drop-everything-emergency aid for something more existential, the colorless oxygen of today’s civilization we dangerously take for granted: the liberal world order. This plain-spoken senior fellow of Brookings wants to grab you by the lapels and scream urgency in your face—because if we lose the American-guaranteed collection of laws, democratic values, economic and defense treaties that have produced seven unprecedented decades of peace and prosperity, you’ll wonder why you ever worried about anything else.
If U.S. global leadership slides, Kagan asserts, the invisible protective bubble we’ve enjoyed since 1945 won’t just deflate. It will explode. Good-bye rules-based trade, hello shortages of food and essential products. Dictators not just threatening but using nuclear weapons. More innocents repressed or killed in civilized countries. Cross-border migrations magnitudes beyond the crises of today’s detention centers and Mediterranean rescues.
Dark Forces Re-emerging
The botanical metaphor in Kagan’s book title began our recent conversation. “We’ve been living in a tranquil garden of largely peaceful practices and liberal expectations across much of the world, ignoring the dark forces of jungle multiplying under the rocks. If we don’t defend civilization’s cultivation—especially American’s guarantee of peace and economic integration across the world—the toxic creatures and weeds will roar back.” Thus China’s determined military rise, Russia’s continuing aggressions, fiery authoritarians on the march in so many once democratic countries.
As Kagan continued, “Trump has been damaging the system—he too seems to have forgotten what good it has delivered—but actually America’s desire for maintaining the global order has been diminishing for years. After the dissolution of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, people talked about ‘the end of history”—that America didn’t have to worry anymore about war or aggression. History doesn’t end, it simply paused. The ugliest aspects of human nature are surging again.”
Vanishing Leadership, Vanishing Peace
Kagan’s apocalyptic message, repeated in other recent writings, is lucid and terrifying, all the more devastating for its relentless use of history. It’s a footnoted plea that “we’ve seen this movie before.” He reminds us that Americans have frequently turned away from defending world order, with regrettably familiar outcomes: to be dragged in later at greater cost (e.g. helping to stop Hitler earlier might have prevented World War II); or, simply hoping that “the problem would go away,” to watch it get ten times worse (e.g. Obama’s policy in Syria). Kagan acknowledges that America has sometimes misstepped (e.g. Viet Nam, Iraq), but he still argues that overall our foreign engagement has produced more peace and prosperity than not. “History shows,” he summarized, “that world order has never been achieved without some constructive force to keep the peace. The relative harmony and fair play we’ve created in the modern world will vanish if the U.S. forsakes international leadership.”
Can Today’s Peaceful Garden Be Saved?
“The odds are against our preserving today’s world order,” Kagan flatly commented. “But the game isn’t over, and demise isn’t inevitable. But any rescue will require lots of new thinking and bucking current political tides.”
I turned our discussion to leadership, probing about the skills and mindsets of the people who built the postwar liberal order. So what would take to rebuild it now?
His replies led to several interesting insights beyond the book per se. Four have implications for all of us who should care about keeping the garden safe–as leaders in our own right, citizens of this country, and future voters in important elections forthcoming.
1. Today’s global liberal order was built piecemeal, evolving more through continuous improvement than “grand design.”
Kagan quickly listed the post-WWII building blocks of the order, led by the U.S—“first undoing the military capability of Japan and Germany, and then fostering their financial success; economic integration for them and others based on open trade and fair competition with America; creating a democratic and liberal culture among allies, guaranteed by America’s power, and our willingness to punish those who threatened it.” Yet he resisted the idea of any detailed vision. “The system emerged step by step as different American statesmen took on this or that immediate problem. How to keep Germany and Japan from causing war again? OK, next how to make it worthwhile for them and other nations to invest in trade and business, not more armies? And then, later, how to push back on Russia and Communism when they started to threaten the order?”
“It wasn’t a vision but a process. As broader benefits started to accrue, allies saw the value, and with that we built further on what had been achieved. When we made mistakes—like Viet Nam—we had the strength to learn and course-correct, as Reagan led us to do.”
So perhaps, I reflect, thinking of our discussion, we need to stop worrying about big theoretical frameworks, and start tackling specific problems to protect the garden we have—and just keep learning from mistakes and building on progress.
2. Today’s order emerged from “generational leadership.”Though Kagan acknowledges contributions of well-known policy makers—Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Trumanet al— he de-emphasized any “great man theory.” “The legacy was created by a whole generation, people born in the 1890s, who lived through the optimism of the early 20th C., and then watched it collapse in forty years of conflict. They had a shared experience, animated by fear and memory of war, so they worked together to prevent reemergence of the same horror. American Presidents have implicitly accepted that challenge and reliably invested in the order—until recently.”
And as we all join political debates and go to the polls in coming weeks, we might thus ask: has the current generation of American leaders lost touch with the risk of abandoning our global role?
3. The best leaders refuse the “either/or” choice between domestic and foreign policy investment.
Kagan railed about prioritizing domestic welfare over keeping the peace abroad. “Americans have periodically shied away from foreign affairs, claiming ‘we can’t afford to maintain military bases and also take care of our own people.’ Or that our own ‘social justice’ is more important than ‘freedom in the world.’ When we turn inwards we threaten our own prosperity and even survival. The greatest advances in racial justice in this country happened while we were building the liberal world order. Our guarantees of world commerce is what allows our own economy and people to flourish. Our military leadership is what protects us from the evil actors gunning for us today.”
As we spoke further, I came to appreciate the complex leadership needed to build and maintain the liberal world order that we still enjoy—engagement and capabilities on three levels at the same time: first, leaders with strength and courage against foes; second, leaders that also have empathy and ability to collaboratively guide fractious allies; third, also leadership skills for teaching and inspiring the citizens of our country. This third element in fact sparked Kagan’s final thoughts and the insight below.
4. We desperately need leaders who can explain and mobilize the rebuilding of this most precious asset.
Kagan had a ready list to save the flagging liberal order (indeed reversing Trump’s current approach)—“rebuild our allies’ solidarity; strengthen our global security guarantees; re-assert the practices of free trade; and pressure countries like Hungary, Poland, and Turkey to stop backsliding on democratic values.” But most important, he called for new American leadership that can rally tomorrow’s citizens around what our fathers’ generation collectively and intuitively knew—that the world is fundamentally dangerous; that peace and prosperity are not natural; that preserving an international liberal community depends critically on America’s political will to invest money and lives to keep open markets, and prevent violence against our allies and values.
Kagan closed with a blend of pessimism and aspiration. “It’s very difficult to explain all this to the American people. Even the gifted FDR struggled with the challenge. But we need a president now who can convince Americans that preserving our global liberal system is absolutely worth doing. That the cost of letting it come undone will be so much more than saving it. We have to find leaders who can motivate tomorrow’s generation to join this cause, and do whatever it takes, so our nation can reassert our fundamentally benign—even if self-interested—hegemony in the world.”
Originally published on Forbes.com