By ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Once labeled a neoconservative, Robert Kagan is actually a Friedmanite. Like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, Kagan specializes in elegant oversimplification, regularly producing artfully constructed polemics that are superficially persuasive but substantively misleading. Taken seriously, they can even be dangerous.
Friedman describes himself as “a big believer in the idea of the super-story, the notion that we all carry around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at the world.” Fastening onto some big framework enables Friedman, in his words, to “order events, and decide what is important and what is not.” Choose the correct—or most convenient—big framework and everything becomes clear. This describes Kagan’s approach as well, along with a tendency to deploy act-now-or-all-is-lost rhetoric.
Certain policy types have a particular susceptibility to super-stories that purport to explain everything. It liberates them from actually having to think. For those eager to remain au courant, it signals which way the herd is heading.
Prominent examples of this recurring phenomenon include George Kennan’s savvy marketing of “containment” as a basis of U.S. grand strategy at the outset of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s impeccably timed revelation four decades later as the Cold War was winding down that history itself had ended.
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