‘When bloodied, we bloody’

‘Innocent people can’t do any good in the world. First of all, there are no innocent people, and, second of all, exercising power is not an innocent activity.’ This is not the kind of straight talk you expect to hear in Brussels, but Bob Kagan is a man with little time for polite fictions. Three years ago he ruffled feathers by arguing that the trans-Atlantic falling-out over Iraq was not an unfortunate misunderstanding but a consequence of the fact that today Europeans are from Kantian Venus while Americans are from Hobbesian Mars. Now he has written a book claiming that the traditional view of America as an innocent, isolationist power is a myth. Instead, he argues that America has always been an aggressive, expansionist power — a Dangerous Nation, as the book’s title has it. Kagan is not a trendy European intellectual, though, but America’s most perceptive neoconservative thinker.

Kagan comes from one of those families that could provide the entire panel for a highbrow Radio Four discussion programme. His father is Donald Kagan, America’s pre-eminent classical historian and the author of the definitive modern history of the Peloponnesian war. His brother is a renowned military historian, and his wife is the US ambassador to Nato, which is why he lives in Brussels. Kagan himself is an impressive figure. Co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, a contributing editor to Washington’s two most influential magazines and a columnist for the Washington Post: a kind of Timothy Garton Ash on steroids.

Kagan claims that the lesson from his history of US foreign policy is that it won’t change much even post-Bush and post-Iraq. Kagan points out that America elected Ronald Reagan just five years after the end of Vietnam, which was a far more divisive and humiliating conflict for the United States than Iraq is.