During the United States' 2016 presidential race, historian/scholar and author Robert Kagan was among the conservatives who expressed his disdain for Donald Trump by leaving the Republican Party and endorsing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Kagan had a long resumé in right-wing politics, from serving as a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz in the Reagan Administration to co-founding the Project for the New American Century with fellow neocon Bill Kristol in 1997. But when Trump won the 2016 GOP presidential nomination and defeated Clinton in the general election, Kagan's exit from the Republican Party became permanent.
Nine years after endorsing Clinton from the right, Kagan is still very much in the Never Trump camp. And he offered a grim view of Trump's foreign policy in an interview with Kristol published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 5.
The United States and Western Europe, Kagan argued, enjoyed a period of relative stability following World War 2. But that stability, he fears, is coming to an end during Trump's second presidency.
"Normally, wearing my historian hat, I'm reluctant to say things have changed radically, because there's usually tremendous continuity," Kagan told Kristol. "And that's particularly been true of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. It's not that there haven't been huge debates about American foreign policy, but mostly, American policy, with a new administration, regardless of the rhetoric they've run on, is about 10 percent one way or 10 percent the other way in terms of our foreign policy. But now, I think we're at a moment of a real break and a real discontinuity — and the beginning of a return to, I think the best way to put it is, 'normal' international relations."
Kagan continued, "Normal international relations are a very dangerous situation. We sort of take for granted the degree of peace that we've enjoyed over the past eight decades, the degree of prosperity, etc. And we sort of think that's the norm. The norm is actually a lot more like what the world looked like before 1945. Certainly, the previous 100 years were one of constant great-power warfare. And I don't think people are really quite ready for that, for the world that we're now moving into."
Kristol warned that the world could become dangerously unstable if the U.S. becomes an "unreliable ally," and he got no argument from Kagan.
Kagan told Kristol, "Trump has put us back in the position that we were in the '20s and '30s. We could help a country if we decide to help them. We don't have to help them if we don’t decide to help them. This year, we're aligned with these guys; this year, we're aligned with that guy. But it's the permanence and reliability of the (post-1945) system that has been such a great force for peace."
Kagan added, "For instance, the fact that the British could not necessarily be relied upon to come to France's defense in 1914 had a huge impact on German calculations. If the Kaiser had known for sure that the British were going to come in on the side of the French, he would not have gone to war."
Bill Kristol's full interview with Robert Kagan is available at this link or here.
