All he says is that "Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus". But at a time of unprecedented dissent between US leaders and their continental counterparts, Robert Kagan's pithy turn of (para)phrase has made him one of the most popular theorists of our times.
Dual perspective
Of Paradise and Power, his study of the differing approaches to military strategy in the western world, has become required reading for every ambassador to the European Union, and has pushed Kagan into the publishing stratosphere. By what he calls a "freak accident", he has achieved the rare feat of turning foreign policy into a bestseller.
The author is well placed for a dual perspective on US and European attitudes. A senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he is based at Europe's nominal power hub in Brussels. But, as a graduate of both Yale and Harvard universities, he is steeped in America's deepest academic traditions.
And, as a former speechwriter to then Secretary of State George Schultz, Kagan knows all about how these traditions shape US foreign policy today. As a seasoned observer of America's tendency to favour the stick over the carrot, he calls the chasm with Europe "deep, long in development and likely to endure".
Simple argument?
Kagan disputes that the US's attitude was altered by the events of 11 September. He says that the country "only became more itself" in its intolerance for the enemy. In contrast, Kagan believes Europe to be entering a "post-historical period" when, tired of 20th-century violence, diplomacy and negotiation present the only way forward.
The author's critics accuse him of over-simplifying the argument, overlooking the influences of economic and cultural strength as well as military, and also a certain brutalism in his acceptance that "American power, even deployed under a double standard, may be the best means of advancing progress".
Henry Kissinger has called Kagan's work a "seminal treatise", but Gore Vidal describes him as being "in the grip of a most unseemly megalomania, speaking for no-one but political hustlers within the Washington beltway". Surely a book on differing attitudes to Robert Kagan must not be far away.
Caroline Frost
