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Institutional
Affiliations
Project for the New American Century: Contributor to two PNAC volumes, Rebuilding America's Defenses and Present Dangers
Education
Yale University: B.A., Ph.D. (1)
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Highlights
& Quotes
Frederick Kagan, along with father Donald and brother Robert, is a member of a key neoconservative family, second in influence only to the Kristol and Podhoretz clans. Like his father and brother, Frederick favors hawkish foreign policies and extravagant defense budgets. He is also associated with the Project for the New American Century (which his brother cofounded), having participated in the PNAC study group that produced Rebuilding America's Defenses, a 2000 book that served as a blueprint for several Bush administration policies, and contributed a chapter about the U.S. military for the PNAC volume Present Dangers (2000), which was edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol.
He co-wrote with his father While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000) which compares the United States at the end of the Cold War to post-World War I Great Britain, arguing that the United States is weak and vulnerable, and that it needs to greatly boost military spending. In a review of the book, University of Chicago scholar Bruce Cumings wrote: "The storm has been gathering for a decade, according to the Kagans, but in 1991 we failed to comprehend that we were at a critical turning point. ... It would indeed be one of the great ironies of modern times if 1991 -- the year the United States emerged from the Cold War as the only remaining superpower, outspending all conceivable adversaries combined on defense and launching an information revolution that would sweep the globe -- was really the beginning of the end of American dominance. But the United States can still save itself, say the authors, if it spends more on defense and acquires loads of new weapons. This last message, which dominates the latter third of the book, seems to have been perfectly timed for the 2000 presidential campaign. ... There is one good thing about While America Sleeps: No one who reads it is going to run out and buy a flak jacket, teach kindergartners to 'duck and cover,' or restock a backyard bomb shelter. This is a book to assign to students who want to know what professors mean when they say 'a little history is a bad thing." (2)
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