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Institutional
Affiliations
Project
for the New American Century: Co-Founder
(with William Kristol) and Co-Director (1)
Center
for Security Policy: Frequent participant on CSP sign-on
letters (3)
U.S.
Committee on NATO: Board of Directors (4)
Council
on Foreign Relations: Member (1)
The
Weekly Standard: Contributing Editor (2)
The
New Republic: Contributing Editor (2)
Washington
Post: Monthly Columnist (2)
Committee
for the Liberation of Iraq: Advisory Board (5)
The
Public Interest: Assistant Editor, 1981 (1)
American Committee for Peace in Chechnya:
Member
Government
Posts/Panels/Commissions
Department
of State: Deputy for Policy under Elliott Abrams,
then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs, Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, 1985-1988
(1)
Office
of the Secretary of State: Principal Speechwriter for Secretary
George Schultz and Member of Policy Planning Staff, 1984-1985
(1)
United
States Information Agency: Special Assistant to the Deputy
Director, 1983 (1)
Office
of Congressman Jack Kemp: Foreign Policy Adviser, 1983 (1)
Education
Yale
University: B.A.
(1)
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: M.A.
in Public Policy and International Relations (1) |
Highlights
& Quotes
Robert Kagan
has impeccable neoconservative credentials. His father and brother
-- Donald and Frederick -- are neocon historians who have written
on the need for a stronger and more interventionist U.S. military.
Robert also is a close associate of William Kristol, with whom he
has co-written articles and books, and founded the Project for the
New American Century. He writes frequently on post-Cold War strategy,
trans-Atlantic relations, U.S.-China relations, military strategy,
defense budget, and U.S. diplomatic history. (2)
He is the author
most recently of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in
the New World Order, 2003, in which he argues that "Americans
are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little
and understand one another less and less." Kagan claims that
because Europe has benefited from 60 years of U.S. security guarantees,
it has not been forced to spend as much on defense as the United
States and is softer when it comes to issues like Iraq and other
“rogue states.”
According to
a BBC profile, “Kagan disputes that the U.S.’s attitude
was altered by the events of Sept. 11. He says that the country
‘only became more itself’ in its intolerance for the
enemy. … 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.’” (6)
Kagan was appointed
by Elliott Abrams in 1985 to head the Office of Public Diplomacy,
which was created to push for U.S. support for Nicaraguan Contras.
After the Iran-Contra scandal broke, Abrams pleaded guilty to two
counts of withholding information from Congress. Kagan, however,
failed to mention Abram’s illicit activities or his guilty
plea in his 1996 book A Twilight Struggle, which was touted
as the “definitive history” of the U.S. anti-Sandinista
campaign. (Kagan does mention the convictions of Oliver North and
John Poindexter.) The book received financial backing from the Bradley
Foundation and the Carthage Foundation, two key conservative funders.
(7)
He is coauthor,
with William Kristol, of a 1997 Foreign Affairs article called
“Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” in which the
authors argue that the United States should establish a “benevolent
hegemony;” and he edited, also with William Kristol, Present
Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy (Encounter
Books), 2000. (5)
Kagan has been
published in Foreign Affairs, Commentary, Foreign Policy,
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New
Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The National Interest,
Policy Review, and The Weekly Standard. (1)
In a 2002 article
for Policy Review, Kagan argued, “It is time to stop
pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the
world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important
question of power -- the efficacy of power, the morality of power,
the desirability of power -- American and European perspectives
are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a
little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained
world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.
It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative
prosperity, the realization of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace.’
The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising
power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and
rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and
promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and
use of military might.”
His wife is
Victoria Nuland, who was tapped to be Dick Cheney’s deputy
national security adviser. (8)
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