Book Review: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Kagan on the State of America

By JONATHAN FREEDLAND

Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audi’s A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voice-over gloomily intoned, “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair.” Fear not, said the voice; Audi’s smart gizmos would help. The spot’s message was clear: Roads in the United States are now so bad, you need a foreign car to negotiate them.

The Audi ad was seized upon as evidence of American decline, now such a regular meme that the Foreign Policy magazine Web site runs a dedicated blog, “Decline Watch.” Books have been in plentiful supply, and now come two more, helpfully approaching the subject from left and right, as if to demonstrate declinism’s bipartisan credentials.

The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world.

 As you’d expect, there are big differences between the two. Kagan barely mentions the Iraq war in “The World America Made,” and certainly feels no need to explain his past enthusiasm for a decision that many now regard as a calamity. By contrast, Brzezinski is scathing in “Strategic Vision,” judging Iraq “a costly diversion” from the fight against Al Qaeda. The war, he says, was justified by dubious claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that “evaporated altogether within a few months” and that sapped America’s international standing.

The former Carter official regards climate change as a grave global threat; the ex-Reagan appointee hardly mentions it. When Brzezinski lays out the obstacles to America’s keeping its position as international top dog, he includes ever-widening inequality between the richest and the rest — offering statistics that would fit well on an Occupy Wall Street placard — and an unsustainable financial system that benefits “greedy Wall Street speculators.” Reform is needed, he writes, not only to ensure growth but to foster the “social consensus and democratic stability” at home without which the United States cannot be a force abroad. Kagan allows that the post-2008 woes look like capitalism “discrediting itself” but confidently asserts that “the liberal economic order is in everyone’s interest” even as some ­voices, certainly outside the United States, are having severe doubts about key tenets of neoliberal economics.

The two books are different in temperament and style, too, in ways that say much about the contrast between left and right. Brzezinski’s is full of wonkish detail and some truly leaden language: “ . . . with the potential international benefits of the foregoing unfortunately vitiated by the cumulatively destructive consequences of continued and maybe even somewhat expanded. . . . ” Kagan prefers to paint with a broad brush, sprinkling a memorable metaphor here, a striking simile there. International “rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don’t hold the building up; the building holds them up” (the building being America). Where Brzezinski can be gloomy, almost channeling the spirit of Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech when he warns of the excessive materialism and spiritual hollowness of contemporary American life, Kagan is breezier and sunnier. Reading the books side by side is to be reminded not only of Carter versus Reagan but also of Kerry versus Bush.

And yet the great surprise is how much they agree with each other, especially on what matters. They both insist that reports of America’s decline are exaggerated. Both note that the United States still accounts for a quarter of the world’s gross domestic product, a proportion that has held steady for more than 40 years. Both note America’s military strength, with a budget greater than that of all its rivals combined. As Brzezinski puts it, on every measure “America is still peerless.”

Usefully, Kagan states that much of the current decline talk is based on a “nostalgic fallacy,” imagining a golden past in which America was all but omnipotent. There never was such a time, he says, not even during those periods now remembered as the glory days of American might. Still bathing in the glow of total victory in World War II, the country watched events in China, Korea and Indochina that, Dean Acheson lamented, were “beyond the control of the . . . United States.” In 1952 Douglas MacArthur warned of “our own relative decline.” Indeed, Kagan shows that declinism is as old as America itself: in 1788, Patrick Henry was ruing the Republic’s fall from the days “when the American spirit was in its youth.” Kagan’s message is that America has been gripped by these fears before, only to bounce back: “Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s, with Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation and the energy crisis, cannot really believe the present difficulties are unrivaled.”

Both men dismiss that other plank of declinist conventional wisdom, the assumption that China’s hot breath is on America’s neck and that it is about to take over. That’s an “overreaction,” Brzezinski writes, on a par with 1980s fears that the United States was about to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan. China is still decades behind on all the measures that count and has shown little sign of wanting to assume America’s central role. It might just be biding its time, but Kagan makes a good case that its geopolitical position is not propitious: while the United States is flanked by oceans, China is encircled by wary, watchful neighbors. It cannot so easily head out into the world to serve as a global naval power and hegemon.

The two authors agree that it’s in every­one’s interest, not just America’s, for the United States to remain dominant. Kagan frames his essay with a device borrowed from the Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” imagining the world if America were not there to play global superpower. He provides a compelling demonstration that whether it’s protecting the sea lanes vital for free trade or nudging societies toward democracy, the world stands a better chance with America in prime position than it would with China or Russia in the lead. Brzezinski similarly asks us to imagine the Internet if it were under the de facto stewardship of Moscow or Beijing rather than Washington.

Of the two, it is Brzezinski, predictably, who is more alert to the long history of United States intrusion abroad — including the toppling of democratic governments and the gobbling up of developing nations’ resources — that might make non-­Americans skeptical of the merits of American dominance. But both are persuasive that American mastery is better than any plausible alternative (if only because a world without any dominant power is itself implausible).

Above all, Brzezinski and Kagan unite in arguing against fatalism. American decline is not preordained, but neither is the status quo. If Americans want to remain on top, they will have to fight for that position, making some painful changes in the process (including, Brzezinski says, to a dysfunctional, paralyzed political system). But it’s worth it, chiefly because the current international order — more or less stable and free from world war for seven decades — will not maintain itself. Given what else is out there, the world still needs America.

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London.

STRATEGIC VISION

America and the Crisis of Global Power

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Illustrated. 208 pp. Basic Books. $26.

THE WORLD AMERICA MADE

By Robert Kagan

149 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $21.