One of the weirdest ticks of hawkish types that extoll the virtues of American hegemony is the disdian they have for the European approach to geopolitics. To them, it’s downright shameful that Europe — after having tens of millions killed in decades of massive war — has largely departed from high military expenditures and gaining influence through their military might in favor of economic cooperation. To them, it’s a sign of Europe’s weakness and, even worse, hypocricy, as they free-ride of American military might.
What’s odd about this argument is that American hegemony — which they favor — is supposed to bring about this state of affairs. The entire point of a unipolar system to provide two things, which are really the same, stability and a set of public goods that benefit everyone (they are, after all, public). One of these public goods is protection against the rise of revisionist powers that want to screw the global order. The idea is that the US’ security umbrella will allow Europe to de-militarize, thus neutralizing the threat of a resurgent Germany, or even more hypothetically, a resurgent Russia. This isn’t Europe being weak, or America being particularly strong - it’s just the way it’s supposed to work. So it shouldn’t be the neoconservatives and the hegemonists (I really try to use that term in a value neutral way) that get all high and mighty when extolling America’s willingness to allow Europe, instead, they should point to European welfare-states and stability with pride.
All of this is a long way of saying that Robert Kagan’s Post Op-Ed chiding Europe for practicing “postmodern” global politics while Russia plays bare-knuckle power politics very unconvincing. He points to Russia playing nasty with its “near abroad” — getting testy with Georgia, attacking Estonia’s cyber infrastructure, exercising influence by refusing to sell gas — as a sign that Europe’s politics, which involve inviting people into a club that guarantees access to large markets and economic growth and stability, are not working. I guess all I can say is that Kagan is clearly incorrect. Since 1991, Russia was shedding influence and power, while the EU literally had countries begging to join it. They’ve been so successful at integrating so many former Russia-sphere countries so quickly that it is now taken as a sign of failure or weakness that they appear to be drawing a line (temporarily) at a large, poor, Muslim country (Turkey).
Kagan asks, after unconvincingly trying to tell us that Russia is somehow competing with Europe - despite the massive corruption and depopulation — “Can [Europe] bring a knife to a knife fight?” This is an incredibly shortsighted and misleading question. If you look at the major trends, you have two political systems, the EU and Russia. One has sporadic, oddly distributed and highly corrupt resource-driven growth, the other has sustained, roughly egalitarian growth based on technological innovation and productivity increases. One attracts hundreds of thousands of migrants, has decent fertility and has managed to massively expand — peacefully — for more than a decade, the other is facing depopulation and has been shrinking geopolitically and demographically since the early 1990s. Sure, with high gas prices, Russia is able to throw its weight around in its super near abroad (Georgia, Moldova) while what was once it’s true near-abroad (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states) have firmly decided that they want to be part of Europe.
So the reason Europe isn’t bringing a “knife to a knife fight” is that there is no fight, or at least not one worth fighting.
