The neo-cons' black and white world By Edward Luce

The following contains Edward Luce's review in the FT of Bob Kagan's book

The neo-cons' black and white world

By Edward Luce

Published: June 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 2 2008 03:00

It is often forgotten that in the 2000 Republican primaries it was John McCain, rather than George W. Bush, who was favoured by the neo-conservatives. Eight years on, the dwindling band of Republican realists are as worried about Mr McCain's proclivities now as they were alarmed by what an ideologically born-again Mr Bush did after 9/11.

There are obvious differences in both character and circumstance. Mr McCain is much more tutored in the ways of the world than Mr Bush. And since he hopes to succeed a president whose ratings have been at near-historic lows for almost three years, politics forbids Mr McCain from selling a full-throated return to neoconservatism.

But that is largely a question of nuance. In his most serious speech since becoming the Republican nominee, Mr McCain in late March set out how he would conduct foreign policy. It included eye-catching distinctions from Mr Bush: he would close Guantánamo Bay, push for a global cap and trade system for carbon emissions and restore strong relations between the US and Europe.

Yet in key respects Mr McCain's speech also promised to restore much of what drove the post-9/11 Bush. At its heart was the proposal to set up a "league of democracies" that would be led by the US but would reassuringly "complement" rather than supplant the United Nations.

However, when he moves from abstract to concrete, Mr McCain's "league" starts to look more like Donald Rumsfeld's coalition of the willing. Mr McCain would punish -Moscow's autocrats by ejecting Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial nations. He would invite democratic India and Brazil to the economic high table while spurning China. The G8's membership criteria would be based on political character rather than economic weight.

This is a review of Robert Kagan's short book, The Return of History . Since Kagan was the main author of Mr McCain's speech and since it was in key respects a distillation of his book, it makes sense to begin with the speech. For all Kagan's intellectual strengths, which are many, The Return of History is basically an argument for a restoration of Mr Bush by other means (or McBush, as some Democratic wits have it).

Kagan's main aim is to refute Francis Fukuyama's The End of History , which argued that the end of the cold war left liberal democracy with no ideological competitors. Fifteen years on, China is not democratising, Russia has abandoned its brief spell of free elections and countries such as Iran are on the rise.

Then there is what McCain calls the "transcendent" threat of Islamist -terrorism - a phenomenon that Kagan describes as "the most dramatic refutation of the [Fukuyama] convergence paradigm".

The world Kagan describes is divided into black and white: autocracies versus democracies. US foreign policy should approach the world through this bipolar lens - a kind of cold war redux. "It may not come to war," Kagan writes, "but the global competition between democratic and autocratic governments will become a dominant feature of the 21st century world."

Kagan persuasively - and at some points compellingly - sets out why China and Russia may well persist with their undemocratic trajectories for a long time to come. And if he had stopped there - roughly two-thirds of the way - this would be a good book. But when the scholar Kagan moves from the descriptive to the prescriptive, all we are left with is the neo-con. And many questions.

If America were to kick off on a new era of democracy promotion by ostracising China and Russia, which are the world's second and third-largest military powers respectively, whom would it partner to defeat the "transcendent challenge" of Islamist terrorism? Either it is transcendent or it is not.

How would it address that other great challenge - the spread of weapons of mass destruction? Would a club that included Japan but not China stand any chance of pressing Iran to renounce its nuclear ambitions? Would India want to join a group whose aim was ideological competition with its giant neighbour to the east? Would the league be democratic? If so, would the decision to intervene militarily in Sudan, say, or Burma be taken by majority vote? Or would the US have a veto?

The book offers little evidence these questions have been thought through. Nor does it appear to have absorbed the most abiding lesson of the Bush years, which is that to defeat your adversaries you must first divide them. History may well be returning. Kagan's approach would only hurry it along.

The writer is the FT's Washington bureau chief

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