Wake-up call
A few weeks ago I told you that I liked Robert Kagan’s book Of Paradise and Power. I liked it so much I ordered a more recent work of his, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. I again appreciated his clear analysis that seems to me to be realistic without being cynical. I’ll commend the book simply by quoting from his concluding section:
The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas and on the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Our political scientists posit theories of modernization, with sequential stages of political and economic development that lead upwards to liberalism. Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer. Naturally, many are inclined to believe that the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage forward in humanity’s march from strife and aggression towards a peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
The illusion is just true enough to be dangerous.
If I was forced to boast about only of your skills, I would probably start with the fact that you can read books like this and comprehend the message, whereas I would simply drool and say, “Huh?”.