Something puzzling just happened in Washington: a liberal American president who opposed the invasion of Iraq endorsed one of its chief neoconservative advocates. By embracing Robert Kagan’s essay, “The Myth of America’s Decline”, Barack Obama has done the author a turn. The essay is excerpted from Mr Kagan’s book, The World that America Made, which comes out later this month.
“America is back,” Mr Obama said in his State of the Union address 10 days ago. “Anyone who tells you America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Mr Obama “loved” the Kagan essay, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, later revealed on the talkshow presented by Charlie Rose. The president had gone over it point by point at a White House meeting.
Mr Kagan, who also wrote “Europeans are from Mars, Americans are from Venus”, the provocative post-Iraq book, has written a clear and powerfully-argued essay. But Mr Obama might want to scan it more closely. Start with its economic facts. Mr Kagan says that in 1969 the US had “roughly a quarter” of the world’s income. “Today it still produces roughly a quarter,” Kagan wrote. “America’s share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably steady.”