Airstrip One

Robert Kagan: Celebrity Status - 2nd March 2003, 15.15

Robert Kagan is in London this week promoting his new book, "Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order". Kagan enjoys well-deserved authority for being one of the first to anticipate and describe the differences between American and European attitudes towards international relations. However, given that his authority is predicated upon this particular insight, he is now committed to viewing the world through a particular prism. In an interview with the Telegraph, Kagan is puzzled by Blair, who he views as an exception that does not fit his rule.

From his State Department days, he remembers Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as "peas in a pod" on almost every subject. The Blair-Bush axis he finds much more extraordinary. "Blair is something of a phenomenon. I understand the way Bush is. He's an extremely normal product of American culture. He represents the fundamental average American. But Blair is something else. He has become a world historical figure who is not acting according to predictable political patterns.

"What he's persuaded Bush to do is amazing. There's no way that Bush would be going for a second resolution if Blair were not asking for it. Blair has succeeded in roping Bush - as far as possible - into a European vision of an international system where the United States seeks legitimacy for its actions. The transatlantic relationship is hanging by a thread and it is being held by Tony Blair."

Why has the Prime Minister risked so much? "For Blair there was no low-risk option anywhere on the board. Imagine if he had taken the Franco-German line. He might have resurrected the British Conservative Party in one move! Downsides were obvious whichever way he turned.

"But the one he is most concerned about transcends his own political career: the damage that would have been done to Britain's relationship with the US if he had sided with the French. That would have been a genuine turning-point in history."

That last sentence is a telling admission from the author. Despite his framework, he is unable to explain or predict the actions of a 21st century Gladstonian like Blair, and covers up his failure with the figleaf of a political sport like Asimov's Mule. The institutional ties that underpin the transatlantic relationship of the United States and Great Britain have weathered far greater divisions in foreign policy goals and the phrase "hanging by a thread" would have been far more accurate if we had seen institutional disarray in NATO.

Kagan has provided some remarkable insight into the assumptions that underlie the assumptions of the European elite in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. That Weltanschaaung has already been tested and found wanting as many European states find their Eden is disrupted by Macmillan's pithy mantra concerning the power of events. Kagan argues that the European view of a counterweight will win out and does not recognise the ever-important concept of national interest that governs the actions of most European nations. Given the clarifying power of diplomacy and war in the coming weeks, Kagan's thoughts will prove to be one of the better analyses of 2002, but they have now been outpaced by the current 'diplomatic revolution'.