"Inevitable Progress"

In "Trump’s America does not care" Robert Kagan presents an interesting analysis of the Trump revolution from the perspective of international diplomacy: "the United States as rogue superpower, neither isolationist nor internationalist, neither withdrawing nor in decline, but active, powerful and entirely out for itself."

Kagan observes that "Trump is not merely neglecting the liberal world order; he is milking it for narrow gain, rapidly destroying the trust and sense of common purpose that have held it together and prevented international chaos for seven decades."

As we have seen over the past two years, the role of the U.S. in the international order has been turned upside down. Common sense dictates that even an election of a Democrat as president in 2020 can not reverse this because once "America First" takes hold and requires a "Me First" or an "Us First" from other nations, excluding the U.S., other countries know they can not count on the U.S. to honor treaties or commitments from one administration to the next.

Kagan states, "Trump’s world is a struggle of all-against-all. There are no relationships based on common values. There are merely transactions determined by power. It is the world that a century ago brought us two world wars."

Kagan writes more expansively on a similar theme in "The strongmen strike back: Authoritarianism has reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. And we have no idea how to confront it."

In this piece he recounts the history of the tension between authoritarianism and liberal democracy over the past several hundred years, with the First World War largely representing a great battle between the two and the Second World War marking the defeat of authoritarians and a "new birth" for liberalism.

Of interest to readers of this blog, Kagan remarks that the authoritarians are succeeding in ways never imagined since the end of the Cold War. He writes:

"It has been decades since liberal democracies took this challenge seriously. The end of the Cold War seemed like indisputable proof of the correctness of the Enlightenment view — the belief in inexorable progress, both moral and scientific, toward the achievement of the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of every individual. History was “the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it in 1830; or as Francis Fukuyama wrote in "The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992, there were fundamental processes at work dictating 'a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies — in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.'” [emphasis added]

This observation about the current reversal of progress belies "the belief in inexorable progress"on a global scale that mirrors the belief in "Inevitable Progress" expressed as Point #4 of the Six Points keynote page of this blog.