Kagan’s work is wonderfully clarifying. Of the big conflicts built in to our present global reality, two preoccupy us:
1) the war on terror which cannot be the only preoccupation (and one in which we share interests with Les Russes and Les Chinoises).
and 2) the ongoing tension between liberalism and autocracy (e.g. Putin v Georgia), ongoing since sometime before Cromwell, I’d say, but since the American Revolution, at least, sez Kagan.
He mentioned other built in issues, too, globalism for one. but what is interesting and very puzzling is the fact that there is SOMETHING going on that Bobbit is calling the Market State that is not included in Kagan’s excellent overview. That something has something (exactly what I couldn’t tell us) to do with, as Wretchard put it, a Supranational association of nation states.
So, liberals in Kagan’s sense includes most Americans, conservatives, neocons, Truman-JFK guys, FDR, Wilson, and WJ Clinton. We are all opposed, we all insist, to autocracy.
Kagan points out very effectively that it was exceedingly naive for any of us to imagine “the end of history” or an eternally self-renewing “peace dividend”, but virtually all of us in liberal Anglo/Eurosphere did. Autocrats have good, principled reasons to support strongly defined nations.
Even the most conservative among us have supported the willy-nilly dilution of nations. Bobbitt calls this undefined and yet-future thingie as the “market state”, some sort of Liberty-lover’s paradise that is somehow predestined to swallow up the tedious narrow-minded and violent past.
Only it didn’t. And Kagan points out that we don’t get how destructive the Kosovo business was. We don’t realy worry or think it matters if the UK, in effect, devolves Cornwall and the Manx as part of its self-dissolution into the EU. “Freedom”, right?
Since this “market state” is coming into being and yet it is too obscure to be seen in outline, is it really not a cute fuzzy little lambie-pie, but a dreadfully retro wolf, instead?
If all are included, then none are included. If the universal market state will prevail, it will prevail as a stealth autocracy, imposed by the already rich in a bid to freeze their wealth in place. That is the precise opposite of a free market which rewards risk, innovation, and “creative destruction”.
I submit that the “market state” is most clearly seen in Brussels. It is really an atavistic congerie of bureacratic oligarchs preserving the status quo by breaking nations and peoples down into finer and finer grains of powder. It is no different than Mr. Putin’s new state and it is certainly not going to oppose or attempt to dismantle Mr. Putin’s new state.
No, the market state is a rosy-tinted, vain imagining for Pollyana-ish Liberals (Right or Left), hiding the erasure of Freedom in a fast-setting Politically Correct epoxy.
Give me an American nation preferring smaller alliances of democratic nations, and keeping the seas and continental passageways open for global free trade and innovation, and pushing back against the autocrats ad hoc.
NATO became a collective, it cannot function as an alliance of nations. So, work with an Eastern European Alliance Group, a Black Sea Treaty Organization, a Caspian Mutual Assistance Sphere, an East Asian Littoral Alliance, and so on… based upon committment to practicing democratic governance.
Nation states are capable of freedom, more so than the market state mush. Does the invisible hand of the market have a General Staff? No, and God help us when the invisible General Staff of the “Market State” reveals itself!
