Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru … is a neocon
On the eve of the President’s last State of the Union speech the White House let it be known that a recent essay by Robert Kagan in The New Republic, which excerpted his book, The World America Made, had been sent to his national security staff for their perusal. As the President told reporters beforehand, Kagan’s thesis – that America is not in decline and must maintain its hegemonic stature in the world, or all is lost – was a major theme of his peroration. [...] That President Barack Obama, ostensibly a Democrat of the liberal variety, was touting the views of a neoconservative foreign policy maven whose work has been published in The Weekly Standard, should come as a surprise to exactly no one. The overarching bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of global intervention ensures that foreign policy disputes are limited to “debates” over means rather than ends. In short, it isn’t a question of whether we ought to have an empire, but of how to best to maintain and expand it.