Monday, February 13, 2012

Robert Kagan: So Close, Yet So Far

As I scanned this Wall Street journal article by Robert Kagan ("The Romney advisor read by Democrats"), I started to believe there was hope for the right wing, that somewhere in there was a seed that could germinate and become a 21st century flower in the garden of thought.
 
HAH! Until I got to this:
Both Beijing and Moscow already protect dictators like Syria's Bashar al-Assad. If they gain greater relative influence in the future, we will see fewer democratic transitions and more autocrats hanging on to power. The balance in a new, multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democracies—Brazil, India, Turkey, South Africa—picked up the slack from a declining U.S. Yet not all of them have the desire or the capacity to do it.
Kagan misses an obvious point here: it wasn't until American military power and moral authority began to cave that we saw the Arab Spring, because we propped up our own autocrats, like Saddam Hussein, like the Shah of Iran, like Muammar Qaddafy (at least in the Bush years,) like Hosni Mubarak and any number of felons and thugs that we've given comfort to in the name of "American interests."
 
Bob, you lost all credibility with this. Go back and re-read a history book.