IT IS TIME to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power—the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power—American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s “perpetual peace.” Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory—the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.
It is easier to see the contrast as an American living in Europe. Europeans are more conscious of the growing differences, perhaps because they fear them more. European intellectuals are nearly unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common “strategic culture.” The European caricature at its most extreme depicts an America dominated by a “culture of death,” its warlike temperament the natural product of a violent society where every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns. But even those who do not make this crude link agree there are profound differences in the way the United States and Europe conduct foreign policy.
The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. When confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favor policies of coercion rather than persuasion, emphasizing punitive sanctions over inducements to better behavior, the stick over the carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: They want problems solved, threats eliminated. And, of course, Americans increasingly tend toward unilateralism in international affairs. They are less inclined to act through international institutions such as the United Nations, less likely to work cooperatively with other nations to pursue common goals, more skeptical about international law, and more willing to operate outside its strictures when they deem it necessary, or even merely useful.1
Europeans insist they approach problems with greater nuance and sophistication. They try to influence others through subtlety and indirection. They are more tolerant of failure, more patient when solutions don’t come quickly. They generally favor peaceful responses to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy, and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to appeal to international law, international conventions, and international opinion to adjudicate disputes. They try to use commercial and economic ties to bind nations together. They often emphasize process over result, believing that ultimately process can become substance.
This European portrait is a dual caricature, of course, with its share of exaggerations and oversimplifications. One cannot generalize about Europeans: Britons may have a more “American” view of power than many Europeans on the Continent. Their memory of empire, the “special relationship” with the United States forged in World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, and their historically aloof position with regard to the rest of Europe tend to set them apart. Nor can one simply lump French and Germans together: the first proud and independent but also surprisingly insecure, the second mingling self-confidence with self-doubt since the end of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the nations of Eastern and Central Europe have an entirely different history from their Western European neighbors, a historically rooted fear of Russian power and consequently a more American view of the Hobbesian realities. And, of course, there are differing perspectives within nations on both sides of the Atlantic. French Gaullists are not the same as French Socialists. In the United States, Democrats often seem more “European” than Republicans; Secretary of State Colin Powell may appear more “European” than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Many Americans, especially among the intellectual elite, are as uncomfortable with the “hard” quality of American foreign policy as any European; and some Europeans value power as much as any American.
Nevertheless, the caricatures do capture an essential truth: The United States and Europe are fundamentally different today. Powell and Rumsfeld have more in common than do Powell and the foreign ministers of France, Germany, or even Great Britain. When it comes to the use of force, most mainstream American Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they do with most Europeans. During the 1990s even American liberals were more willing to resort to force and were more Manichean in their perception of the world than most of their European counterparts. The Clinton administration bombed Iraq as well as Afghanistan and Sudan. Most European governments, it is safe to say, would not have done so and were, indeed, appalled at American militarism. Whether Europeans even would have bombed Belgrade in 1999 had the United States not forced their hand is an interesting question.2 In October 2002, a majority of Senate Democrats supported the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war with Iraq, while their political counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and even the United Kingdom looked on in amazement and some horror.
What is the source of these differing strategic perspectives? The question has received too little attention in recent years. Foreign policy intellectuals and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have denied the existence of genuine differences or sought to make light of present disagreements, noting that the transatlantic alliance has had moments of tension in the past. Those who have taken the present differences more seriously, especially in Europe, have been more interested in assailing the United States than in understanding why the United States acts as it does—or, for that matter, why Europe acts as it does. It is past time to move beyond the denial and the insults and to face the problem head-on.
Despite what many Europeans and some Americans believe, these differences in strategic culture do not spring naturally from the national characters of Americans and Europeans. What Europeans now consider their more peaceful strategic culture is, historically speaking, quite new. It represents an evolution away from the very different strategic culture that dominated Europe for hundreds of years—at least until World War I. The European governments—and peoples—who enthusiastically launched themselves into that continental war believed in Machtpolitik . They were fervent nationalists who had been willing to promote the national idea through force of arms, as the Germans had under Bismarck, or to promote egalité and fraternité with the sword, as Napoleon had attempted earlier in the century, or to spread the blessings of liberal civilization through the cannon’s mouth, as the British had throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The European order that came into being with the unification of Germany in 1871 was, “like all its predecessors, created by war.”3 While the roots of the present European worldview, like the roots of the European Union itself, can be traced back to the Enlightenment, Europe’s great-power politics for the past three hundred years did not follow the visionary designs of the philosophes and the Physiocrats.
As for the United States, there is nothing timeless about the present heavy reliance on force as a tool of international relations, nor about the tilt toward unilateralism and away from a devotion to international law. Americans are children of the Enlightenment, too, and in the early years of the republic were more faithful apostles of its creed. At its birth America was the great hope of Enlightenment Europeans, who despaired of their own continent and viewed America as the one place “where reason and humanity” might “develop more rapidly than anywhere else.”4 The rhetoric, if not always the practice, of early American foreign policy was suffused with the principles of the Enlightenment. American statesmen of the late eighteenth century, like the European statesmen of today, extolled the virtues of commerce as the soothing balm of international strife and appealed to international law and international opinion over brute force. The young United States wielded power against weaker peoples on the North American continent, but when it came to dealing with the European giants, it claimed to abjure power and assailed as atavistic the power politics of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European empires.
Some historians have gleaned from this the mistaken view that the American founding generation was utopian, that it genuinely considered power politics “alien and repulsive” and was simply unable to “comprehend the importance of the power factor in foreign relations.”5 But George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and even Thomas Jefferson were not utopians. They were well versed in the realities of international power politics. They could play by European rules when circumstances permitted and often wished they had the power to play the game of power politics more effectively. But they were realistic enough to know that they were weak, and both consciously and unconsciously they used the strategies of the weak to try to get their way in the world. They denigrated power politics and claimed an aversion to war and military power, all realms in which they were far inferior to the European great powers. They extolled the virtues and ameliorating effects of commerce, where Americans competed on a more equal plane. They appealed to international law as the best means of regulating the behavior of nations, knowing well they had few other means of constraining Great Britain and France. They knew from their reading of Vattel that in international law, “strength or weakness . . . counts for nothing. A dwarf is as much a man as a giant is; a small Republic is no less a sovereign State than the most powerful Kingdom.”6 Later generations of Americans, possessed of a great deal more power and influence on the world stage, would not always be as enamored of this constraining egalitarian quality of international law. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the great European powers that did not always want to be constrained.
Two centuries later, Americans and Europeans have traded places—and perspectives. This is partly because in those two hundred years, and especially in recent decades, the power equation has shifted dramatically: When the United States was weak, it practiced the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do. When the European great powers were strong, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now they see the world through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different points of view have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing them, different calculations of interest, and differing perspectives on the value and meaning of international law and international institutions.
But even the power gap offers only part of the explanation for the broad gulf that has opened between the United States and Europe. For along with these natural consequences of the transatlantic disparity of power, there has also opened a broad ideological gap. Europeans, because of their unique historical experience of the past century— culminating in the creation of the European Union—have developed a set of ideals and principles regarding the utility and morality of power different from the ideals and principles of Americans, who have not shared that experience. If the strategic chasm between the United States and Europe appears greater than ever today, and grows still wider at a worrying pace, it is because these material and ideological differences reinforce one another. The divisive trend they together produce may be impossible to reverse.
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羅伯特卡根的《天堂與權力》廣受好評
「羅伯特·卡根的這本小書，巧妙地將戰略與哲學、權力的現實與權力的倫理、美國的正義理想與歐洲的和平理想並置，可謂意義深遠。自雷蒙·阿隆去世以來，還沒有人寫出過類似的作品。”
——萊昂‧維塞爾蒂爾
“精妙絕倫。”
—— 《新共和》
「簡潔有力、意義重大，是對這本篇幅不長的書的最佳概括，它篇幅雖短，卻蘊含著深刻的信息……書中觀點固然頗具爭議，但所有有責任感的公民都應該讀一讀這本書。”
— 《書單》（星級評論）
“從華盛頓到東京，外交政策機構都在密切運作……它被稱為新的‘X’條款。”
——《華盛頓郵報》
“一本條理清晰的新書……卡根的論述非常公正客觀……他的分析很有價值，也很有啟發性。”
—底特律自由報
「卡根這篇引人深思、發人深省的文章，是所有關心跨大西洋關係未來的人的必讀之作……儘管並非所有人都會同意卡根的分析，但讀者定會從其清晰的論述、深刻的見解和歷史的力度中獲益。”
——參議員約翰·麥凱恩
“分析精闢而富有同理心…見解深刻。”
—— 《西雅圖時報》
羅伯特·卡根在其新書的第一段寫道：“‘美國人來自火星，歐洲人來自金星’……這或許是任何一位外交政策學者對解釋跨大西洋在國際關係中權力行使問題上長期存在的爭端所提出的最佳精闢概括……論證充分……見解深刻。”
—— 《紐約觀察家報》
“卡根的寫作技巧嫻熟，學識淵博，論證嚴密。”
— 《國家評論》
“任何想要了解伊拉克衝突中地緣政治力量的入門讀物的人都應該訂購一本羅伯特·卡根的《天堂與權力》。”
—— 《星期日電訊報》（倫敦）
“這篇令人耳目一新的文章源於深思熟慮和翔實信息。閱讀之後，您將會對這個重要領域有更深入的思考。”
——喬治‧P‧舒爾茨
史丹佛大學胡佛研究所傑出研究員
“傑出的。”
——弗朗西斯·福山
「民主的西方已經分裂成兩派：一派是務實的美國，信賴武力；另一派是理想主義的歐洲，信賴知識權威和多邊主義。誠然，正如卡根先生所闡明的，美國的外交政策仍然保留著強烈的理想主義成分，但卡根先生在此捍衛的，是其必要時孤軍奮戰、採取強硬行動的決心，而且他的捍衛。
—— 《華爾街日報》
“卡根以冷靜而又致命的準確度描述了（當前的氣候）。”
—— 《華盛頓郵報》
“身材纖細，才華橫溢。”
—商業周刊
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第一版，Vintage Books出版社，2004年1月
版權所有 © 2003、2004 Robert Kagan
Vintage 和 colophon 是 Random House, Inc. 的註冊商標。
本文的簡短版本最初以題為「權力與弱點」的文章發表在《政策評論》（2002 年 6 月/7 月）。
出版品編目資料存檔於美國國會圖書館。
作者照片 © Claudio Vazquez
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
電子書ISBN：978-0-307-42709-0
v3.0
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