Since the Democratic Party’s decisive electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, the Tea Party movement has helped to re-energize conservatism. The movement has focused largely on domestic politics, promoting limited government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty. The reality is, however, that when it comes to foreign policy the conservative movement is being pulled in multiple, and often mutually exclusive, directions. Some believe that democracy promotion should be the cornerstone of American foreign policy while others do not. Quite simply, the conservative movement does not have a coherent foreign policy platform. Going forward, it will be important for conservatives to articulate a clear foreign policy platform. What is at stake is not the success of the conservative movement or a political party…
Posts Tagged ‘Robert Kagan’
Robert Kagan and The Return of History
After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, some defense analysts and international relations scholars believed that a new, peaceful era would emerge. One scholar, Francis Fukuyama, built his career on this idealistic hypothesis (which he now backed away from). He wrote a an article in 1989 entitled “The End of History?” which concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed over authoritarian forms of government. In an article yesterday, Robert Kagan examined the growing power of the authoritarian regimes of Moscow and Beijing and the “return of history”:
One wonders whether Russia’s invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world’s democracies after the close of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet…