The Wall Street Journal has a thought provoking article by Mr. Kagan – a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The key take away are:
- International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition
- Democratic progress and liberal economics have been and can be reversed and undone.
- The better idea doesn’t have to win just because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it.
- In a genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies.
- The move from American-dominated oceans to collective policing by several great powers could be a recipe for competition and conflict rather than for a liberal economic order.
- Rough parity among powerful nations is a source of uncertainty that leads to miscalculation. Conflicts erupt as a result of fluctuations in the delicate power equation.
Read the whole thing here. It would be time well spent.