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from: Bob Kagan
to: Niall Ferguson

Our Legitimacy Problem

Posted Thursday, May 6, 2004, at 4:24 PM ET

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Dear Niall,

Well, I'm sorry. You're going to have to do a better job picking a fight with me than that. Except for taking my earlier concession at face value (I cannot, I'm afraid, really accept your "imperial" or even "implicitly imperial" characterization of the United States, and I do not own a pith helmet, as it turns out), you have not offered me a great deal to disagree with. I certainly agree that the Bush administration has further damaged an alliance already damaged by the tectonic shifts of the post-Cold War world. Rumsfeld's comment about the "New" and the "Old" Europe had the great virtue of being not only offensive but also, as it turns out, wrong. I have long believed that France and Germany represent the future of Europe—the direction Europe is heading—not Poland and certainly not Spain. If there have been chances to strengthen NATO over the past few years, the Bush administration has not failed to miss them. And I truly feel for Blair. I understand he has great admiration for Bush's stolidity, matched by an equally great contempt for what he regards as French and German decadence. But Blair deserves a smarter, more helpful American ally than he has found in this administration.

However, in fairness, the Europeans may be killing NATO faster than Bush can. When I talk to Europeans, including many Britons, about reviving NATO as precisely the place where the United States can cede real influence to its partners, and thus address the legitimacy crisis, they look at me as if I'd been in a coma for the past few years and did not realize that NATO was no longer the big game in Europe. And, of course, for most Europeans it is not any longer. But when I then ask how the United States can work out a similar grand bargain with whatever institutions the European Union ultimately spits out, what precisely the mechanism for such a relationship would look like, they begin mumbling and stammering. They truth is they don't know, and the bigger truth is, they don't much care. It is no surprise that, when it comes to solving the present legitimacy crisis, we all come up short. Your "liberal empire," I see from your silence, offers no answer. Gaddis' appeal to federalism sort of trails off anticlimactically at the end of his otherwise compelling essay. Mead's answers are, I agree, not very serious at all. And my own idea of a "grand bargain," whereby the United States cedes influence in return for Europeans seeing the world more through America's eyes, sharing more the American perception of threat and what to do about it, seems at the moment not much more promising.

I do strongly disagree with your characterization of this administration's "willful misrepresentation" of the Iraq WMD threat. The Bush administration made no more of that threat than the Clinton administration did. Everyone, and I mean everyone, believed Saddam had the weapons. And they were right. Iraq admitted to having stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s, and we were not able then, and we have not been able now, to discover what happened to those stockpiles. We have discovered ongoing weapons programs and, as David Kay reported, efforts to deceive Hans Blix and his inspectors about those programs right up until the eve of war last year. Count me as among the last holdouts on this issue. I honestly do not believe we yet know the final story regarding Saddam's weapons. But, in any case, the Bush administration did not engage in "willful misrepresentation," although the fact that it is perceived to have done so has certainly not aided the quest for legitimacy.

Where I do agree with you, I'm afraid, is that the administration seems indifferent to the issue of legitimacy entirely. That is why they, and everyone else concerned with these issues, would be well advised to read the fine works of John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead. They should note well that these are two writers very sympathetic to the administration's efforts to deal with the current threats we face. And yet they are both deeply troubled by the administration's unwillingness or inability to address some of the international fallout from their actions. Can the Bush administration listen even to friendly advice?

In conclusion, Niall, let me say it's been an enjoyable conversation. You have livened the discourse here, even for those who do not agree with you on all points. And based on my own experience I predict that within a matter of weeks, if not hours, after your return to the seat of your once-great empire, you will find yourself at least as frustrated by the conversation on your own planet as on ours.

All best,
Bob

the book club
entries
123456
from: Bob Kagan
to: Niall Ferguson

Our Legitimacy Problem

Posted Thursday, May 6, 2004, at 4:24 PM ET
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Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author most recently of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author most recently of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.
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