Dangerous Nation

"I think Kagan is the most important neoconservative foreign policy thinker of the post-9/11 era. He’s someone whom I have great respect for, even though we disagree about some things. Dangerous Nation is Kagan’s history of American foreign policy in the 19th century ­– it’s the first half of a two-part history of American foreign policy that he is writing. The Fight is for Democracy is a liberal response to 9/11; Dangerous Nation is a more conservative take. Kagan suggests that the Bush administration responded to 9/11 in a way that flowed from a very deep tradition. He suggests that since America’s founding it’s been what he called “the dangerous nation”. By that he meant a nation not content to accept the world as it is, but a nation with the desire to shape the world in accordance with not only our interests but also our values. So I think that Kagan has been involved in a very ambitious and interesting project to suggest that neoconservative foreign policy and the Bush administration’s foreign policy have very deep roots, even going back to the 19th century. American exceptionalism has always meant different things to different people. There’s a strand that suggests that what makes us exceptional is our distance from world events – that we’re not polluted by them. But what neoconservatives often take American exceptionalism to mean is that we have a special mission and that the more we are freed from international constraints on our power, the more good we will do. That idea was definitely supercharged by 9/11. That’s partly because 9/11 hit at a time when America was unusually powerful compared to other nations – militarily, economically and ideologically. And also because that belief in America’s exceptional destiny fed popular support for using American power in very ambitious ways."