The frozen world view of a McCain guru

FOR SOME on the political right, Russia's overreaction to Georgia's attempt to pull a fast one in South Ossetia is a source of satisfaction and we-told-you-so. For those steeped in nostalgia for the Cold War, Russia will always be an enemy - and that goes for China, too.

One of the best and brightest of conservative writers is Robert Kagan, whose brilliant essay "Of Paradise and Power," in which he conceived that Europeans are from Venus and Americans from Mars, has become a modern classic.

Recently he wrote in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that Russia's lunge into Georgia was "neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural," according to Kagan, "a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging."

Today's so-called realists, Kagan says, are "supposed to be locked into some titanic struggle with neoconservatives . . . but rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion, and international laws." Sissy stuff. Today's namby-pamby realists, he says, are fond of quoting George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Reinhold Niebuhr, "but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naïve." Kagan scorns those of us who think that George H.W. Bush's ways of doing business on the world stage were better than his son's.

All this would be academic were not Kagan a foreign policy adviser to John McCain's campaign, and it is there that the struggle between realists and neoconservatives is being played out.

In Kagan's view, realists today no longer see the world as Hans Morgenthau did, as "an anarchic system in which nations consistently pursue 'interests defined by power,' but as a world of converging interests in which economics, not power, is the primary driving force. Thus Russia and China are not interested in expanding their power so much as enhancing their economic well being and security."

Although there is some truth in Kagan's thesis, written with his usual élan, human nature can be curbed and modified, and nations do change. Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, is not Stalin or even Alexander I. Germany is no longer the Germany of Bismarck, let alone Hitler, and France is not the France of Napoleon. The Soviet Union and Mao's China bear little resemblance to today's Russia and China. There is not the unbridgeable gap between capitalism and communism that there once was.

As for economics, there can be no power without a strong economy.

I know of no realists who believe that diplomacy is always sufficient without being backed up by potential force. Nor is it naïve to say that it is more effective to have other nations follow your lead, and behave as you want them to behave, because they perceive it in their best interest, rather than succumbing to bullying. And if there are some converging interests, why not encourage the convergence, as the European Union has done?

Clearly China wants to be part of the world economic system and has little interest in threatening neighbors. True, China believes Taiwan should one day return to the fold, but is not bent on invading Taiwan and accepts the status quo as long as Taiwan does.

As for Russia, it cannot be excused for its lunge into Georgia, but it was the US-trained Georgian Army that upset the status quo in South Ossetia. Nations, like human beings, can feel threatened and lash out when attacked, but hostility is not an immutable trait.

It would do no harm to recognize that Russia has an interest in what happens in the countries along its southern flank as does the United States on this continent.

To view Russia and China as nothing more than villains striving to expand their power at the expense of the West is simply to fight the last war, the Cold War, over and over when the geopolitical terrain has changed. It is the dependence on military power, and the bluster of the neoconservatives, that has weakened America's ability to achieve its goals, and it would be misguided indeed if this were to continue beyond the life of the present administration.

How about a little less Mars next time around?

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.