Home › Authors › Robert Kagan
Robert Kagan Quotes
born 1958 United States
Robert Kagan (born 26 September 1958) is a neoconservative American historian and foreign policy commentator. During the 2016 presidential election, he left the Republican Party, due to the party's nomination of Donald Trump and endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Also known as: Kagan, Robert
Random Robert Kagan quote
10 quotes
When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.
No one sitting in Germany in 1945 would have said, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just natural to become a democracy.”
In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.
The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States...
The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction.
The United States was losing interest in preserving European security, but at the same time it was hostile to European aspirations to take on the task themselves. Europeans complained about American perfidy, and Americans complained about European weakness and ingratitude.
And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.
The formula for defeating Trump in November [2024] is simple enough: Unite the Democrats, and split the Republicans.
Americans officials have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe really have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem on Iraq — by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action — than they have ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
American nationalism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism. No one's an American just because they were born in America or had American parents. American nationalism is built around this idea - and it happened to be, certainly at the time, an extremely revolutionary idea that only Americans believed in, by the way, at the time. Which was the principle of universal rights...
Topics Robert Kagan is quoted on