An article today in the unhappy New York Times purports to describe the Republican Party’s "fractious" divisions around John McCain’s foreign policy ideas. Pragmatists are locked in fierce battle with Neoconservatives, among them the "prominent neoconservative" Robert Kagan. Aaargh.

This clumsy piece maybe explains why those NYT share prices have been drifting downwards.

Instead I commend to anyone interested in international affairs a long but penetrating piece by Kagan himself which explores how different ideas about the merits of ‘interventionism’ have been a long feature of US history, with Republicans and Democrats alike to be found on different sides of the arguments.

Stick with this fascinating historical analysis until the final paragraphs, where Kagan makes a vital philosophical point:

History will judge whether the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake or not. But if it was, what kind of mistake was it? Was it an error of judgment and calculation or an error of doctrine, and if the latter, which doctrine? We could have such a debate, but we are only pretending to have it now.

Kagan points out how hard it is to get the balance right:

People understandably want a foreign policy doctrine that produces only the results they desire and avoids all errors. Unfortunately, no such doctrine exists. A doctrine that precluded war with Iraq would also likely preclude going to war over Kosovo, just as a strategy that guaranteed America would never go to war in Vietnam might not have been successful in the Cold War.

And he concludes:

In fact, the expansive, idealistic, and at times militaristic American approach to foreign policy has produced some accomplishments of world historical importance—the defeat of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism—as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the failures, derived not from innocence or purity of motive, and not because Americans abided by an imagined ideal of conduct in the world, but from the very qualities that often make Americans queasy: their willingness to accumulate and use power, their ambition and sense of honor, their spiritedness in defense of both interests and principles, their dissatisfaction with the status quo and belief in the possibility of change. Are we really interested in abandoning this course?

Elegant and subtle. If John McCain is listening to him, fine by me.