Even Robert Kagan, the King Neocon himself, is not so much walking back his bellicose imperialism as running away from it:
In 1997, Kagan co-founded Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank that lobbied for a muscular foreign policy and the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony. The group exercised its considerable influence to push regime change in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Kagan’s advocacy has always been based on a belief that the world would collapse into disorder without American leadership, even though U.S. military misadventures have repeatedly destabilized parts of the world.....
Kagan: I do reject it, not only because it has taken on connotations that I think are frankly antisemitic, but because it’s just a bad description of what I am. What I am is a liberal. Lib-er-al. My foreign policy is liberal. If you look back on the history of American foreign policy, the people who have pursued the policies that I favor have always tended to be progressive and liberal. And conservative foreign policy in America has always tended to be in the direction of restraint. I worked for the neoconservatives. I worked for Irving Kristol. They were called neoconservatives because they had been on the left and then they were newly on the right.
Now, all of this is absolutely absurd, as Simplicius notes.
Someone is extremely defensive over the repudiation of what is essentially his life’s work. This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to salvage credibility. In accordance with the extremely tetchy tenor of his responses, Kagan again reverts to knee-jerk defensiveness… It’s clear he realizes how bad he looks in hindsight and can’t help but adopt an almost whiny tone in attempting to rewrite his key role in America’s geopolitical depletion.
I’ve read Kagan’s books, and he’s been methodically retreating from the idea that America’s military can impose satanic imperialism on the world for nearly 20 years now, despite his previous advocacy of it. The jungle, as he calls it, has proven to be significantly more resistant to the order he wishes to impose out of the chaos that he, his wife, and the other neocons have been causing for at least the last 40 years.
