Urban Verbs
(real) men are from Mars (U S), girly-men are from Venus (E U).
There was a post on Michelle Malkins' web log last week titled
NO GIRLIE MEN ALLOWED. An Arnold reference, not even quoting himself, but Saturday Night Live satire of himself.
Over the week-end while catching up with Arts and Letters Daily I came across the article in Foreign Policy
the Metrosexual Superpower which was what set Mark Steyn off, which was the paticular thing MM was applauding. Rather than read Steyn, I went looking for the possible source of the Robert Kagan reference Kanna made. Conservative noses' are out of joint by the style of the urbane sophisticates of the old europe (a book by Michael Flocker seems to lurk at the center of all this). This led me to a Kagan article in Foreign affairs from earlier this year
America's Crisis of Legitimacy (Foreign Affairs; Mar/Apr2004, Vol. 83 Issue 2, p65, 23p) which if not the right one would do.
Mostly this is just a (re)-affirmation of his significant piece (power and weakness : Policy Rev no. 114) from 2 years ago. He tries to claim American foreign policy has always been unilateral, even when it wasn't. He calls this the 'bipolar predicament'. A lazy weak europe tolerated even welcomed the gathered Soviet shadow because of their equal fear of the specter of U S hard hegonomy and/or Frances soft hegonomy. They and their economies have thrived in this cloisterd largely neutral existence, a complex weave of transnational agreements and organizations
If the United States is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then, it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington's behavior.
This is not to argue that the Europeans' demand that the United States seek international legitimization is simply self-serving. Because of their own history, and because they now operate within an international organization, the European Union, that requires multilateral agreement on all matters, Europeans' respect for the legitimacy derived from multilateral negotiation and international legal institutions is often sincere. But ideals and self-interest frequently coincide, and Europe's assaults on the legitimacy of U.S. dominance may also become an effective way of constraining and controlling the superpower. Legitimacy, the senior British diplomat Robert Cooper has written, "is as much a source of power as force."Undoubtedly, there are many in Europe who hope this is true.
Kagan wanly supports the formula Legitimacy=Multilateralist though he feels for the EU it is a description of legal status, where for Americans it is merely general practical policy : ...'Multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary' was the catechism of the Clinton administration... he quotes approvingly. Followed by ...legitimacy is a genuinely elusive and malleable concept .
As he wraps up in the last section We see him try to come to terms with how he feels: tempted to ...dismiss the debate over legitimacy as a ruse and a fraud.... While acknowledging: The alternative course would be difficult for the United States to sustain... . Kagan arrives at position that the U S cannot avoid seeking legitimacy on the worlds terms, whatever they might be and he hates that. Still, he reasons
. The United States, in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature: by promoting the principles of liberal democracy not only as a means to greater security but as an end in itself. Success would bring it a measure of authority in the liberal, democratic world, including among Europeans, who cannot forever ignore their own vision of a more humane world, even if these days they are more preoccupied with strengthening the international legal order
Possibly the vision of a more humane world the Europeans possess contains within it a glimpse of the less humane one that lies behind the door of un-apologetic power. Neoconservative Unilateralism in the raw is not sustainable and not really part of the U S foreign policy tradition Wilsonian or otherwise. Neoconservatives demonstrate a certain unwillingness comprehending multiple forms of power seeming to value only primal physical force. One often finds them singing of men and arms. More subtle forms leave them feeling cheated somehow as though constrained to running a race holding weights. Perhaps they are placing too much emphasis on an absolute metaphoric dichotomy of male and female ways of being and supremacy of a male power nature, they can claim by the sympathetic magic of speaking its name, and speaking yannically of their enemies.
[Noted that the Foreign Affairs article of Kagans is only the abstract I have an URL to the EBSCO host full text of that article America's Crisis of Legitimacy.
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