Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan is an American neoconservative scholar, a critic of U.S. foreign policy, and a leading advocate of liberal interventionism. A co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, he is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kagan has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for The Washington Post. 

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kagan left the Republican Party due to the party's nomination of Donald Trump and endorsed the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, for president. Kagan was born in Athens, Greece. His father, historian Donald Kagan, the Sterling Professor of Classics and History Emeritus at Yale University and a specialist in the history of the Peloponnesian War, was of Lithuanian Jewish descent. 

His brother, Frederick, is a military historian and author. Kagan has a BA in history (1980) from Yale, where in 1979, he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a periodical he is credited with reviving. He later earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in American history from American University in Washington, D.C.

Kagan is married to American diplomat Victoria Nuland, who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration since April 2021, and previously as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Barack Obama administration. Nuland held the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest diplomatic rank in the United States Foreign Service. She is noted for her criticism of Russian policies.

Kagan is a columnist for The Washington Post. He has also written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, World Affairs, and Policy Review. Regarding Kagan's July 2000 opinion piece "Problem with Powell," Guy Roberts stated that "PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan sought to explain core differences" between the positions of the neoconservatives and those of Colin Powell. In that piece, Kagan wrote,

The problem with Powell is his political and strategic judgment. He doesn’t believe the United States should enter conflicts without strong public support, but he also doesn't believe that the public will support anything. That kind of iron logic rules out almost every conceivable post-Cold War intervention. Clarence Lusane has described Kagan as blaming Powell "for Saddam Hussein remaining in power" in the Washington Post piece.

In a subsequent opinion piece, "Spotlight on Colin Powell" (The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 12, 2002), Kagan praised Powell for "[a]rticulately defending the new Bush Doctrine" and declaring "his support for 'regime change' in Iraq."

In 2003, Kagan's book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, published on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, created something of a sensation through its assertions that Europeans tended to favor peaceful resolutions of international disputes while the United States takes a more "Hobbesian" view in which some kinds of disagreement can only be settled by force, or, as he put it: "Americans are from Mars, and Europe is from Venus." A New York Times book reviewer, Ivo H. Daalder, wrote:

When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways, writes Mr. Kagan, concluding, in words already famous in another context, 'Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.'

In Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2006), Kagan argued forcefully against what he considers the widespread misconception that the United States had been isolationist since its inception. Georgetown University awarded dangerous Nation the 2007 Lepgold Prize.

Kagan's essay "Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline" (The New Republic, February 2, 2012) was very positively received by President Obama. Josh Rogin reported in Foreign Policy that the president "spent more than 10 minutes talking about it...going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph." The essay was excerpted from Kagan's book, The World America Made (2012). John Bew and Kagan lectured on March 27, 2014, on Realpolitik and American exceptionalism at the Library of Congress.