Tony Judt on Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan wants it both ways. At the end of his book he rather limply asks that Americans and Europeans show better mutual comprehension; but the foregoing 100 pages display not just ignorance of the recent European past and current European diversity, but an undertone of arrogant condescension, mixed with a certain amount of humbug. "The problem," he writes, is that "the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe's post-modern norms." But the norms that Washington currently violates are its own - there is nothing uniquely European, much less post-modern, about the rule of law or the desirability of peace over war.