Robert Kagan quotes

Robert Kagan is an American historian, author, and foreign policy commentator, known for his influential work on U.S. international relations. His writings have shaped debates about American power and intervention around the world. He is regarded as a leading voice among neoconservative thinkers and has contributed to major publications and policy discussions. Here are 20 of his quotes:

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus: they agree on little and understand each other less and less.

Robert Kagan

I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

Robert Kagan

I believe it is still true that conflicts among major powers usually stem from geopolitical rivalries but rarely from economic competition.

Robert Kagan

When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.

Robert Kagan

In my view, America has never had the opportunity to enter paradise. Europe enjoys the paradise it enjoys, in part because the United States provides the overall security that allows Europe to live in a system where military power is not a major issue.

Robert Kagan

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.

Robert Kagan

And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.

Robert Kagan

The vast majority of Europeans always believed that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction.

Robert Kagan

The United States was losing interest in preserving European security, but at the same time it was hostile to European aspirations to take on the task themselves. Europeans complained about American perfidy, and Americans complained about European weakness and ingratitude.

Robert Kagan

Under our Constitution, military leaders have no choice but to endorse the president's decision after giving him their best advice.

Robert Kagan

The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States (Of Paradise and Power, p. 19)

Robert Kagan

Americans officials have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe really have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem on Iraq - by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action - than they have ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Robert Kagan

The thing that I would say is that U.S. power is not eternal. I am not saying that it won't come to an end. Because it will.

Robert Kagan

I left Russia in 1993 optimistic that democracy had taken hold despite the obstacles.

Robert Kagan

It is true that I have known Straussians almost all my life. And the one thing I was taught about them from the earliest age is that they are wrong.

Robert Kagan

Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

Robert Kagan

American nationalism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism. No one's an American just because they were born in America or had American parents. American nationalism is built around this idea - and it happened to be, certainly at the time, an extremely revolutionary idea that only Americans believed in, by the way, at the time. Which was the principle of universal rights...

Robert Kagan

The thing that I find striking, in addition to Americans not being aware always how they are bumping into others and intruding upon others, Americans also - because they have this view - because we have this view that we don't care, that we're really just about minding our own business, then events occur and we surprise ourselves and we do care.

Robert Kagan