Politics & Power Quote by Robert Kagan

Kagan’s sentence is engineered to make militarism sound like maturity. He opens with a commonsense concession - “better not to use military force” - then pivots to the real claim: restraint is a “luxury” the world won’t “provide.” That framing matters. It doesn’t argue that force is good; it argues that force is unavoidable. Once the debate is moved from choice to necessity, dissent starts to look naive, even irresponsible.

The subtext is a familiar Washington move: America is cast less as an agent than as a manager trapped by external realities. “The world” becomes the active subject, a kind of impersonal tyrant, while the United States is reduced to a reluctant adult doing what has to be done. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand that dodges the messier questions - how U.S. actions help shape that world, how “tools” get used because they exist, how costs and blowback are distributed, and who gets to define what counts as “avoid it.”

Contextually, this is Kagan’s wheelhouse: the post-Cold War and post-9/11 argument for American primacy, where credibility and order supposedly depend on keeping the military option not just available, but central. Notice the corporate technocrat language - “important tool of foreign policy.” War is recast as policy instrumentation, not catastrophe. The line doesn’t sell a specific intervention; it sells the default setting: the idea that power, once possessed, must remain thinkable, ready, and legitimate - because the alternative is framed as childish idealism in an unforgiving world.