Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Kagan

Kagan’s sentence is doing what his best policy writing often does: sounding collegial while quietly sliding a blade between assumptions. He grants the premise up front - yes, there’s a real attitudinal split between Eastern and Western Europe - then pivots to the more provocative issue: who gets to claim modernity. In European self-mythology, “the West” is the future (cosmopolitan, post-national, post-war), while “the East” is the past (hard borders, hard power, historical grievance). Kagan tiptoes right up to that hierarchy and then flips it: maybe the supposedly “new” Western worldview is the older, more exhausted one, and the “old” East is responding to contemporary reality with fresher eyes.

The key phrase is “in the broadest sense of world view,” a move that elevates the dispute from policy details (NATO spending, Russia, EU federalism) to temperament: how societies imagine danger, agency, and moral responsibility. “Interesting question” is strategic understatement; it gives him room to challenge Western complacency without sounding like he’s scolding. And “I almost think” is the softener that makes the provocation palatable - he’s not declaring, he’s inviting.

Context matters: Kagan’s work is steeped in the post-Cold War argument that Europe’s comfort with a rules-based order is subsidized by American (and, in the East’s memory, hard-earned) security logic. The subtext is a warning: if Western Europe treats power politics as an embarrassing relic, it risks becoming the truly “old” Europe - not wise, just unprepared.