"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"
About this Quote
A polite diplomatic sentence, built like a divorce filing. Kagan’s line isn’t trying to describe a minor policy disagreement; it’s staging a civilizational break. The careful pileup of verbs - “setting,” “determining,” “defining,” “fashioning,” “implementing” - performs the very thing it argues: this isn’t one argument over one war, it’s a full-spectrum divergence in how power gets imagined and used. By the time you reach “parted ways,” the conclusion feels inevitable, almost procedural.
The subtext is sharper than the syntax. “Threats” and “challenges” are not objective facts; they’re political stories a society tells itself to justify budgets, alliances, and violence. Kagan is signaling that Europe and the United States are no longer even reading from the same genre. America, in his framing, lives in a world where danger is constant and force is a legitimate instrument; Europe lives in a world where rules, institutions, and negotiated constraints feel like the default operating system. The sentence quietly implies asymmetry: one partner still believes in hard power because it has it, the other has learned to moralize restraint because history and capacity push it there.
Context matters: Kagan was writing in the early post-Cold War, post-9/11 atmosphere when NATO solidarity was being stress-tested and the Iraq War exposed how differently Washington and key European capitals assessed legitimacy and risk. The intent isn’t just diagnosis; it’s permission. If the sides have truly “parted ways,” then American unilateralism can be framed not as impatience, but as necessity. That’s the rhetorical trick: a claimed reality that conveniently authorizes a strategy.
The subtext is sharper than the syntax. “Threats” and “challenges” are not objective facts; they’re political stories a society tells itself to justify budgets, alliances, and violence. Kagan is signaling that Europe and the United States are no longer even reading from the same genre. America, in his framing, lives in a world where danger is constant and force is a legitimate instrument; Europe lives in a world where rules, institutions, and negotiated constraints feel like the default operating system. The sentence quietly implies asymmetry: one partner still believes in hard power because it has it, the other has learned to moralize restraint because history and capacity push it there.
Context matters: Kagan was writing in the early post-Cold War, post-9/11 atmosphere when NATO solidarity was being stress-tested and the Iraq War exposed how differently Washington and key European capitals assessed legitimacy and risk. The intent isn’t just diagnosis; it’s permission. If the sides have truly “parted ways,” then American unilateralism can be framed not as impatience, but as necessity. That’s the rhetorical trick: a claimed reality that conveniently authorizes a strategy.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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