A Powerful Jewish Family: The Kagan – The People Steering Us Into Another World War
A Powerful Jewish Family: The Kagan – The People Steering Us Into Another World War
The Iraq war debacle, the relative (to Bush) restraint of the Obama administration, and the 2016 anti-interventionist campaign of Donald Trump may have seemingly discredited the neo-conservative movement and its personalities, but they have come roaring back.
This new stage in American foreign policy could be characterized as Kaganism: neither Democrat or Republican, but rather a non-partisan 21st century crusade for “liberalism.”
Donald Kagan, the patriarch of Kaganism, followed a similar intellectual trajectory to his colleagues Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: Marxist academics who transformed into rabid Reaganoid Cold Warriors in response to the Soviet Union’s support for Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism in the 1960s. Donald was quite clearly in the Republican camp, though his children have dropped some of the “right-wing” elements of the neo-conservative doctrine (previously used to mobilize Evangelical Christian voting blocs) and replaced it with a unified American state ideology that is as at home in the Democratic Party as it is in the GOP.
Donald’s sons, the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan and the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan, were highly influential in the George W. Bush administration through think-tanks such as the Project For A New American Century and the Foreign Policy Initiative, though today they have largely distanced themselves from the GOP following the party’s alienation of Jewish elites through Trumpification.
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