A single family is providing the intellectual justification, such as it is, for the neocon wars on Russia, China, and Iran. Notice that despite the fact that their policies appear to be based on an ideological foundation, their ideology du jour changes from Trotskyite to Reaganite depending upon whatever the geopolitical environment happens to be:
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.
At PNAC, the Kagans were primarily concerned with expanding Israeli power by using the United States to topple Saddam Hussein, Bashar Al-Assad and strangling Iran, but by 2006, they grew increasingly suspicious and hostile towards Russia and China for seeking more control in how they interface with Western (read: Jewish) financial institutions and cultural values, while simultaneously choosing to pursue their own foreign policy paths independent of Pax Americana. Over time, the fears of Kaganism have been vindicated, as Russia and China have evolved from wild card United Nations votes to outright revisionist powers ready to directly confront Washington interlopers in their backyards.
The Kaganists blame the rise of China, Russia and Iran on the war and free trade weary American people, who in 2016 even managed to pressure Hillary Clinton into tactically walking back her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a move that enraged Kagan). For most Americans, the nation-wrecking trade deficits (which are in truth subsidies to buy subservience), trillion-dollar wars, and mountains of body bags required to oversee a world empire are neither necessary or worthwhile for the well-being of the geographically gifted and resource rich United States.
In 2019, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Robert Kagan, the husband Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, published an editorial excoriating the “America First” message embraced by segments of both parties and reiterated the minority Jewish-held internationalist elite consensus think-tanks have been churning out for decades. According to Blinken and Kagan, a world of realism, where countries are free of Jewish minders and American blood and treasure is exclusively reserved for the benefit of American people, is a “jungle” that allows budding Hitlers (Putin), Mussolinis (Iran) and Hirohitos (China) to spread “anti-democratic” revolution against “Anglo-American” (a term Kaganists use to identify their civilizational project even as they support demographic replacement of the European stock in English-speaking country) liberal-globalist hegemony.
The central domestic political theory of Kaganism purports that liberalism is in perpetual antagonism with “populism,” (which the Kagans view as a strain of Fascism), in other words, the will of the people. The Kaganists view the democratic accountability of political leaders, self-interested (at least in the case of Gentiles) trade-offs, and the free discussion of ideas as a distraction or minor inconvenience to suppress and push through, as shown in their latest book celebrating Franklin Delano Roosevelt for deceiving the American people into fighting a world war against Germany and Japan, two countries Kagan admits never posed a security threat to the United States but had to be lured into a confrontation anyway.
It’s really fascinating to read Donald Kagan’s books, and see how he constantly shifts his positions while never, ever, questioning his core assumptions. The sophistic rhetorical appeals to redefined words misrepresenting concepts is always interesting too, although it’s so transparent that the reader will find it astonishing that it actually works on the media and a substantive portion of the population.