Robert Kagan (b. 1958) is a leading theorist of American primacy in the decades after the Cold War. He built his career as a historian and essayist who supplied a governing class with the vocabulary it used to interpret its own power. He wrote for policymakers, editors, diplomats, legislators, and educated readers at the same time, and he translated geopolitical theory into moral and historical narrative. The result was a body of work that functioned less as academic analysis than as a sustained argument about what the United States owed to the order it had built.
He was born in Athens in 1958, while his father taught abroad, into a family that became a dynasty of American foreign-policy thought. His father, Donald Kagan (1932–2021), was a leading historian of ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War, and his scholarship rejected idealized pictures of international harmony. Donald Kagan stressed the recurrence of power competition, the fragility of democracies, and the decline of civilizations that lose the will to defend themselves. His son inherited this tragic conception of politics almost whole. His brother, Frederick Kagan (b. 1970), became a military historian and analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, which deepened the family’s standing inside the national-security world.
Kagan often appears as a simple advocate of American force, yet his worldview rests on pessimism about historical stability. He argues that liberal order is unnatural and requires constant armed maintenance. Peace does not sustain itself. Institutions do not defend themselves. Democracies tire, and predatory states return when deterrence weakens. This sensibility places him closer to Cold War anti-totalitarian thinkers and classical historians than to the managerial globalization theorists with whom critics group him.
He studied at Yale, the Harvard Kennedy School, and American University, where he took a doctorate in history. He developed as a historically minded essayist rather than a quantitative strategist, and he preferred analogy, narrative, and moral framing to abstract modeling. The style worked inside Washington because it gave officials emotionally legible frameworks rather than equations. He first entered government during the Reagan administration as a speechwriter for Secretary of State George Shultz (1920–2021), and Reaganite anti-communism left a permanent mark on him. He absorbed the conviction that military strength and ideological confidence cannot be separated, and that a society unwilling to defend itself in moral terms eventually loses the will to defend itself in strategic ones.
The collapse of the Soviet Union turned him from a conservative policy hand into a theorist of post-Cold War primacy. A debate then divided American foreign-policy circles. One camp argued that the end of bipolar rivalry justified retrenchment and deeper reliance on multilateral institutions. Another argued that American predominance was a rare opportunity that had to be preserved by design. Kagan became a clear voice for the second view. In 1997, with William Kristol (b. 1952), he co-founded the Project for the New American Century, which shaped much of Republican national-security thinking before and after the September 11 attacks. Its premises ran through his work: that American primacy is fragile rather than permanent, that liberal order depends on American enforcement, that power vacuums invite aggression, and that military supremacy remains indispensable in an age of economic globalization.
His best-known work from this period, Of Paradise and Power (2003), grew from his 2002 essay “Power and Weakness.” He argued that the United States and Europe had diverged because they occupied different positions within the structure of global power. Europeans, sheltered beneath the American security umbrella, came to imagine politics as a matter of law and negotiation. Americans, holding unmatched military capability, continued to read the world through force and security competition. He compressed the thesis into a line that traveled worldwide: Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. Critics charged him with caricaturing Europe and romanticizing coercion. The deeper claim was structural. Strategic culture follows material capability, and states protected by overwhelming power see the world differently from states that depend on others for protection. The argument set him against the “end of history” thesis of Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952). Fukuyama treated liberal democracy as the likely endpoint of ideological evolution. Kagan rejected any belief in permanent convergence and held that liberal order stays contingent and threatened by enemies abroad and exhaustion at home.
September 11 raised his influence sharply. The attacks broke the optimism of the 1990s and returned questions of force and civilizational conflict to the center of American politics. Kagan became a visible defender of interventionist leadership during the early War on Terror. He did not run military operations or occupation policy, yet his worldview attached itself to the coalition that backed regime change in Iraq, and critics later made him a symbol of neoconservative overreach once the occupation failed. Reducing him to Iraq misses the scale of the project. Iraq was one episode inside a larger theory of American-led order. His central question was never Iraq. It was whether the United States would keep functioning as guarantor of the system built after 1945.
In Dangerous Nation (2006) he attacked the myth of nineteenth-century American isolationism and argued that the country had expanded from its founding, pushed outward by universalist ideas about liberty into conflict with rival empires. In The Ghost at the Feast (2023) he examined the years from 1890 to 1941 and argued that repeated American retreats from global responsibility helped create the conditions for catastrophe in Europe and Asia. The title carried one of his deepest convictions, that democratic societies try to withdraw from history and then find that threats keep developing in their absence. In Rebellion (2024) he turned inward and linked modern populist nationalism to older anti-liberal traditions running from the slaveholding South through the isolationism of the 1930s into contemporary anti-institutional politics. The book marked a shift in his concern from the maintenance of external order toward the survival of constitutional liberalism inside the United States.
The Trump era drove this transformation. His move from Bush-era neoconservative to anti-Trump defender of liberal institutions confused observers who read politics through Left and Right. Within his own framework the shift made sense. His loyalty was never to partisan conservatism. It belonged to the postwar Atlantic order: NATO, democratic internationalism, constitutional liberalism, alliance systems, and the continuity of the institutions that managed them. Trumpism threatened that whole architecture, so he became a sharp conservative critic of nationalist populism and warned about democratic erosion and institutional decay. His essays began to resemble classical republican warnings about demagoguery and exhaustion. In October 2024 he resigned as editor-at-large of The Washington Post after its owner, Jeff Bezos (b. 1964), declined to endorse a presidential candidate, a decision Kagan called a capitulation to Trump. He then joined The Atlantic as a contributing writer while keeping his post as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His seat at Brookings symbolized a broader convergence after 2016, as neoconservatism and liberal internationalism merged into a single elite consensus around Atlanticism, democracy promotion, and strategic competition with authoritarian powers.
His marriage to Victoria Nuland (b. 1961) reveals the institutional sociology of that establishment more than any single essay. Nuland became one of the consequential American diplomats of the era and served across Republican and Democratic administrations as ambassador to NATO, deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney (b. 1941), assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under President Obama, and under secretary of state for political affairs under President Biden. Her career centered on NATO management, Russia policy, and Ukraine, and after the 2014 crisis and the 2022 invasion she became a visible architect of hardline anti-Kremlin strategy. The pairing shows how American grand strategy reproduces itself through linked institutions running from think tanks through the State Department, NATO, the press, universities, foundations, and the national-security bureaucracy. Kagan supplied the historical narrative and the public justification. Nuland worked the machinery of implementation. To supporters the network meant competence and continuity. To critics it meant elite insulation, interventionist orthodoxy, and a managerial internationalism cut off from democratic publics.
His quarrel with realism clarifies where he stands. His long dispute with John Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is among the defining conflicts of recent strategic thought. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism treats international politics as driven by anarchic structure and balance-of-power competition, with regime type counting for little, since all great powers pursue survival and dominance regardless of their internal character. Kagan rejects this structural determinism and insists that regime character shapes behavior. In his account authoritarian states are inherently revisionist because liberal democratic norms threaten their own legitimacy, so democracies and autocracies cannot be treated as interchangeable units inside an anarchic system. He also opposes the advocates of restraint associated with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. They argue that American overreach breeds instability and drains resources. He answers that what they call overreach is the price of order, and that retrenchment yields not equilibrium but a vacuum, which predatory powers fill.
Kagan defends liberal order through illiberal instruments of coercive power. He champions constitutionalism, human rights, self-determination, and democratic norms, and he argues at the same time that these principles survive only when backed by overwhelming force and disciplined elite stewardship. This tension marks post-Cold War liberal internationalism as a whole. Kagan distrusts democratic impulses toward retrenchment and nationalism, and he often implies that stable strategy requires an elite able to resist volatile public moods. Critics read this as paternalism and skepticism about democracy. Supporters reply that mass electorates underrate danger and overrate the durability of peace.
Kagan shaped elite strategic discourse through several channels at once, and few contemporaries combined all of them. He set terms of debate through phrasing that entered common usage, as the Mars and Venus formula did, giving officials and journalists a shorthand for the transatlantic split. He built institutions, since the Project for the New American Century gathered signatories who later staffed the George W. Bush administration and pushed its early agenda. He advised candidates and governments directly, serving as a foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential campaigns and sitting on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board under Democratic administrations, which let one man move across the partisan divide that constrained most of his peers. He occupied the commanding platforms of opinion, first at the Carnegie Endowment, then at Brookings, and across decades of columns at The Washington Post and now The Atlantic. He furnished long-run historical framing through his books, which gave the foreign-policy class a usable account of its own past and a warning about its future. The influence is ideological and narrative rather than bureaucratic. He did not write the Defense Planning Guidance or run a bureau. He told the governing class a story about itself that many of its members came to believe.
His peers are the strategic intellectuals who tried to define the meaning of the post-Cold War world, and naming them locates him by contrast. Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) held unmatched prestige and access across governments and capitals, though his peak belonged to the Cold War itself. Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017) shaped Eurasian strategy and NATO enlargement through Democratic administrations and elite networks. Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) supplied the civilizational frame that quietly informed national-security analysis after 9/11 even as leaders disavowed it in public. Fukuyama gave the 1990s its narrative of liberal-democratic inevitability. Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943) turned primacy doctrine into Pentagon planning through the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance and later through the Iraq War. Joseph Nye (1937–2025) reshaped strategic language with the idea of soft power, among the few academic terms to enter global diplomacy. Mearsheimer stands as his sharpest theoretical opponent from the realist camp. Against this company Kagan looks less like the most influential and more like the most versatile. Kissinger had greater access, Wolfowitz greater operational reach, Nye a more durable single concept, Huntington a more sweeping thesis. Kagan held a narrower but rarer position. He combined historical narrative, institutional integration, public clarity, ideological influence, and the capacity to work both parties, and he sustained that combination across more than thirty years.
What sets him apart is his refusal to believe that history settles. He remains a theorist of recurrence. Civilizations decay. Democracies lose confidence. Vacuums attract predators. Peace breeds the illusion of permanence in the moment before crisis returns. He stands at the meeting point of classical tragic historiography, Cold War anti-totalitarianism, Reaganite moral confidence, Wilsonian liberal internationalism, and neoconservative primacy doctrine. Whether later historians judge his worldview farsighted or ruinous, he holds a permanent place in the intellectual history of American power, as a man who did much to define how the American governing class understood liberal order, democratic legitimacy, and the obligations of supremacy in the turbulent decades after the Soviet collapse.
The Set
The Kagan-Nuland set is the Atlanticist national-security elite at its most distilled. Picture the rooms first. The Munich Security Conference each February. The Aspen Strategy Group in summer. The Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the same faces at Brookings, Carnegie, and the German Marshall Fund in Washington. Georgetown dinner parties where a sitting under secretary, a retired four-star, a foundation president, and a columnist talk in the shorthand of people who have known each other for thirty years. The Halifax forum. The op-ed pages of The Washington Post and now The Atlantic and the foreign-affairs sections that treat these people as the natural sources. This is a small world with thick walls, and its members move through government, think tanks, the press, and the academy as though through rooms of one house. Kagan and Nuland sit near the center of it, and the family extends further, since Frederick Kagan and his wife Kimberly Kagan (b. 1972) run the Institute for the Study of War, which means the clan supplies both the historical narrative and the daily battlefield assessment.
What they value is competence, continuity, and stewardship. They prize seriousness above almost everything, and they hold a fine-grained sense of who is serious and who is not. Seriousness means mastery of detail, a long memory for how the institutions actually work, the patience to sit through interagency meetings, and the discipline to subordinate personal mood to the requirements of the order. They value access, and access functions as both reward and proof of worth. To be consulted, to be in the room, to have the Secretary take your call, these confer standing that no book sale can match. They value alliances as something close to sacred objects, NATO above all, because the alliance carries the moral weight of the war against totalitarianism. They value the rules-based order, American credibility, deterrence, and the idea that the United States owes the world something beyond its own narrow interest. They distrust enthusiasm and reward gravitas. A person who keeps his composure during a crisis and produces a workable option earns more respect here than a brilliant outsider with a disruptive idea.
The hero system runs straight back to the 1930s and the 1940s. The founding story is Munich 1938 and the cost of appeasement, and the founding heroes are the men who built the postwar order out of the wreckage, the Marshalls and Achesons and Kennans, and behind them Churchill, who saw the danger when others looked away. Every member of this set casts himself as an heir to that generation. The heroism is holding the line. It is keeping the predators out and the alliances intact and the public from sliding back into the comfortable illusion that peace sustains itself. The villain is fixed and recurring. He is the isolationist, the appeaser, the naif, the man who mistakes a lull for permanence and pulls back the troops, and the populist demagogue who tells the public it owes the world nothing. To be on the right side of this drama is to matter in the only way that finally counts. The immortality on offer here is the knowledge that you stood guard during your watch and the order survived because you and people like you refused to let it fail. Kagan writes this story in his books. Nuland lived it at NATO and across three decades of Russia policy. The marriage fuses the narrator and the practitioner into a single household, and that fusion is part of why the pairing carries symbolic weight inside the set. They are the story told and the story enacted at the same table.
The status games follow from all this. Credentials open the door, the Yale and Harvard and Oxford degrees, the doctorate, the early apprenticeship to a famous principal. Senate confirmation marks a higher tier, because a confirmed appointment means you carried real authority and survived the scrutiny. A security clearance is its own kind of jewelry, since it signals that you hold knowledge the outsiders lack. The byline in the right outlet, the fellowship at the right institution, the seat on the right board, the invitation to the right panel at Munich, these accumulate into a portfolio of standing that members read in each other at a glance. Bipartisan service ranks highest of all. To advise Republican candidates and then sit on a Democratic administration’s policy board, as Kagan has done, signals that you serve the nation rather than a party, that you stand above the squabble. The set treats this as a mark of nobility. Critics read the same trait as evidence that the foreign-policy consensus floats free of any electorate, answerable only to itself. Both readings describe the same behavior. Within the set, durability is the prize. The members who last across administrations, who keep the relationships warm and the judgment sound, who are still in the room when the crisis comes, win the longest game.
The worldview fits the careers. A creed that says order requires constant American engagement, expert stewardship, and suspicion of public moods toward retreat is a creed that keeps these people employed, consulted, and necessary. Restraint threatens not only their argument but their relevance. The retrenchment they warn against would shrink the very institutions that pay them and the very meetings that confer their status.
The normative claims. America has obligations beyond its own interest. Order requires enforcement, and enforcement requires force. Alliances must be honored even when the bill comes due, because credibility is the coin that deters aggression, and a great power that abandons a partner teaches every adversary that its word is cheap. Authoritarian expansion must be contained early, since the price of waiting is always higher. Democracy is worth defending with arms. Retreat is not prudence but abdication, and abdication is a moral failure that loads the cost onto the people who later pay for the vacuum. Kagan states the moral logic most plainly. What restraint advocates call overreach he calls the price of order, and he treats the refusal to pay that price as a kind of cowardice dressed in the language of realism.
The essentialist claims. The core conviction is that the character of a regime determines its behavior. Authoritarian states are revisionist by their nature, not by accident of circumstance, because liberal norms abroad threaten their legitimacy at home, so they cannot rest while free societies prosper. Russia in this account is expansionist as a settled trait rather than a response to provocation, which is why the set rejects any argument that NATO enlargement drove Moscow to aggression. China is a rising challenger whose ambitions flow from its system rather than from any specific grievance. The mirror image runs just as deep. America is a force for order by its nature, expansionist from its founding but expansionist on behalf of liberty, and its power is therefore different in kind from the power of the predators. This is the precise point where Kagan breaks from the realists. Where Mearsheimer treats all great powers as interchangeable units chasing survival under anarchy, Kagan insists that what a state is determines what it does. The set holds this as something close to first principle. It lets them divide the world into stewards and predators and to feel the division as a fact about reality rather than a choice about framing.
The portrait, then, is of a clan that believes it guards civilization against a recurring darkness, that measures its members by seriousness and access and staying power, that draws its heroism from the war generation it claims as ancestors, and that grounds its certainties in fixed claims about what regimes are and what America is. The walls of the house are thick, the memory is long, and the conviction is sincere. The conviction also happens to keep the house standing.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Take Mearsheimer’s premises as true and Kagan’s project loses its foundation, because the two men disagree about what a human being is, and everything Kagan builds rests on the picture Mearsheimer denies.
Kagan needs the atomistic individual to be real. His universalism depends on it. The case for defending and spreading liberal order assumes that every person on earth carries the same inalienable rights and, given the chance, wants them, so that American power serves a human want rather than a Western preference. Mearsheimer cuts the root. If men are social from the start, tribal at the core, and shaped by their group long before reason wakes, then the rights-bearing individual is not a fact about our species. He is a parochial construct of one civilization, dressed as a law of nature. The universal man Kagan acts for does not exist. What exists is a Western tribe that produced an ideology and mistook its own creed for the human condition. The mission to carry that creed abroad becomes one tribe imposing its values on others, which is the thing Kagan’s framework exists to deny.
The essentialism collapses next. Kagan stakes his whole quarrel with Mearsheimer on regime character. Authoritarian states are revisionist by nature, he says, because liberal norms threaten their legitimacy, while America builds order by nature. Mearsheimer’s anthropology dissolves the distinction. If all men are tribal and all groups demand loyalty and sacrifice, then all great powers pursue their group interest and clothe it in principle, the democracies no less than the autocracies. America is not a different kind of actor. It is a powerful tribe with a flattering story about itself. Kagan’s division of the world into stewards and predators stops being a fact about regimes and becomes the in-group bias Mearsheimer would expect from any society describing its rivals.
Then the account turns on Kagan himself, and this is the sharpest part. Mearsheimer says reason is the weakest of the forces that set our preferences, weaker than socialization, because a man passes a long childhood under the value infusion of his family and society before his critical faculties mature, and by the time he can think for himself the work is done. Apply that to Kagan and his certainties stop looking like conclusions. They look like inheritance. He took the tragic conception of power from his father, the anti-communist confidence from the Reagan years, the Atlanticist loyalty from the clan and the institutions and the marriage. The value infusion finished before the arguments began. The reasoning came after, as defense rather than discovery. Kagan presents himself as a buffered mind that surveyed history and concluded that liberal order requires force. Mearsheimer’s man cannot do that, because no one reasons his way to his deepest commitments. Kagan is the best evidence against his own anthropology. He is a profoundly socialized, tribal being whose tribe happens to be the national-security elite, and his universalism is that tribe’s particular faith.
So what survives for Kagan if Mearsheimer is right? Less than he would want, but not nothing. The tribal half of his worldview holds. Loyalty to one’s own, the willingness to sacrifice for the group, the defense of an alliance as a thing worth blood, these track human nature on Mearsheimer’s account and need no liberal scaffolding. Kagan could keep Atlanticism as frank tribal solidarity, the defense of our people and our friends because they are ours. What he cannot keep is the universalism that turns the tribe’s interest into humanity’s. The human-rights mission, the claim that he acts for all men, is the part Mearsheimer marks as fantasy. Strip it away and Kagan becomes a nationalist of a transnational tribe, defending his coalition’s dominance for the ordinary reason that it is his.
The hardest consequence sits in his last book. In Rebellion (2024) Kagan reads the populist revolt as antiliberalism tearing America apart again, a pathology breaking in from the past. Mearsheimer reads the same revolt as nature returning. He holds that nationalism is far stronger than liberalism precisely because it speaks to the social, tribal being that men are, while liberalism speaks to an individual who was never there. On those terms the populist surge is not a disease attacking a healthy body. It is the default reasserting itself against an ideology that ignored what people are. Samuel Moyn (b. 1972), whom Mearsheimer quotes on the rise of human rights, has made a related point about how recent and how fragile that rights language is. If both are right, Kagan spent his career defending the artifice and calling the substrate a sickness. The buffered liberal individual was always the construction. The porous tribal man was always underneath. Kagan built on the construction, and Rebellion is the sound of the substrate coming back through the floor.
Take Mearsheimer’s anthropology as true and The Atlantic faces the same reckoning as Kagan, because the magazine rests on the picture of the human being that Mearsheimer rejects, and it rests on it more completely than Kagan does.
The Atlantic imagines a reader who is a buffered individual. He sits alone with the essay, weighs the argument, and updates his beliefs by the force of the better reason. The whole enterprise, the long-form piece, the careful case, the appeal to evidence and conscience, assumes a mind that reason can reach and move. Mearsheimer denies that mind exists. Reason is the weakest of the forces that set our preferences, weaker than socialization, and by the time a man can read a magazine his tribe has already finished the value infusion. So the essay does not persuade across the lines. It confirms inside them. The Atlantic does not change minds. It feeds a tribe its own convictions in elegant prose and lets the tribe feel, while reading, like a community of reasoners rather than a community of the like-bred.
This means the readership is the key fact, and the readership is one socialized group. The educated, cosmopolitan, professional class of the coastal United States and its outposts abroad. They arrive already infused with the creed, democracy, human rights, the open society, expertise, the suspicion of nationalism, and the magazine supplies them the words and the warrant. Reading it is an act of membership. The subscription is a badge. The content carries less weight than the belonging it confirms, which is why the magazine can run the same argument in a hundred variations and lose no subscriber, since the subscriber pays for the affirmation, not the information.
The magazine sells its creed as universal. Democracy and human rights as everyone’s aspiration, the elevated hope of all mankind. Mearsheimer marks that universalism as the parochial faith of a particular tribe that mistook itself for humanity. The Atlantic is not the conscience of the species. It is the house organ of one American moral class, and it has been that since 1857, when it spoke for the New England reform elite, abolitionist, Emersonian, sure that its values were America’s destiny and the world’s. The universalism was always the universalism of a specific people projecting its code outward. Mearsheimer only names what the magazine has always been and cannot admit it is.
The editorial heart of the present Atlantic is the crisis of democracy, the beat that drew Kagan in. Jeffrey Goldberg (b. 1965) framed the hires of Kagan and Danielle Allen around covering that crisis in all its forms. On Mearsheimer’s terms the beat describes a tribe in alarm. Nationalism is stronger than liberalism because it speaks to the social, tribal being that men are, while liberalism addresses an individual who was never there, so the populist surge is not democracy dying but the human default returning against an ideology that ignored it. The Atlantic reads the surge as pathology and writes its obituaries for the open society. Mearsheimer reads the same surge as nature coming back through the floor. The magazine documents its own tribe’s retreat and calls it the death of democracy, because it cannot see the retreating party as a tribe. It sees itself as reason, neutrality, the universal forum, and that blindness is the precise thing Mearsheimer’s account predicts. The liberal cannot recognize his own tribalism, because his ideology denies that tribalism is the ground of everyone, himself included.
The ownership fits the reading. Laurene Powell Jobs (b. 1963) funds the magazine through Emerson Collective, a tech fortune underwriting the scripture of the class that the fortune came from. The economics run on identity, not enlightenment. A tribe subscribes to its own gospel and a patron keeps the press warm. Nothing here requires that anyone be persuaded of anything, because persuasion across tribes is the one thing Mearsheimer says rarely happens.
So Kagan’s move to The Atlantic is not a move to a neutral forum. It is a tribesman leaving a post compromised by an owner who flinched, Bezos and the withheld endorsement, and rejoining the purer in-group organ. The marketplace of ideas is the cover. Coalition consolidation is the act.
What survives for the magazine? The tribal work survives, and The Atlantic does it well. It binds its class, polices the line of the serious, supplies the language of membership, sustains the morale of a people under pressure. That function is real and durable. What fails is the self-description. If the magazine accepted Mearsheimer it would understand itself as the journal of one American class defending its creed and its standing, which is honest and which it can never say, because the moment it says it the universalism dies, and the universalism is the product. The Atlantic sells itself as the voice of reason addressing all citizens. Mearsheimer says there are no such citizens and no such voice. There are only tribes with magazines, and this is one tribe’s magazine, written beautifully, for itself.
The Calibration Indictment: Robert Kagan and the Atlanticist Set Under Tetlock
Tetlock’s question is the one the set is built not to face, and it is simple. Are these people any good at predicting the world they claim to manage? His answer, drawn from two decades of scored forecasts in Expert Political Judgment, is that the experts the public trusts most are the experts who forecast worst. Fame and accuracy run in opposite directions. The analyst with the television booking, the confident thesis, and the single organizing idea calibrates worse than the cautious generalist who hedges and qualifies. The Atlanticist set is the population Tetlock studied, distilled. It holds one big idea, that liberal order requires constant American enforcement and that predators fill any vacuum, and it applies that idea to every case with the certainty Tetlock found to be the surest marker of error.
The hedgehog and the fox, the figure Tetlock took from Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), sorts the set at once. The fox knows many small things, distrusts grand theory, holds his views loosely, and tracks the particular case. The hedgehog knows one big thing and bends every case to fit it. Kagan is a hedgehog of unusual purity. His one big thing is the recurrence of predation and the necessity of American primacy, and he has read every event since 1989 through that single lens, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, the populist surge at home. The set rewards this. It treats the fixed thesis as principle and the loose, probabilistic mind as unserious. Tetlock found the opposite. The probabilistic, self-doubting, granular forecaster, the fox, beats the hedgehog reliably, and beats him by the widest margin on exactly the long-range, high-stakes questions the set specializes in. The trait the set honors most, conviction, is the trait that most degrades the forecast.
The receipts are the part the set cannot answer, and Iraq is the standing exhibit. The invasion rested on confident predictions about weapons, about welcome, about the spread of democracy across the region. The predictions failed. On Tetlock’s accounting that failure should have cost the forecasters their standing, because a forecast that fails is data about the forecaster. It did not. Wolfowitz, the planners, the columnists who supplied the moral case, kept their chairs, their fellowships, their bylines. Kagan, whose worldview underwrote the interventionist coalition, sits today at Brookings and writes for The Atlantic. This is the finding Tetlock states most plainly and the one the set most needs to suppress. Experts almost never pay for being wrong, because the institutions that employ them grade on prestige and fluency rather than on the scoreboard, and a man who is wrong with eloquence and good standing outranks a man who was right from outside the circle.
Tetlock also explains how the set survives its own record, because he catalogued the moves. When the world refutes a hedgehog, the hedgehog does not update. He defends the belief system. He says the thesis was sound and only the execution failed, the close-call counterfactual that rescues the idea by blaming the men. He says he was right but early, the off-on-timing defense that converts a falsification into a delayed vindication. He says an unforeseeable shock intervened, the exogenous-shock defense that walls the theory off from the event. The Atlanticist set runs all three on Iraq. The war was right and Bremer botched the occupation. The democratic wave is still coming, give it a generation. The insurgency was a contingency no one could have priced. Each move keeps the one big idea intact and teaches the holder nothing, which is why the set enters each new crisis with the same confidence it carried into the last, undiminished by the wreckage behind it.
His work on sacred values supplies the second blade, and it explains why the set cannot even run the calculation that might improve it. A sacred value is one the holder refuses to trade, and the refusal is itself a display of virtue. For this set the alliance and the order are sacred. To propose that an alliance commitment be weighed against its cost, or that a piece of the order be conceded to lower the risk of war, is not to offer an analysis. It is to commit a taboo. Tetlock showed that people met with such proposals respond with outrage rather than reasoning, and that they engage in moral cleansing afterward to wash off the contact. Watch the set when a restrainer suggests that Ukraine’s NATO path be bargained, or that Taiwan’s defense be measured against the chance of a great-power war. The response is not a counter-forecast. It is the language of betrayal and appeasement, the ritual expulsion of the heretic. The taboo protects the value, and it also protects the set from the one mental act that might raise its accuracy, the honest weighing of a sacred commitment against its expected cost.
The deepest cut is that Tetlock built the alternative and the set ignores it. The superforecasters of his later work, the ordinary people who beat the credentialed analysts, win by doing everything the set scorns. They break big questions into small ones. They assign numbers and keep score. They update fast on new evidence and feel no shame in it. They hold no grand theory and distrust the ones they have. They are foxes who have professionalized doubt. The set could adopt this. It could publish its forecasts, track them, grade them, and reward the accurate over the eloquent. It does none of this, because the practice would expose the gap between its prestige and its record, and the prestige is the asset. The set sells judgment. Tetlock’s whole body of work suggests the judgment is poor, the poverty is hidden by fame and accountability’s absence, and the cure exists and goes unused because the disease is more comfortable for the people who carry it.
That is the indictment in one frame. The set’s central claim is expertise. Tetlock asks for the scoreboard, finds it damning, shows why the damning record never lands, and names the alternative the set declines to become.
The Higher Circles: The Kagan-Nuland Set as Mills’s Power Elite
Mills asks who holds the command posts, and the answer for this set is unembarrassed. The Power Elite describes a small circle that occupies the top positions in three realms at once, the state, the corporation, and the military, and that moves among them as if the three were rooms in a single house. The men at the top are interchangeable. A man runs a corporation, then a department of government, then sits on the board of a foundation, then returns to the firm, and at no point does he leave the circle, because the circle is defined by the positions and the positions interlock. The Kagan-Nuland set is this circle in its present form, and the present form has simply added a think-tank floor and a transnational wing to the house Mills drew.
Trace the interlock and it holds. Nuland moves from the State Department to a think tank and back to the State Department across four administrations, which is Mills’s interchangeability made literal. Kagan crosses from Carnegie to Brookings, advises Republican campaigns, then sits on a Democratic administration’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and writes from the commanding platforms of opinion the whole while. The Institute for the Study of War, run by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, ties the military-analysis node to the family, so the clan supplies the long historical narrative, the daily battlefield read, and the diplomatic implementation from one bloodline. The foundations and the donor money sit behind all of it, Brookings and its funders, Emerson Collective behind The Atlantic, the defense-adjacent fortunes that endow the chairs and underwrite the conferences. The political directorate, the money, and the war-analysis apparatus meet in this set, and the meeting is the point Mills wants you to see.
The marriage is the detail Mills would have circled. He wrote that the higher circles cohere through shared origin and intermarriage, that the top families bind themselves by blood as well as by board membership, and that this binding produces a uniformity of social type the members read as natural affinity. The Kagan-Nuland household fuses two command posts in one home, the narrator of the order married to its practitioner. The shared credentials run underneath, Yale, the Harvard Kennedy School, the Ivy pipeline that sorts and stamps the type before anyone reaches a position. Mills insisted that this background is not incidental. It is how the circle reproduces itself, by drawing its replacements from the same schools and clubs and families, so that the new entrant already speaks the language and holds the assumptions before he is handed any power.
Here Mills delivers the cut the hero-system reading cannot. The set experiences its cohesion as merit. Its members believe they rose by talent, that they are simply the serious people, the competent ones, selected by the difficulty of the work rather than by the accident of origin. Mills says this is class misrecognizing itself. The cohesion is structural, the product of shared formation and overlapping interest, and the merit story is the form the class takes when it explains itself to itself. The set cannot see its own class character, because the merit story is sincere and because the members did work hard and did clear real hurdles. Mills grants the effort and denies the conclusion. The hurdles were placed inside a track only their kind could enter, and clearing them proves fitness within the circle, not selection by some neutral test of judgment.
Mills also guards the analysis against the charge it invites. He denied conspiracy, and the denial matters. The set does not meet in secret to plot. It does not need to. The cohesion comes from the shared schools, the interchange of positions, the intermarriage, and the coinciding interest, with explicit coordination only at the top and only as needed. When critics call the set a blob or a cabal they hand it an easy refutation, since no smoke-filled room exists. Mills closes that exit. The interlock produces aligned action without command, because men formed alike, placed in linked positions, and serving overlapping interests will converge without being told to. That is more durable than conspiracy and harder to break.
The characteristic output Mills named is crackpot realism, and the phrase fits the set better than any it has coined for itself. Crackpot realism is policy that sounds hard-headed and tragic and grown-up while it drives toward catastrophe, the militarized confidence of men who define every problem as a security problem requiring force and who mistake this reflex for prudence. Mills saw the elite of his day adopt a military metaphysic, a habit of framing the world in terms of threat and deterrence until no other framing felt serious. The Atlanticist set carries the same metaphysic. Order is a security problem. Restraint is appeasement. The answer to a vacuum is presence, and the answer to a rival is pressure. The posture presents itself as realism and produces Iraq, and the producers call the result tragic rather than mistaken, which is the crackpot realist’s signature, the dignifying of his own error as the cost of seriousness. Eisenhower (1890–1969) gave the warning its most famous form, and Mills gave it the analysis, that an interlocked elite with a war economy behind it will keep finding wars to define as necessary.
The last move Mills makes is to relocate power from the person to the position. Kagan’s influence is not the genius of one essayist. It is the structural weight of the command posts he occupies, the Brookings chair, the magazine, the policy board, the family apparatus. Put a man of equal talent outside the circle and he writes into silence. Put Kagan inside it and his ordinary essays carry the force of the institutions behind them. This is why the set’s distrust of the public follows from its structure rather than its character. The members route around Congress, which Mills called a semi-organized stalemate, and they manage the public as a mass whose moods toward retrenchment must be resisted, because the elite holds that grand strategy belongs to the circle and not to the electorate. Kagan’s paternalism is not a personal quirk. It is the worldview of a man who occupies a command post and believes the posts should govern.
Mills brings the floor plan. He shows the same people own all the rooms, why they own them, how they pass them down, why they cannot see the ownership as anything but desert, and what they produce from inside, which is confident, serious, well-bred catastrophe called by the name of realism.
