Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Hands across the water: Neocons and European parliament liberals join forces to 'lean on Russia'

While the stress has been on Freedom House, the event's hosts, it also bears mention that a key co-organizer was the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a think tank created by William Kristol and Robert Kagan as successor to the Project for the New American Century, a Neocon incubator which they co-founded in 1997. PNAC had become weighed down by its responsibility for America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq that turned out so badly. Founded in 2009, FPI established a platform for Robert Kagan to re-enter the US domestic political fray on a full-time basis now that he's relocated to Washington from Brussels, in line with wife's diplomatic career, Victoria Nuland.

Throughout his own career, Robert Kagan has been consistent in his anti-Russian positions which go back to the very origins of Neocon thinking in the late 1970s-early 80s. In 2004, he was co-author, with William Kristol, of an open letter condemning Vladimir Putin for the rollback of political freedoms and an imperial foreign policy which attracted signatures from leading American politicians of both parties, including Joe Biden and Michael McFaul. His 2008 book The Return of History, which was effectively a policy paper for the John McCain presidential campaign to which he was chief foreign policy adviser, singled Russia out as a revisionist state following an autocratic path.

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