In The Washington Post recently, Robert Kagan advised his fellow conservatives to show maturity and readiness to govern: “Blocking the treaty will produce three unfortunate results: It will strengthen Vladimir Putin, let the Obama administration off the hook when Russia misbehaves and set up Republicans as the fall guy if and when U.S.-Russian relations go south.” ~Maureen Dowd

Many people have been citing Kagan’s op-ed in “support” of the treaty to contrast Kagan’s supposed neoconservative seriousness with the fecklessness of the Senate GOP. This is mistaken. As the quote from Kagan’s column shows, his concern has nothing to do with the effects of the treaty’s defeat on arms control, U.S.-Russian relations, or U.S. foreign policy more broadly. Presumably, those would be the concerns of someone interested in “maturity” and a “readiness to govern.” Instead, what we get from Kagan is a warning that the Republicans are putting themselves in a bad position politically and are in danger of taking the blame for bad relations with Russia. This is what I was saying last week when the op-ed first appeared.

Of course, Kagan and many Republican hawks want to pursue policies that will guarantee bad relations with Russia (e.g., NATO expansion, re-arming Georgia, etc.), and they are not terribly concerned if U.S.-Russian relations deteriorate. In their view, that is what must happen so long as Russia is dominated by its current form of authoritarian populist government. This is an ideologically–driven view that insists that democracy and “autocracy” (as Kagan calls it) are inherently antagonistic and will work to undermine one another in international relations. What the hawks don’t want is to have to take responsibility for causing that deterioration. Ideally, they would like to blame the Russians or Obama or both together, because many of the hawks who supported Bush-era provocations of Russia believe that those policies had nothing to do with declining relations with Moscow. It is always someone else’s fault. Kagan is displaying the same ideological blindness that contributed so much to Bush administration failures in foreign policy, especially in U.S.-Russian relations, and yet somehow he has been getting credit for being a responsible or serious part of the debate.

Kagan argues that Republicans ought to support the treaty–which Kagan wrongly dubs a “nothingburger”–as a way of better serving their larger goal of outmaneuvering Obama. In answer to the Senate GOP’s short-term cynicism, Kagan proposes that they take a longer cynical view. He assumes that the “reset” is doomed to fail, presumably because he continues to labor under the assumptions of his faulty ideological reading of modern great power politics, and he wants Republicans to be in the right position to profit politically when that happens. To maximize the blame that Obama receives for the expected failure of the “reset,” which Kagan considers wrongheaded anyway, Republicans must play along for now. This is certainly a more subtle form of rejectionism, but it is substantively not much different from the views of the Senate Republicans Kagan is lecturing. Kagan has happened to land on the right side of the treaty issue for tactical reasons, but that shouldn’t blind anyone to the reality that Kagan’s overall rejection of Obama’s foreign policy is rooted in the same ideological delusions that prevailed in the Bush era.