Kagan Condemns Trump Iran War, Won't Disavow Iraq
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- Robert Kagan condemned the Trump administration's handling of Iran in The Atlantic in March, arguing that U.S. involvement in the Middle East has served as a catalyst of — rather than a prudent response to — Islamic terrorism.
- Kagan co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997 and served as head of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy from 1985 to 1988, laying the institutional groundwork for his decades-long advocacy of U.S. global primacy.
- Kagan rejected the neoconservative label as antisemitic and inaccurate, insisting his foreign policy views are "liberal" and that the American conservative tradition has historically favored restraint over intervention.
- Kagan refused to disavow his support for the 2003 Iraq invasion, arguing the strategic context was different — no rising great power threats — and that Saddam Hussein posed a genuine threat given his invasions of Iran and Kuwait, though he acknowledged Donald Rumsfeld's troop deployment was a mistake.
- The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimated at least 180,000 civilian deaths from direct war violence in Iraq, alongside 4,500 U.S. service members and 3,600 American contractors killed over a decade of conflict.
- Kagan pushed back against the notion that the Iraq war damaged U.S. standing, claiming alliances — including with countries that opposed the war — actually strengthened in the second half of George W. Bush's presidency.
Why it matters: When a figure of Kagan's stature — co-founder of PNAC and a Brookings senior fellow — publicly condemns an ongoing military operation as botched, it shifts the boundaries of acceptable hawkish critique, yet his refusal to disavow Iraq, even with 180,000 civilian deaths documented by Brown's Costs of War Project, reveals how enduring the establishment's interventionist consensus remains even among its most visible dissenters.
