‘Warrior Races’ in Medieval Europe

Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus’, proclaims Robert Kagan in Paradise and Power, his provocative dissection of ‘America and Europe in the New World Order’, published in 2003 at the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Though steering clear of crude national stereotypes, Kagan seeks to show how events in the twentieth century conspired to lend American and European (by which he means primarily French and German) foreign policy fundamentally different, indeed incompatible, qualities. While Europeans bargain and prevaricate, Americans reach for their guns, he says. His book does not settle merely for describing; it ascribes and prescribes too, moving from observations about the present to predictions and proposals for the future.