“I’m not sure we will have free and fair elections in two years in the United States,” said Robert Kagan at Oxford
Kagan delivered the prestigious Dahrendorf Lecture at St Antony's College, Oxford, as a requiem for the American order—and called on Europe to re-arm.
**This is an extra newsletter for the week—I wanted to share the details of this timely and intriguing lecture with you.
“I’m not sure we will have free and fair elections in two years in the US,” said Robert Kagan in Oxford.
The remark prompted many in the audience to look around in disbelief, checking whether they had heard him correctly.
Kagan was responding to a question from Dimitar Bechev, director of the Dahrendorf Programme, about the likely outcome of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections.
Last Friday, Kagan delivered one of the most prestigious lectures at St Antony’s College—and indeed, at the University of Oxford—the Dahrendorf Lecture. Inaugurated 17 years ago by the liberal thinker and former Warden of St Antony’s, it has since been shaped into a major intellectual event by another prominent liberal voice, Timothy Garton Ash.
It was an intriguing lecture. Kagan’s stamina in responding to what felt like an endless stream of questions from the audience was impressive. He is, without doubt, a highly engaging orator.
The central premise of his talk was to dissect the elements that made the United States a superpower after World War II—and the global order it constructed. He insisted on calling it the American order, avoiding the more familiar euphemisms such as the “rules-based international order” or Oxford’s preferred “liberal international order.” According to Kagan, we are now in the midst of a revolutionary moment—one in which this order is being dismantled. His lecture was, in effect, a requiem for it.
He made several key arguments:
First, America’s rise to superpower status was not a consequence of raw power alone—military or economic—but a result of recognition. The world accepted America’s role, he argued, not out of coercion but out of contrast. The post-1945 order was, in part, a default choice: between the unattractiveness of Soviet internationalism and the more seductive grammar of American hegemony.
Second, and here his tone shifted from analytical to cautionary. Kagan suggested that many around the world wrongly assumed this order emerged as a natural progression of human political development—as if it were the endpoint of a linear historical arc, as the popular misreading of the end of history thesis came to imply (though that was never quite what Fukuyama meant). In truth, Kagan said, it was fought for. Preserving it required constant effort. That effort waned. Europe and the U.S. took the order for granted. Hence the crises within the EU. Hence Brexit. Hence Trump.
Third, Kagan argued that the isolationism we associate with Trump—withdrawals from international agreements, the erosion of global institutions, tariffs dressed up as strategy—is not a historical anomaly. It has precedent. America first turned inward in the 1920s. The real difference today is not the isolationism, but the anti-liberalism that underlies it. Kagan believes the U.S. has always swung between liberalism and its opposite—and that the most consistent feature of its foreign policy is this oscillation between two irreconcilable worldviews.
Even if Trump leaves office, Kagan warned, anti-liberalism has been unleashed—and institutionalized—by the MAGA movement, now led by JD Vance. He considers Vance highly ideological and points to his Munich speech, along with his interventions in German politics, as evidence.
But here, I find myself unconvinced. What exactly is Vance’s ideology? What defines it beyond negation? Anti-liberalismis not an ideology—it lacks an action plan, a theory of governance, even a coherent mythos. It is reactive, dialectical. A backlash, not a blueprint.
Kagan then claimed that the last U.S. election was a “white male election.” Race, religion, and gender were the three anchors pulling white Protestant men toward Trump. Again—a backlash.
Yet, as Kagan mentioned en passant, there is something more cohesive, more ideological, embedded in Vance’s rhetoric: a blood-and-soil nativist nationalism. This is the thickest doctrine of all. Its morphology, as always, fuses race, religion, and patriarchal authority—features that form the anti-liberal core of nationalist ideology across time.
At one point, I asked Kagan about the speed of authoritarianism.
He had opened his talk with the blunt assertion that the U.S. is becoming a dictatorship—and that, as mentioned earlier, it might not hold free and fair elections in two years. He made the same claim during Trump’s first 100 days in office.
This puzzled me. Scholars of the Middle East have been inundated with arguments tying authoritarianism in the region to weak institutions—weak compared, always, to the West. And of all Western institutions, none were so vaunted as America’s: the checks and balances, the constitutionalism, the legalism. The system was meant to be ironclad. So how, I asked him, could these institutions unravel so quickly? Even Putin needed more time, more obstacles to overcome, before consolidating his one-man rule.
Kagan’s response was intriguing.
Checks and balances, he said, are not a switch to be flipped in emergencies. “Checks and balances are us,” he declared—meaning the American people. He compared the U.S. system to the Titanic: fitted with back-ups, layered with redundancies, but unprepared for an iceberg capable of tearing through them all. Trump may be that iceberg. Kagan left that unsaid.
What he did say was that the Founding Fathers built a system that required virtue. And that today, many Americans—including those who are not MAGA loyalists—are insufficiently concerned with civil liberties, the rule of law, and constitutional freedoms. Hence the passivity of the Republican Party. Hence the collapse.
I remain unsatisfied by this answer. Virtue is not an analytical category. Institutions cannot be measured in moral terms. If the speed of democratic breakdown hinges on virtue, then we are in trouble—not just empirically but conceptually. The speed of American authoritarianism deserves more rigorous study. (Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s argument is discussed in last Thursday’s Substack post.)
Kagan ended his lecture with an unexpected directive to the EU and the UK: Re-arm. If Europe wants to preserve the prospect of liberalism, he argued, it must be able to defend itself—militarily.
The advice was met with astonishment. A room full of Oxford dons, London journalists, and think tank analysts exchanged startled glances. Re-arm.
Not the return of the Cold War, but the return of history—without illusions.
I find very strange this assimilation of history with war. We may have to imagine that there is another form of history possible.
Much food for thought (the Dahrendorf lecture and your personal remarks) - thank you for sharing this with us! I listened to the Prospect- podcast too and - all in all - the situation remains bleak (we only don't know how much unravelling of the state of things we will have to face with all these right-wingers in the next decade...). I still think of Poland and how they got their country back (at least in a "small" but nevertheless significant way - even if their conservatives of course pander to the right too... But they have gotten rid of the PIS- party). Vance seems to be determined - the whole Bannon-machinery is at full speed... We'll see. I think Ruth Ben-Ghiat is absolutely right when she says that communicating a positive vision of a shared future is key to any electoral success. But I also think that those afore-mentioned doubts about the erosion of checks and balances are very real... I am definitely unsure how far this will go as well, tbh.