Rana Mitter & Robert Kagan discuss 'The Return of History' [audio 15min @13:15]

Rana Mitter talks to American writer and neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan about his new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf [USA]; Atlantic Books [UK]), which debates the issues facing liberal democracies today. Rather than entering an era of international convergence, Kagan argues that we have entered an age of divergence, that the 'end of history' is an illusion. Mitter is University Lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Politics at St Cross College, Oxford, where he works on the history and politics of modern China. Kagain is a key advisor on foreign policy to Republican Party nominee John McCain, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a columnist for the Washington Post, and he also worked in the US State Department from 1984 to 1998. He called for regime change in Iraq as far back as 1998 and is a vocal supporter of the war. He argues that it was wrong to assume the end of the Cold War would bring about global liberalism and that, instead, the growing might of an autocratic China and Russia, along with the threat from Islamic fundamentalism, has created an ideologically unstable world in which liberal democracies will have to fight for survival and influence.