Britain has taken itself out as a major player in the international system, at least for a while, with the kind of cuts that they've made in their national security budget.

More recently his book The World America Made has been publicly endorsed by US President Barack Obama and its theme was referenced in his 2012 State of the Union Address. Robert Kagan (born September 26 1958 in Athens Greece) is an American historian author and foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution.