Historian and former Reagan State Department official Robert Kagan is advising Mitt Romney on foreign policy issues.

But the latest TIME informs us that President Obama has been listening to Kagan as well.

[O]nly American leadership, Kagan writes, can guarantee the survival of a liberal democratic order internationally.

These ideas struck a chord with a President accused of leading a great American retreat. Before his State of the Union address, Obama spent 10 minutes in a meeting with television news anchors discussing excerpts from Kagan’s book recently published in the New Republic. That night he declared that anyone who says the U.S. is losing influence “doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” National Security Adviser Tom Donilon later touted the Kagan theory in a PBS interview as “very sophisticated.”

While Kagan has supported some of the president’s actions, there is more to the story.

What the White House doesn’t promote is Kagan’s tougher criticisms. He says Obama is withdrawing too quickly from Afghanistan and calls his failure to negotiate an extended troop presence in Iraq “a disaster.” He says by phone from Kuwait, “I’ve been at varying points supportive and at varying points critical.”

Kagan says his friends in the Romney campaign have “made it clear that they see the political use that this is being put to.” And his book’s thesis is tempered with a warning. The U.S. could still slip into decline, he argues, if the U.S. slashes military spending too dramatically. You probably won’t hear Obama, who has asked Congress to make hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon cuts, cite that part of Kagan’s thesis.