Return of the Neocons
Stephen Wertheim
The New York Review of Books
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
President Trump, flanked by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National
Security Adviser John Bolton, addressing a press conference at a NATO
summit, Brussels, Belgium, July 12, 2018
Two years ago, as Donald Trump ascended to the presidency, you might have
thought that, if nothing else, neoconservatives had finally been put out to
pasture. In the campaign, Trump had blasted the neocons signature policy,
the war in Iraq, as a big fat mistake, and repudiated their ostensible
program of turning nations into liberal democracies. He paid no political
price with voters, and probably the opposite, as white evangelicals once
drawn to George W. Bushs freedom agenda flocked to Trump in record
numbers.
Even allowing for Trumps opportunism and inconsistencies, his election
victory appeared to deal a double blow to the neoconservative persuasion. It
not only broke the neocons hold on the Republican Party, but also, in the
same stroke, revealed that they lacked a popular constituency. There they
were, free-floating pundits, alone and exposedneither intellectually
credible nor politically representative.
Why, given this development, would Republican politicians respond by once
again seeking out the neocons counsel? Why, far less, would Democrats? And
why would much of the news media, grappling with historic levels of public
distrust, accept neoconservatives and neoconservatism as the baseline for
foreign policy analysis?
Yet exactly this has happened. Today, neoconservatives are riding high once
more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of
opinion. The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons
enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic
parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post.
Others, meanwhilecall them neo-neoconservatives, or
post-neoconservativesare busy making policy in the Trump administration.
Theyve gone with Trump for good reason. Although he is repudiating the
export of liberal democracy and degrading its practice at home, Trump is
also reasserting the American rights pugnacious antipathy to globalism.
He is acting as many within the neocon firmament have long favored,
positioning the United States against a vicious world and fetishizing brute
force in response.
As a result, Trump has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first
time, whether they are more against totalitarianism or globalism. If
anti-totalitarians take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear,
anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit and vehicle for
power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have
bypassed the political wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on
either side of the Trump divide. A new configuration of right-wing foreign
policy is coming into view, and neocons are in the lead once more.
For the dominant strand of neoconservatism, embodied by those who left the
Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s in order to keep waging the cold war
behind Ronald Reagan, Donald Trumps political ascent offered a unique
opportunity, even if it did not look that way at first. Ever since the Iraq
War began to lose the American publics support in 2005, the neocon agenda
had proved increasingly bankrupt, out of step with the world and therefore
dangerous if imposed upon it. The hallmark of the mainline neoconservatives
was their alarm against totalitarianism, originally aimed at the Soviet
threat. But their anti-totalitarian ethos had little to offer in the
post-totalitarian twenty-first century. After the September 11, 2001,
attacks, some neoconservative mainstays, such as Commentary editor Norman
Podhoretz and Bill Kristols The Weekly Standard, tried to conjure
Islamofascism into existence. Here was a totalitarian enemy to succeed the
Nazis and the Soviets, the idea wentexcept that numerically small terrorist
groups, however threatening and odious, possessed neither the geopolitical
strength nor the universalist ideology to sustain the analogy, even among
Islamophobes. It was due to their basic intellectual commitments, and not
just their particular policy failures, that neoconservatives spent the Obama
years on the defensive, carping about Obamas supposed weakness but unable
to put forward a fresh program of their own.
Then Trump ran for president and gave neoconservatives a new mission for
their cause: regime change at home. Just when neocons could no longer muster
the support to destroy totalitarian monsters abroad, Trump supplied them
with the next best thing, the enemy within. It is time for some moral
straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate, Washington Post columnist Jennifer
Rubin pronounced in October 2016. By casting Trump as the greatest of
villains, neocons could reclaim their preferred role as the moral
truth-tellers of the nation. And once the Democratic nomination went to
Hillary Clinton, whose hawkish record had years earlier earned the praise of
neoconservative think-tankers Max Boot and Robert Kagan, they could swing
their loyalty a little leftward in order to maintain their advocacy of a
1990s-style foreign policy, in which the United States would be militarily
preeminent, belligerently liberal, unconditionally pro-Israel, and leading
brashly from the front. Scathing toward Obama and now toward Trump, Rubin
was not altogether wrong when she claimed, My views and analysis remain the
same.
More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump
resistance have welcomed these neocons into their fold. Boot, Kristol,
Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and Senator John McCain appear
daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the
axis of evil as George W. Bushs speechwriter, earns resistance retweets
by warning of this hour of liberal peril in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New
York Times hired Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal in an effort to
broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions, a curious
rationale given that Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump
pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change the op-ed pages
lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist.
In Washington, D.C., liberal foreign policy hands have reacted to Trumps
presidency less by reaching out to ordinary citizens than by crossing K
Street to make common cause with their neighborhood neocons. Among other
efforts, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the leading Clintonian
policy shop, is now issuing joint reports with the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), the leading neocon incubator, which this year sent John
Bolton to be National Security Adviser. CAP donated $200,000 to AEI in 2017.
The think tanks latest joint missive defends the rules-based international
order against Russian-backed transatlantic populism. Centrist Democrats
apparently choose to overlook the fact that neocons ludicrously accused
Obama of retreating from the supposed order, a charge repeated by Kristol
in an AEI forum as recently as February 2018. They might rather have asked
whether these newfound friends will warn of catastrophe at home only until
they can cheer on a fresh, righteous war abroad. As Kristol recently
tweeted: Shouldnt an important US foreign policy goal of the next couple
of decades be regime change in China?
Of course, tactical alliances are often necessary in politics, and any
immediate diminution of Republicans support for Trump may feel like a win
to Democrats, much as a drone strike may appear worthwhile for leaving the
world one terrorist fewer. But Democratic mainstays could make any number of
tactical alliances, including with non-interventionists on both the left and
the right. Instead, they have chosen to the court the neocon vote, if there
is one, at the risk of colluding with a class of discredited pseudo-experts.
Back in March 2016, as Hillary Clintons campaign geared up to woo
Republicans, one observer raised doubts: Now that the neocons [have] been
revealed as having no real grassroots to deliver, and that their actual
constituency consists almost entirely of a handful of donors subsidizing a
few dozen think tankers, journalists, and letterheads, why would Democrats
want them back? This insight might have benefitted the Clinton campaign,
which lost the pivotal states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin where
communities suffered high casualties in Middle East wars criticized by
Trump.
What best explains centrist Democrats rapprochement with neoconservatives
isnt an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their
current political objectives and style. Neocons have spent decades reducing
politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an
imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain
liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges
these Democrats fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep
Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history. Decent citizens,
the tale goes, will recoil at Trumps profanities and banish his like for
goodbut only if they are led by the very authorities for whom those
citizens have demonstrated deep mistrust. We will, in fact, be greeted as
liberators, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed in March 2003, days before
the first bombs dropped. The Never Trump neocons hold out a similar promise.
The question is whether they have any more to offer America than they had to
Iraq.
But it would be incorrect to say that neoconservatism has become simply a
resistance creed. While the Kristols of the Beltway have salvaged their
reputations by teeing off on Trump, Trump has drawn on neoconservative ideas
and goals, not to mention some neocons themselves, in order to fashion his
foreign policy. This outcome should be less surprising than it may sound.
All along, neoconservatives have positioned themselves against not only
totalitarian powers but also global institutions and interests. World
government is a terrible idea was how Irving Kristol, the father of Bill
and so-called godfather of neoconservatism, defined a core neocon belief in
2003. Prizing American power above international rules and bureaucracies,
neocons have historically assailed liberal internationalists, not banded
together with them. The elder Kristol, in 1985, dismissed liberal
internationalism as one vast fiction. In order to combat liberals, with
their faith in the United Nations or NATO or whatever, he argued,
conservatives must affirm the spirit of nationalism (to which he added
religion and economic growth). This view informed the George W. Bush
administration, in which Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in
particular, elevated the unilateral exercise of hard power to a first
principle of American policy.
During Trumps presidential campaign, commentators heard him denounce
globalism and figured that his America First foreign policy would spell a
retreat from US global leadership. They had some basis for this view: since
World War II, right-wing non-interventionistssometimes called
paleoconshave attacked globalism in order to argue that far-flung wars
serve the interests of others, but not those of Americans. Commentators
missed, however, that globalism, or something close, is also a target of
neocon interventionists, most notably National Security Adviser Bolton, the
Yale-trained, UN-bashing lawyer and veteran of every Republican
administration since Reagans. Whereas most neocons have trained their
rhetorical fire on villainous regimes first, and global institutions second,
Bolton flipped those priorities, making his career by railing against
globalism and the un-American Americans who bow before it.
If I were redoing the Security Council today, Bolton said in 2000, Id
have one permanent member [the United States], because thats the real
reflection of the distribution of power in the world. During the Obama
administration, when other neocons were warning of Americas retreat from
promoting democracy and leading the world order, Bolton framed his 2010
tract, How Barack Obama is Endangering Our National Sovereignty, around the
struggle between Americanists and globalists. Bolton implored the country
to wake up to the danger that leftists like Obama were attempting to give
away American sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies. (Not that
Bolton regarded sovereignty as a universal principle: he mocked in a 2008
book the diaphanous idea of sovereign equality that no one outside the UN
pays the slightest attention to.)
Back then, Bolton sounded like a despairing Cassandra, warning that the
globalists assault on sovereignty was something that most Americans didnt
even know was happening. Whether out of conviction or opportunism, he
joined forces with far-right, anti-immigrant Islamophobes like the Gatestone
Institute while offering commentary on the mainstream platforms of the AEI
and Fox News. Bolton and then-Congressman Mike Pompeo also became regular
guests on the radio show of ex-Reagan official and neocon fellow-traveler
Frank Gaffney, who, through his Center for Security Policy, thundered that
American sovereignty was under attack by globalists, socialists, Islamists
and others who seek our submission, as he recently characterized them. Yet
Gaffneys outfit remained a fringe-ish organization known for spreading
conspiracy theories. How, then, to gain power? In the 2016 primaries,
Gaffney, together with more traditional neocons like Elliott Abrams and
Michael Ledeen, decided to advise Senator Ted Cruz, who made a show of
denouncing neocons who went on naïve adventures to spread liberal democracy.
Cruz vowed to carpet-bomb Americas enemies instead, and find out if sand
can glow in the dark. It was a promising message, but it required a
different messenger.
For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance. Trump
elevated globalism from a marginal slur to the central foil of American
foreign policy and Republican politics. Americanism, not globalism, will be
our credo, Trump declared on capturing the nomination. He filled out
Boltons arid anti-legalism with a set of cultural tropeswhite nationalism,
Christian traditionalism, Western civilizationthat spoke to a GOP base
fearing decline and seeking restoration. Here, Trump made a distinctive
contribution to anti-globalist neoconservatism: he recast the United States
as a global victim.
Bolton had long expressed resentment toward malevolent outsiders and
sanctimonious elites, but Trump went further, calling the United States a
Third World country exploited by cunning foreigners and enabled by
domestic collaborators. Already fallen, America had to be made great again.
The anti-totalitarian neocons heard apostasy. Was not the United States
already great, now and forever shining the light of freedom on a benighted
world? Not to Trump. Positioning the United States behind the rest, Trump
portrayed America as a humiliated, subjugated dupeand gave a new, more
dynamic rationale to a stale neocon agenda. Unleash American power, Trump
promised, to take back what others had stolen. Turn the tables on a
vicious world by being more vicious than the rest. As far as Im
concerned, the president said, we have to fight fire with fire.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
US military personnel listening to President Trump at the Al Asad Air Base,
Iraq, December 26, 2018
This is fundamentally not a vision of restraint and withdrawalor
isolationism, as critics deride it. Trump wants to take things from the
world and assert Americas dominance over it. In the name of opposing
globalism, Trump has upheld one pillar after another of the neocon policy
agenda. He is building up Americas already supreme military, to the tune of
$750 billion slated for 2019. He is confronting a panoply of adversaries
from Venezuela to Iran to China. He has escalated military engagements in
parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, without leaving a
single of the nations dozens of formal security obligations around the
world. He has released the United States from multilateral arrangements like
the Paris Climate Agreement, UNESCO, and the UN Human Rights Council, and is
exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. And he has
steadfastly supported the right-wing government of Israel, moving the US
embassy to Jerusalem and slashing aid to the UN agency for Palestinian
refugees. If Dick Cheney were president, the record would be similar.
Still, Trump remains a mixed blessing for neo-neoconservatism, and not just
because of his penchant for chaos and incoherence. Anti-globalism is a
position shared by paleocons and neocons, and Trump vacillates between the
two variants. In the name of opposing globalism, Trump can execute
nationalist withdrawals as well as the vigorous exercise of America First
power. Trumps decision to pull 2,000 US troops out of Syriamade suddenly,
though telegraphed in public for monthsmakes sense in anti-globalist terms:
the United States should crush its ISIS enemy and then leave, rather than
get entangled in an open-ended, nation-building, world-ordering mission.
Likewise, Trump took the dramatic of step of meeting personally with North
Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June 2018, and he continues to appear
friendlier than his advisers toward deal-making with North Korea. He seems
to have stumbled upon a nationalist defense of bilateral diplomatic
negotiation at odds with neocon orthodoxy. Because Trump ascribes no
exceptional moral virtue to America, he sees no concession in meeting with
an adversary, especially if he can claim to have cowed the other side
through sanctions and threats of fire and fury. Anti-globalism opens up
space for a muscular kind of diplomacybilateral and leader-to-leaderthat
anti-totalitarianism closes down. For that reason, some paleocons, such as
Pat Buchanan, applauded the diplomatic initiative with North Korea, just as
they adopt the framework of nationalism versus globalism, in the hope that
Trump will heed their version of it.
So far, however, Trump has sought to put America above the world, not set it
apart. The anti-globalists are fully capable of projecting American
political-military power on a global scale. They tap existing reserves of
cultural chauvinism and nationalist animus as they jettison the old
rationale of liberal world-ordering. In this way, Trump has salvaged the
neoconservative policy agenda, and rebranded it for a new generation. The
legacy neocons are not unprincipled in their opposition to Trump, but a
quarter-century removed from the end of the cold war, their endless crusades
against totalitarianism look more and more like yesterdays cause.
Other neocons see Trumps as a banner they can get behind. The Foundation
for Defense of Democracies, a Twitter-happy advocacy group that trashed the
Iran nuclear deal, has emerged as the leading redoubt of Trump-friendly
neocons. Its chief executive, Mark Dubowitz, recently opined that democracy
has been a disaster in the Middle East and suggested inclusive
authoritarianism as the way forwardnot the sentiment one might expect from
a titularly pro-democracy group. Gaffneys Center for Security Policy
maintains a direct line to Bolton, who appointed one of its fellows as his
chief of staff.
While the older neocons make the rounds on the Sunday shows and newspapers
of record, the new breed exerts influence through alternative media and
party politics. In a sign of things to come, ambitious Republican
politicians like Pompeo and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton have gravitated
toward Trumps sovereigntist, anti-globalist pitch. Cotton, once hyped by
Bill Kristol and hailed as the last, best hope for GOP hawks, gave a
speech in May complaining that a bipartisan, cosmopolitan elite has
tended
to put its own interests and the interests of foreigners above the national
interest. Cottons trajectory is explicable: he and other Trumpist
Republicans may yet be the hawks best hope. Give anti-globalism a chance,
writes Clifford May, FDDs founder and president. He has every reason to say
so. We will find out what this proudly iron-fisted impulse will bring in the
remainder of the Trump years, and after.
January 2, 2019, 7:00 am