How neo are the neocons?
VTR
From the Los Angeles Times
How neo are the neocons ?
Promoting democracy throughout the world has been a driving force in U.S. politics since the
country's earliest days.
Jonah Goldberg
April 22, 2008
In the play "Embedded," Tim Robbins' 2003 satire about the Iraq invasion, a thinly veiled
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz shout with Nazi-like gusto, "Hail Leo Strauss!" and get
sexually aroused at the prospect of international conquest. During the post-9/11 age of
neo-phobia, when an irrational fear of anything that might be called "neoconservative" gripped
the nation, such critiques passed as intelligently nuanced.
Neocons have been attacked as secret Trotskyites, open imperialists and perfidious double
agents for Israel. Some think the neocons are something like Jesuits (or perhaps Jewsuits) in
the service of their dark anti-pope Strauss, a long-dead, German-Jewish political philosopher
who emigrated to the U.S. to escape Hitler.
In a hopeful sign that it's once again safe to discuss the topic sanely, Robert Kagan of the
Carnegie Endowment has offered a renewed defense of neoconservative foreign policy in the
latest issue of World Affairs Journal.
"The first thing that could be said about this neoconservative worldview is that there is
nothing very conservative about it," Kagan writes. "But a more important question is, how 'neo'
is it?" His answer: not very.
From our earliest days, Americans have supported the promotion of democracy around the world,
often by force and without undue heed to international institutions. William Henry Seward, a
founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln's secretary of State, argued that it was America's
mission to lead the way "to the universal restoration of power to the governed." A generation
earlier, statesman Henry Clay championed the idea that America had the "duty to share with the
rest of mankind this most precious gift" of liberty. Both world wars, Korea and Vietnam would
be inconceivable without accounting for America's dedication to the promotion and defense of
democracy.
Kagan traces such sentiments to the dawn of the republic. The founders, he writes, saw the U.S.
as a " 'Hercules in a cradle' ... because its beliefs, which liberated human potential and made
possible a transcendent greatness, would capture the imagination and the following of all
humanity."
Even amid the 15-month riot of Bush-bashing during the Democratic Party's fratricidal
primaries, both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama conceded the core neoconservative
principle of the Bush doctrine. "There's absolutely a connection between a democratic regime
and heightened security for the United States," Clinton said, responding to events in Pakistan.
And Obama would not only unilaterally attack Al Qaeda in Pakistan without Pakistan's permission
if necessary, but he also argues that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is a direct
consequence of the lack of democracy.
Obviously, supporting the spread of democracy hardly requires you to support the Iraq war. But
it works the other way around as well. Support for the Iraq war doesn't qualify you as a
neoconservative. Douglas J. Feith, who was an undersecretary of Defense after 9/11, argues in
his new memoir, "War and Decision," that democratization didn't rank very high among the Bush
administration's early priorities. Moreover, the Bush administration's mistakes in Iraq --
perhaps including the war itself -- have less relationship to ideology than many think. "It is
possible," as Kagan notes, "to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish,
hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine."
America's forcible promotion of democracy has been both successful (Germany, Japan) and
unsuccessful (Vietnam). Where Iraq falls in the win-loss columns is unknowable right now. But
the idea that the "Iraq project" is some bizarre and otherworldly enterprise will seem
laughable to historians a century from now, even if it is viewed as a disaster.
I largely agree with Kagan on all of these points. But I have a problem too. Kagan embraces and
celebrates the definition of neoconservatism as a doctrine of democracy promotion abroad,
moralism in foreign policy and unilateralism toward these ends when necessary. But the original
neoconservatism of the late '60s and early '70s wasn't about any of these things.
It was about domestic affairs, primarily the dangers of overreach. Less an ideology than a
branch of skepticism about the ability of government to achieve anything like utopian goals,
neoconservatism was the school for former liberals -- they'd famously been "mugged by reality,"
in Irving Kristol's words.
Kagan and Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol (son of Irving) actually rejected the label
"neoconservative" when describing their ideal foreign policy in a now famous 1994 Foreign
Affairs essay, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." Yet, since then, their neo-Reaganism
has simply been called "neoconservatism."
Hence the irony: The best cure for today's neoconservatism is a big dose of the neoconservatism
of old.