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The Spectacle Blog
Gentlemen, gentlemen, let’s have some order here. You are both brilliant, witty, tall, and distinguished students of our country’s glory-soaked history, but let us, as they used to teach in school, be clear.
Jeff Lord is quite right to point out that intervention in Central and South America is as American as baseball (damn straight; where would the national pastime be otherwise? and how else would those Latin athletes be laughing at those clever Yankee (the race not the club) merchants and their famous free market? You show ‘em Albert!).
And not only South and Central America, as you well know.
But neoconservatism is not the issue here, and Jim Antle is quite right to say so. Neoconservatism is a set (scarcely a system) of ideas that evolved in conversations between, and exchanges of essays by, a group of friends, all more or less of the WW II generation or just after — Irving Kristol, Daniel P. Moynihan, Robert Bartley, Leo Rosten, and a few others, notably Nathan Glazer and peripherally Mel Lasky (he and Tony Robinson and Stephen Spender were in a damp office in London). They were joined by still others, such as Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy and The American Spectator’s Mr. Tyrrell. The conversation was almost entirely concerned with domestic issues — civil rights and the public policies that ought, or ought not, to follow their legal and constitutional consolidation in the '50s-60s, welfare matters (e.g., “conservative safety net welfare state” vs. reliance on private goodness and free markets), and many more.
The foreign policy of the first Bush administration — the resort to war to enforce international borders — was widely perceived, and surely not inexactly, as a traditional exercise of state power, and it received broad support in our country as well as amongst others, including old allies like France and Britain and new-circumstantial ones like Syria and old-circumstantial ones like Saudi Arabia. Some of them even helped us, as per the Foreign Legion contingent that stayed in the rear, but I have it on good authority that was not for want of volunteering, only Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell were in the unilateral-chain-of-command mode where they felt comfortable and did it their way. The second war began as old-fashioned get-the-varmints warfare, but evolved with the nation-building ambitions of the move into Iraq. The notion of pre-emptive defense and punish-the-dictators and battle-cry-of-freedom-and-democracy beyond our own borders was not a neoconservative notion. It may have been a Wilsonian one, but I leave that to specialists in the matter, as it is not certain President Wilson’s “make the world safe for democracy” fantasy was more important in his own mind and in its effect on 20th century history than his “self-determination for all peoples” one. And anyway, neither the president nor his top men were neos in any recognizable sense, certainly not Mr. Rumsfeld or Mr. Cheney or Miss Rice, nor Mr. Wolfowitz, who is widely called a neo but who had taken his distances from the Committee on the Present Danger in the '70s-80s when, organized by Democrats such as Mr. Nitze and Mr. Rostow and Mrs. Kirkpatrick and others and that attracted Senator Jackson as well as President Reagan (before he was president) and was championed by the then-neos, except Mr. Luttwak, but he too always took his distances from them, as did Prof. Bloom and Prof. Wohlstetter, Mr. Wolfowitz’s great teachers. Please correct me if I am wrong in any or all of these characterizations, I am quite open to being corrected on points of fact, history, and even, yes, judgment.
But, and this is an important but, the neos via several of their key surviving members or their presumptive heirs, applauded and rationalized the enterprise, with some notable exceptions.
And also but, and this too is an important but, are we really in neoconservative territory now? Well, you have to work it out for yourselves and I am happy to see you doing this in a spirited and courteous way. We will have to hope in the sound judgment of future historians and note only that it — and let us not, please, go Clintonesque and start arguing about what “it” means — did not work out as planned, but that is what the neoconservatives — the original items, taking a cue from Robbie Burns — taught us to expect of the best laid plans o’ mice an’ men.
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More Blog Posts by Roger Kaplan
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/12/13/american-international-policy
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Dan Phillips| 12.13.11 @ 12:55PM
Mr. Kaplan, there is some truth here, but I am afraid some misdirection also.
First, the First Gulf War may have been an exercise in international border enforcement, but it wasn't our fight. Nowhere is it written in stone by the Hand of God that the US must lead or participate in such ventures. We went to war because the Bush I Administration, with the slobbering acquiescence of Republicans and Democrats alike, took it upon this country to play global enforcer, something I see nowhere in the job description of the US government called the Constitution. Likewise with “get-the-varmints” warfare. Don’t see that in the job description either.
Second, I agree that people throw around the word neoconservative too casually. Many hyper-interventionists (John Bolton for example) are not neoconservatives proper. They are a type of bellicose, militaristic nationalist, and are less motivated by spreading democracy than they are by stomping out perceived (and always alarmingly exaggerated) threats.
I also agree that there is a difference between the “first generation” of neoconservatives, Irving Kristol for example, and “second generation” neoconservatives, Kristol the Younger for example. The second generation is more fixated on foreign policy as you indicate and more grandiose and less cautious with their rhetoric and plans. But it is clear that the seeds of neoconservative thought that grew into the Jacobin radicalism of “second generation” neoconservatism were there from the beginning.
But while I agree that we need to be more careful with the use of neoconservative, confining the term only to those with a direct lineage to the originals is precision with the intent to mislead. Rumsfeld and Cheney may be more Bolton like, but Wolfowitz not a neoconservative? Come on now.
In most cases the term neoconservative is not meant to indicate only people with a direct lineage, but the ideas they promulgated. Kristol the Elder didn’t write a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea for nothing. Unfortunately, neoconservatives ideas suffuse the whole “conservative” interventionist paradigm making it very hard to sort out.
I think most “conservative” interventionists are primarily concerned with what they see as our national interests and suppressing imagined threats, and less concerned with democratization projects, but the tension still exists as was illustrated here in the AmSpec blog regarding Egypt and Libya. But these bellicose nationalists have a very hard time disentangling themselves from neocon ideas and rhetoric especially when pressed on national interest questions. They quickly resort to classic neocon formulations of US as necessary enforcer of world order and bringer of light complete with all or nothing Jacobin–like good guys vs. bad guys scenarios.
There are a few illiberal interventionists who recognize neoconservatism as the post-Enlightenment liberal ideological dogma that it is and still maintain their interventionism (Ron L who comments here at times is one), but they are few and far between. In my experience neoconservative presumptions suffuse the thought processes of the average run-of-the-mill “conservative” interventionist to the point where it is very hard to make distinctions.
For example, Newt Gingrich’s (is he or is he not a neoconservative?) latest book is on the necessity of American Exceptionalism. (It is interesting that he felt the need to write that as his campaign book instead of something on the economy.) Romney (is he or isn’t he a neoconservative?) babbles incessantly about American Exceptionalism and sings pitch perfect from the neocon hymnal. American Exceptionalism, as it is (mis)understood by “conservatives” today, is an entirely neocon infused idea. Both the militant nationalists and the neocons share the presumption that American has a special role to fill in the world and since there are no more naked Imperialists (let’s invade country x so we can pump their oil) this is always prefaced on a notion of America as benign hegemon. It is conceivably possible to be a militant nationalist without having pretensions of being responsible for the whole world. A militant nationalist might conceivably be concerned only about his own “sphere.” So the world hegemon thing is a neocon baby whether you like it or not.
Dai Alanye | 12.13.11 @ 2:32PM
First Gulf War might have been publicly justified as a politically-correct border enforcement but its true justification was the protection of energy supplies and the weakening of a dictator whose goals were inimical to our interests and those of our allies.
Bush I can be accused of both short-sightedness in how he fought it and soft-headedness in how he explained our part in the quarrel, but no-one presenting himself as an analyst should pass over the actual motivations for the war.
As for who is or is not a neocon, it's merely a label, and a poorly-defined one at that.
JP| 12.13.11 @ 7:59PM
“However our present interest may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.”
- Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1801