Apparently advocating U.S. extended involvement in lengthy wars that turned out to be disastrous costly quagmires is not a humbling experience for what is left of the American neoconservative movement. Today’s neoconservatives are a far cry from the Irving Kristols and Norman Podhoretzs who founded the movement in the late 1960s and provided intellectual and policy-making support for the Reagan administration’s successful foreign policies that won the Cold War. The neoconservative remnant — the lead cheerleaders for the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first two decades of the 21st century — today pushes for greater U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Anyone who disagrees with them, including those who reasonably contend that NATO expansion in the aftermath of the Cold War contributed to the rise of Putin and revived Russian imperialism, is labeled “pro-Putin” or “pro-dictatorship.” Now they are promoting a new book by Jacob Heilbrunn, a former critic of the neoconservatives, who has apparently joined the movement despite editing a journal — the National Interest — that prides itself on promoting foreign policy “realism.”
Heilbrunn’s new book is titled America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. The timing of the book is no accident. Heilbrunn attempts to use a foreign policy “history” of American conservatism from the 1920s to the present to persuade voters that Donald Trump favors foreign dictators over Democrats, and if elected will likely attempt to establish a dictatorship here in the United States. (READ MORE: American Appeasement Emboldens Bad Actors)
All one needs to do is read the reviews of the book by neoconservative writers and others on the anti-Trump left to see what is going on here. Writing in the Bulwark, founded by Trump-deranged neocons Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes (a regular contributor to Trump-deranged MSNBC), Ronald Radosh criticizes Heilbrunn for contending that “neoconservatives were the predecessors of MAGA” but praises him for labeling Pat Buchanan pro-Putin for arguing that “NATO expansion and intervention in the Balkans were colossal errors” — which they were — and pro-authoritarian for supporting Hungary’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Radosh is at one with Heilbrunn in seeing Trump and his supporters as threats to “liberal democracy” and proponents of an “illiberal world order.” Radosh concludes that “An illiberal United States would be a natural ally of illiberal Russia, and illiberal Russia can help create an illiberal United States.” This is yet another version of the Russia hoax just in time for the 2024 election. (READ MORE: What Does America First Actually Mean?)
In American Purpose, neocon intellectual Arch Puddington praises Heilbrunn for helping to expose “right-wingers who succumbed to the allure of the tough-guy autocrat, ranging from Pinochet to Hitler.” Puddington criticizes “today’s MAGA operatives, who claim democracy’s mantle while aligning themselves with democracy’s enemies,” and identifies William F. Buckley, Jr and early National Review conservatives as MAGA’s predecessors in aligning the right with unsavory dictators. Like Radosh, Puddington defends the neoconservatives from Heilbrunn’s attempt to link them to Trump’s America First movement. Instead, Puddington writes, the neoconservatives “should be credited with their early and perceptive warnings about the threat to democracy, here and across the globe, from Trump’s MAGA movement, national conservatism, and the right-wing media machine.” Heilbrunn’s most important message, Puddington writes, is that Trump and the “authoritarian Right” are “dedicated to first gaining political power and then dismantling the institutions of democracy.” (READ MORE: Just Call National Review the Stupid Party Review From Now On)
But it’s not just neoconservatives who are praising Heilbrunn’s book. Favorable reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, the Economist, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other leftist anti-Trump newspapers and magazines. It is a full-court media assault on Trump using Heilbrunn’s book as a vehicle intended to persuade voters that Trump intends to destroy democracy both at home and abroad.
Conservative critics of Heilbrunn’s book, like James Piereson in the New Criterion and Helen Andrews in the American Conservative, point out how bad the book is as history, intellectual or otherwise, but they make the mistake of judging the book on its merits. Heilbrunn tipped his hand earlier this year when in the National Interest he described Joe Biden as a “vigorous leader” who has demonstrated “diplomatic savvy” as a “war president” in the Ukraine conflict, while labeling critics of U.S. co-belligerency in the Ukraine War as being “chicken about backing Kyiv” and of engaging in “cowardly trucking to the Kremlin.” America Last is not history and is not meant to be history. It is a campaign book that the leftist and anti-Trump media is already using to concoct another Russia hoax on the American people. If in the meantime the United States gets drawn into another war of choice that just might escalate into a broader European war, so be it. At least Donald Trump won’t be president again.
