What is a Neocon?: Part II

The depoliticized 90s, the post-Cold War foreign policy pivot, the Unipolar Moment, DPG, PNAC, 9/11, the Israel-shaped elephant in the room, realism comes home to roost, and goodbye to all of that...

Caveat: as with Part 1, Part 2 of my series on the neocons is incomplete. It just isn’t possible to cover the entire subject and all of its nuances, especially as neoconservatism enters into its mature phase after 9/11 and becomes harder to distinguish from plain old mainstream conservatism. This fuzziness is perhaps best summed up by the question, “Was George W. Bush a neocon?”¹ Take a second to think on that.

The answer is yes, sort of, but also no, because if yes, then the particular origins, modes of social analysis, and ethno-religious characteristics of the neocons are no longer relevant so then what is neoconservatism exactly except the floating signifier we started from in Part 1?

I can’t resolve that problem, but I will try to offer some clarity around the topic that will at least keep the term legible, separate out its adherents from its detractors, and maybe most importantly explain how its successor ideology has transmogrified into the ruling ethos of the Global American Empire.

Part II.

After the Cold War ended in 1991, neoconservatism had become one of the most powerful forces in American politics, but without an obvious next step. For decades its foreign policy agenda had been firmly anchored to the fight against global communism, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union that raison d'être vanished and there was no longer an obvious enemy to focus its energies or cohere the right-of-center coalition that Reagan had managed to knit together during the 80s. So where were neocons supposed to pivot in the wake of Soviet collapse? And for that matter, how was the right going to redefine itself without the clarity of purpose that had shaped its agenda since the end of World War II?

Exacerbating the confusion was the fact that the domestic issues around which the neocons first raised their profile seemed increasingly “solved” or in any case thoroughly absorbed into mainstream Republican and Democratic platforms. The social and cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s became far less salient as hippiedom forfeited its cultural ascendancy to yuppiedom and the emergent “moral majority.” Reagan’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill set in motion the most dramatic reduction in crime the country had ever seen, and the issue of welfare dependency, which was maybe the first and most frequent target of neoconservative critique, was effectively put to rest when Clinton passed welfare reform in ‘96.

American life was pretty good. NAFTA, which passed in ‘92 but only went into effect in ‘94, hadn’t quite yet gutted the interior. Reagan’s amnesty and the 1990 Immigration Act would have disastrous downstream consequences (which remain at the center of our politics today), but in this post-Cold War period were mostly concentrated in a few border states. A sense of optimism prevailed. Economic liberalization, suburbanization, and the “culture of narcissism” that defined the boomers had come into full maturity and resulted in a largely depoliticized society.² To the extent there were salient socio-political questions, they revolved around a totally new set of priorities, mostly driven by the Christian right. Issues like abortion, school prayer, and the sanctity of marriage supplanted earlier debates around drugs, crime, and urban decay.

In such a context, the neocons of old didn’t really have much to contribute. Not only did the neocons not care as much about these questions, their more academic, data-driven approach––so useful in debates over welfare and crime––didn’t apply as well to debates on abortion. Further, as pointed out in Part 1, if you take Alexander Bloom’s assessment seriously that the early neocons were primarily motivated by a deep-seated fear of anti-semitism,³ the 80s and 90s made that fear a literal joke. American Jews enjoyed unprecedented levels of social and cultural assimilation during this period, and the rise of Christian evangelical support for Israel in the 1980s created an unlikely but powerful alliance that reinforced Jewish security in the American political landscape. You’d be hard pressed to find a place and time in history where Jews had it so good.

With their relevance on domestic questions made more or less obsolete, and the old generation of neocons now giving way to the new generation (famously in the case of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to their sons, Bill and John), the neocons turned their attention to the unsettled debate over how to assert American military might in a world devoid of the Soviet threat. How the neocons are perceived now, and their reputation as reckless chickenhawks is based largely on the reorientation of their politics starting in the 90s. Where you start or which figures or writings you choose to include to make sense of this shift is an open question, and again, for the third time, I’m almost certainly leaving something out, but for the sake of “good enough” I will look at three main texts: “The Unipolar Moment” by Charles Krauthammer which was published in Foreign Affairs in 1991, the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide from 1992 authored by Paul Wolfowitz under the purview of Scooter Libby, and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for a New American Century published in September of 2000.

Krauthammer’s 1991 article in Foreign Affairs is the place to start not only because it clearly spells out the neoconservative foreign policy vision of the 90s and beyond–– both its practical and moral justifications––but also explains the post Cold War departure from neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick whose more realist foreign policy approach prevailed during the Reagan administration.

As the Cold War drew to a close, Kirkpatrick wrote an essay that ran in the National Interest titled “A Normal Country in a Normal Time”⁴ where she argued that America could retire its foreign policy obsessions and recenter its efforts on domestic concerns, that the world and America no longer faced the same degree of existential threat from abroad as it did in the decades prior, and that we should therefore relinquish any presumptions to being the world’s sole global superpower. She writes:

Foreign policy becomes a major aspect of a society only if its government is expansionist, imperial, aggressive, or when it is threatened by aggression. One of the most important consequences of the half century of war and Cold War has been to give foreign affairs an unnatural importance. The end of the Cold War frees time, attention, and resources for American needs.

…

Most of the international military obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated. Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens, and responsibilities. It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an usually successful, open American republic.

But few have the constitution to throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom once it is in their possession. Kirkpatrick may have been right, but her fellow neocons were not persuaded. Krauthammer’s “Unipolar Moment,” published shortly after “A Normal Country,” explicitly rejected Kirkpatrick’s view, asserting instead that the world remained fraught with threats that required active U.S. leadership (citing the first Iraq War as evidence of this fact), and that moreover the U.S. had an obligation to act as the guarantor of global stability and to shirk from this responsibility would be inviting chaos into the international system that would ensure more and worse military aggression in the years to come. For Krauthammer, war was the natural condition of the world, and to the extent you weren’t fighting one, you were staving one off. For Krauthammer, there was no such thing as a “normal time.”

In the essay Krauthammer goes on to reject a number of other foreign policy approaches. According to Krauthammer, isolationism or Kirkpatrick-esque retrenchment leaves a power vacuum, Kissinger-esque realism overestimates the possibility of muli-polarity where countries like Japan or Germany can effectively balance power in their region, and liberal internationalism is a delusion that falsely imagines that the U.N. or the fiction of “International Law” can ever mean anything if not enforced by the U.S. military, that liberal internationalism is in effect just American unipolarity but dressed up in toothless formalities we might as well do without.

Karuthammer puts it like this:

“The true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world, brought sharply into focus by the gulf crisis [is this]: a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West…. American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself.”

Where it gets more interesting is deeper in the essay where Krauthammer pays lip service to the isolationist position, speaking more or less directly to Pat Buchanan and Jeane Kirkpatrick who represented the other path in the fork conservatives were facing at the time.

“I have great respect for American isolationism. First, because of its popular appeal and, second, because of its natural appeal. On the face of it, isolationism seems the logical, God-given foreign policy for the United States.

It is not just geography that inclines us to it––we are an island continent protected by two vast oceans, bordered by two neighbors that could hardly be friendlier––but history. America was founded on the idea of cleansing itself of the intrigues and irrationalities, the dynastic squabbles and religious wars, of the Old World.

…

Isolationists say rather unobjectionably that America should confine its attentions in the world to defending vital national interests.”

But here Krauthammer pauses and signals the exception to his sympathy for isolationism that would predict the next two decades of interventionist war on behalf of the “unipolar” worldview. This is perhaps the most important paragraph in the essay and in many ways the key that unlocks the post Cold War neoconservative approach to foreign policy:

“Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and hegemonic designs on Arabia posed as clear a threat to American interests as one can imagine––a threat to America's oil-based economy, to its close allies in the region, and ultimately to American security itself. The rise of a hostile power, fueled by endless oil income, building weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them regionally and eventually intercontinentally (Saddam has already tested a three-stage rocket) can hardly be a matter of indifference to the United States.

If under these conditions a cadre of influential liberals and conservatives finds that upon reflection (and in contradiction to the doctrine enunciated by the most dovish president of the postwar era, Jimmy Carter) the Persian Gulf is not, after all, a vital American interest, then it is hard to see what ‘vital interest’ can mean.”

Go ahead and re-read that. All of it. What is being defined here as a “vital” American interest? Is what he describes as “clear a threat to American interests as one can imagine?” The presumptive yes Krauthammer expects you to answer these questions with, and the military obligations implied by that answer becomes the defining feature of the neocons from this point on.

Two foundational documents emerged in the subsequent decade that gave institutional shape to Krauthammer’s vision: the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), primarily authored by Paul Wolfowitz, with recommendations from Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Perle, and eight years later a report from Project for the New American Century (PNAC) titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” published in September of 2000. Together, these texts formalized Krauthammer’s assertion of American global dominance as a moral and strategic imperative and paved the way for what was to come in the wake of 9/11.

The Defense Planning Guidance, leaked in draft form to The New York Times in 1992, set out an explicit strategy to prevent the emergence of any rival power that could challenge the United States’ global supremacy. It identified the dissolution of the Soviet Union not as the culmination of America’s global responsibilities but as the beginning of a new era requiring active measures to consolidate the unipolar world. Wolfowitz and his co-authors argued:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival… This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The DPG’s focus on preempting regional hegemons across Western Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union echoed Krauthammer’s warning against isolationism and multipolarity, and it took them a step further by operationalizing this principle: the United States must, at all times, be using its military and economic might to actively shape the global environment to ensure no competitor could rise. The document prescribed a military posture capable of swift interventions, noting that “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” was a fundamental objective. Wolfowitz’s guidance also reified the moral dimension of this strategy, conflating the spread of democracy and open markets to U.S. security interests.⁵

The strategic framework established through the DPG went somewhat dormant during the Clinton years. Clinton’s more liberal internationalist approach came under heavy attack from the pages of The Weekly Standard,⁶ which by the late 90’s had supplanted Commentary as the neoconservative magazine of record, and made a routine of bashing Clinton for his reticence to fully embrace America’s global obligations, hedging military engagement and getting bogged down in bureaucratic entanglements with the U.N. and NATO, and thereby squandering opportunities to cement American dominance by failing the test of the Balkans and elsewhere. The story the neocons told of the impotent, half-cocked liberal approach to foreign policy of the mid-90s was full of holes but ultimately convincing since no one could explain how the “multilateral institutions” beloved by liberals could justify their authority apart from the sheer fact of American military might. America was the undisputed strongest nation in the world and Americans rightfully believed they should, if responsibly exercised, flex that power however they pleased.

In 2000 Bush came into office with the explicit mandate to reassert American military dominance abroad. The braintrust at Project for a New American Century, a think tank founded by the editors of The Weekly Standard, published a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that expanded and updated the Krauthammer-DPG foreign policy vision in the aftermath of Clinton’s eight years of “strategic drift.” PNAC’s signatories and staff included a who’s-who of the eras conservative figureheads––Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, Eliot Cohen, John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Steve Forbes, our old friend from Part 1, Norman Podhoretz, and many others––who all came to together to identify a clear strategic objective:

“The United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.”

This ambition underscored the PNAC’s commitment to maintaining American military dominance through significant investments in defense, the modernization of U.S. forces, and the expansion of military capabilities into every corner of life, including the internet. It also identified the Middle East, particularly Iraq (please take note of why Iraq keeps coming up over and over again) as a central theater for asserting U.S. influence, arguing for regime change as a necessary step to stabilize the region and protect American interests.

The practical application of these ideas became a fait accompli after 9/11. The Bush administration, populated largely by the neocons listed above, had finally found the pretext to implement the policies outlined in these documents with almost total carte blanche from a freshly wounded and blood thirsty American public. The event was so well suited to the neocon agenda that even the most hardened skeptic can forgive 9/11 conspiracy theorists for drawing certain connections. Strange, improbable things happen. Fate conspires toward its own ends. Fine. But one might at least raise an eyebrow for good measure.

In any case, the neocon moment had arrived. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 embodied of the broader vision articulated in Krauthammer’s essay, the DPG, and the PNAC report. The Iraq invasion, in particular, reflected the neoconservative belief that regime change could transform an entire region into a stable, democratic, pro-American bloc—a conviction rooted in the idealistic strain of neoconservatism totally at odds with the steely-eyed pragmatism its practitioners applied to just about everything else. The wisdom, or catastrophic hubris of the neoconservative worldview would finally be proven out on the battlefield.

Suffice to say, the battlefield won. The invasion quickly turned into a disaster. The occupation was marked by strategic failures, from insufficient troop levels to the disbanding of the Iraqi military, which fueled a violent insurgency and gave rise to terrorist groups that would haunt us for the next decade. The neocons who held the line were reduced to sputtering cope. David Frum, for example, a then speech writer for Bush, insisted that the war was necessary despite its challenges, resorting to moralistic abstractions and asserting that anyone who rejected the wisdom of the campaign was an “unpatriotic conservative.”

But many neocons jumped ship and the American people jumped ship with them. Major media figures and public intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and Andrew Sullivan, once staunch proponents of the war and neocon-style interventionism more broadly, now led the charge against it in places like the Atlantic and the neocon home turf of the National Interest. Even William F. Buckley, while not a neoconservative per se, called the war “a failure” and argued that it was fundamentally “a mistake.” Their arguments followed from a public increasingly skeptical of the war’s aims and outcomes.⁷ The promise of a swift liberation followed by democracy-building was replaced by grim images of sectarian violence and an endless insurgency that claimed thousands of American lives. Our people were dying. And for what exactly?

A giant Israel-shaped elephant stalks the room.

Reading through these seminal neoconservative documents it is actually quite surprising how little Israel is mentioned. Krauthammer doesn’t mention Israel at all in “Unipolar Moment.”⁸ The DPG doesn’t either (at least not in the excerpts that were leaked to the New York Times in 1992). In the PNAC report the word Israel only shows up once, in a throwaway sentence about “Israeli and Saudi citizens donn[ing] gas masks in nightly terror of Scud attacks.” But the absence of the word “Israel” does little to obscure the shape of the negative space it occupies in all of these writings. Even the most ardent neoconservative apologist cannot deny the centrality of America’s “special relationship” with Israel in the neoconservative foreign policy mission.

How far you want to roll back the clock on this issue is a matter of taste. As I said before, this whole topic requires a book, and I only have this (now very long) post, so keeping with the focus on the 90s through the Iraq War, the first place to turn is the policy paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, authored by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser for Benjamin Netanyahu when he first took office as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996.

A Clean Break explicitly called for a shift in Israeli policy away from territorial concessions and peace negotiations, instead advocating for aggressive unilateral actions, including regime change in Iraq and the destabilization of Syria. The authors envisioned a “clean break” from the Oslo Accords and proposed a strategy focused on “weakening, containing, and even rolling back” regional adversaries to secure Israeli dominance. Remarkably, the policy’s recommendations—particularly the emphasis on removing Saddam Hussein and reshaping the regional order—aligned almost perfectly with the subsequent U.S. actions in the Middle East under the George W. Bush administration. However you perceive the motivations of the authors of the document, you’d have to be wilfully blind not to recognize the almost perfect 1:1 overlap between this paper and the broader neoconservative agenda as it was put into action after 9/11. Whatever daylight between Israel’s strategic interests expressed in A Clean Break and America’s military operations, you’d have to strain to find it.

You’d have to strain even further to conclude that the totality of this overlap was incidental. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued in their widely criticized but poorly refuted paper⁹ The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the policies championed by the neoconservative movement in the post-Cold War period—and especially after 9/11—aligned remarkably with the interests of the Israeli state, often to the detriment of America.

Keeping in mind that the core of neoconservatism’s post-9/11 foreign policy was the idea that democratizing the Middle East would stabilize the region and, by extension, secure Israel’s safety, Mearsheimer and Walt write:

“Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party… Although neoconservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.… Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%. Thus, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence.’ Rather, the war was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it.”

As detailed above, key neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith had long advocated regime change in Iraq as part of a broader strategy to remake the Middle East in Israel’s favor. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and eventually Iran all posed existential threats to Israel’s security and it is no wonder why these nations and regimes have become the central focus of U.S. military efforts in the middle-east for the entirety of the 21st century.

The problem, of course, was that these neoconservative priorities often ran counter to America’s own strategic interests. Iraq, which had been a secular counterbalance to Iran, became a vacuum for chaos after the U.S.-led invasion, empowering Shia militias and allowing Iran to extend its influence throughout the region. The unintended consequence was a badly fragmented region that unsurprisingly to everyone but the neocons invited only more chaos and danger. As Mearsheimer and Walt observe, “Israel was becoming a strategic burden,” and our ability to deal with terrorism and “rogue” Middle-East states was made more difficult, not less-so by ensnaring ourselves in narrow concerns over Israeli security.

Whether you find Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments compelling or not, it’s hard to refute that the results of neocon-led foreign policy efforts in the Middle East have been catastrophic for American security. The destabilization of Iraq birthed al-Qaeda and later ISIS, while U.S. policies inflamed anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world, creating new threats that demanded further interventions, and badly damaged our credibility and capability to deal with emerging threats elsewhere.

Even Israel itself did not emerge unscathed. By closely aligning with neoconservative policies, Israel became more straightforwardly a client-state of American empire, rather than a self-sustaining state of its own, and which made it an even larger target for regional hostility. Furthermore, the reliance on American power to secure its interests reduced Israel’s own incentives to pursue a sustainable peace with its neighbors. As Mearsheimer and Walt write, “Israel’s dependence on American support has given it the confidence to pursue policies—including expanding settlements in the West Bank and using disproportionate force in Gaza—that have made a two-state solution virtually impossible.”

Whether cynical or genuinely believed, motivated by selfish ethno-religious interest or belief in “Judeo-Christian” American might, or some other third thing, the neoconservative foreign policy strategy to wed itself so completely to the perceived mutual interests of Israel and the United States has done either country, or the world at large, little good.

As Americans started to intuit these contradictions at the close of the Bush years, the neoconservative project, over-extended and having lost sight of the warnings leveled by both its realist detractors and its more sober adherents like Jeane Kirkpatrick, collapsed under the weight of its failures. As the Obama presidency began, the neoconservative establishment did not vanish exactly but instead went underground, subtly repositioning itself within the new political landscape.

Its major figures seemed to pay little professional cost for their role in the foreign policy disasters that occupied the center of U.S. politics at the time. Figures like Robert Kagan and Max Boot became regular contributors to major publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times, reframing their arguments to appeal to a liberal audience that was increasingly wary of the GOP’s post-Bush turn toward populism.

Meanwhile, the Obama presidency’s foreign policy, while ostensibly a rejection of Bush-era interventionism, provided a surprising avenue for neoconservative influence. The more full-throated hawkish rhetoric preferred by people like Krauthammer was slightly softened by Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, but shared all of the same belligerent moralism that had justified the neoconservative attempt to export liberal Democracy to the rest of the world a decade earlier…

The third wave of neoconservatism that emerged during the Obama years, and then really hit its stride during the Trump Era is going to require a Part III, I’m afraid. I was going to try to squeeze it all in here, but I am already nearly 5,000 words in, and the transition is a bit complicated to explain, and the Thanksgiving holiday, and so on... This should give you plenty to chew on until next time.

So please stay tuned. Like. Comment. Subscribe. Etc.

1. The greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate.

2. It’s a bit hard to describe, and worthy of its own post, but in the 90s people just were not as consumed by politics as they are now, or anyway what counted for politics had a totally different character. I don’t mean to overstate the point, but outside of a hardened 10% on the left and 10% on the right, the prevailing attitude towards politics was, “I don’t care.”

3. From Bloom’s The Prodigal Sons:

“Although psychohistorical explanations have substantial, built-in limitations, it is apparent that the development of neoconservatism in the last twenty years has consisted of a reaction to one major trauma—the fear of anti-Semitism. Since, of course, not all Jewish intellectuals are neoconservatives nor are all neoconservatives Jewish, a conventional disclaimer of universality should and must be entered. Despite the caveats, however, there can be little doubt that the Holocaust constituted the seminal event not only for European Jewry but for many American Jews not far removed from their East European or German heritages.”

4. In many ways Kirkpatrick’s warnings perfectly presage the foreign policy approach of Donald Trump, and so maybe Trump is a neocon after all, just not in the way it’s commonly understood.

5. For what it’s worth, a Control + F on the DPG for “Israel” returns nothing. Instead, as in Krauthammer’s essay, concern over the Middle East is focused on access to oil:

“In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil. We also seek to deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways. As demonstrated by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, it remains fundamentally important to prevent a hegemon or alignment of powers from dominating the region. This pertains especially to the Arabian peninsula. Therefore, we must continue to play a strong role through enhanced deterrence and improved cooperative security…”

6. I highly recommend skimming through these archives. In between articles condemning Clinton for his limp-wristed foreign policy, you’ll find stuff like “The Hidden Joys of Sport Utility Vehicles,” “Johnnie Cochran’s America,” and “The Diversity-crazed Military.” It really is a kind of perfect snapshot into 90s-era conservatism.

7. The linked Pew poll shows that by 2008 only 38% of Americans believed the decision to invade Iraq was the right one, a striking reversal from the broad support the war enjoyed at its outset.

8. Krauthammer’s obsession with Israel is, however, quite explicit in the multitude of articles he wrote on the subject for The Weekly Standard and elsewhere throughout the 90s. Here is a typical example: “The Collapse of Zionism.”

9. The ADL article linked in the text is a perfect example of the pointing and sputtering that greeted anyone taking seriously the distortive effects of Israel’s outsized influence on U.S. foreign policy.