Trump’s Problems Have Neocons Licking Their Chops

The neoconservatives and their allies are now smelling blood. The Trump-era trajectory of the ideologues who ruled under George W. Bush is complicated. Some neocons, such as writers Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and William Kristol, have flown the coop, effectively or explicitly abandoning the Republican Party. Other neocons have thrived, serving in the Trump administration while the 45th president pursues the hawkish line on Iran that the 43th president actually flinched from. If populist-nationalism could be discredited in the process, that is is just the cherry on top.

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Trump’s Problems Have Neocons Licking Their Chops

The neoconservatives and their allies are now smelling blood. The Trump-era trajectory of the ideologues who ruled under George W. Bush is complicated. Some neocons, such as writers Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and William Kristol, have flown the coop, effectively or explicitly abandoning the Republican Party. Other neocons have thrived, serving in the Trump administration while the 45th president pursues the hawkish line on Iran that the 43th president actually flinched from. If populist-nationalism could be discredited in the process, that is is just the cherry on top.

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Max Boot wants to retire 'neocon' label. Why doesn’t he stop using 'isolationist?'

The Washington Post’s Max Boot wants to “retire the ‘neocon’ label” because he believes it unfairly tarnishes the hawkish political elite who got America into the Iraq War and who have literally pushed for every war since. Boot claims national security adviser John Bolton doesn’t deserve to be called a neocon. Neither does former Vice President Dick Cheney. Nor does he.

Boot says “Neoconservatism" once had a real meaning — “back in the 1970s” when it was applied to ex-liberals who had drifted right but claims “the label has now become meaningless.”

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Neocon Admits He Wants To Stay In Middle East Wars For '300 Years'

Yes, We Should Call Them Imperialists

Neoconservatives like Max Boot are fooling themselves if they think imposing 'values' on the rest of the world isn't a matter of empire.

Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram Hazony with the provocative title The Virtue of Nationalism, I encountered a distinction drawn by the late Charles Krauthammer between empire building and American global democratic hegemony. Like the editors of the Weekly Standard, for which he periodically wrote, Krauthammer believed it was unfair to describe what he wanted to see done, which was having the U.S. actively spread its own form of government throughout the world, as “imperialism.” After all, Krauthammer said, he and those who think like him “do not hunger for new territory,” which makes it wrong to accuse them of “imperialism.”

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Neoconservatives Like Max Boot Are the Last People We Should Listen to About Russia

“Imagine,” tweeted Max Boot, a sort of anti-Trump neocon and recently named columnist at the Washington Post, “if, after 9/11, the president saw the attack as a political embarrassment to be minimized rather than as a national security threat to be combated. That’s roughly where we stand after the 2nd-worst foreign attack on America in recent decades.”

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The Woeful Inadequacy of Never-Trumpism

In December, Susan Glasser, Politico’s chief international affairs columnist, interviewed Max Boot and Eliot A. Cohen for her weekly podcast, The Global Politico.

The result is an extended lamentation of sorts, with Boot and Cohen expressing the angst that now afflicts what used to be called the Republican foreign policy establishment. Yet the exchange, moderated by Glasser, also helps us understand why that establishment was blindsided by the Trump phenomenon. Even today, its members are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the voters who repudiated their views by casting ballots for Trump might have had cause to do so.

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Neocons’ Siren Song Has Divorced Republicans From Their Voters

After our failed attempts to export Jeffersonian democracy to the Middle East, voters on both sides of the aisle yearn for realism and restraint. But such pleas have fallen on the deaf ears of both major-party establishments. This establishment believes in spreading democracy and liberty, and still intends to use American sons and daughters to do so. Yet the same crowd sees no contradiction when they argue the world would fall apart if we stopped sending tax dollars to foreign dictators and tyrants.

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Warmonger and Neocon Max Boot humiliates himself again

Jewish Neocon Max Boot, the man who never gets tired of perpetual wars in the Middle East, essentially admitted last month that he got his butt kicked by Tucker Carlson when he went on the show to discuss, well, the Russia thing.

Boot kept propounding ad nauseam that Russia must pay for allegedly hacking the election, but Boot had no qualm about the NSA eavesdropping on virtually every single American and most nations around the world! In his own word, we all have to “stay calm and let the NSA do its job.”

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Tucker Carlson, Neocon Slayer

Oh, it was glorious fun, yielding the kind of satisfaction that us anti-interventionists rarely get to enjoy: not one but two prominent neoconservatives who have been wrong about everything for the past decade – yet never held accountable – getting taken down on national television. Tucker Carlson, whose show is a shining light of reason in a fast-darkening world, has performed a public service by demolishing both Ralph Peters and Max Boot on successive shows. But these two encounters with evil weren’t just fun to watch, they’re also highly instructive for what they tell us about the essential weakness of the War Party and its failing strategy for winning over the American people.

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Neoconservatives Declare War on Donald Trump

Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan — one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq War and an advocate for Syrian intervention — announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination, “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

Max Boot, an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War, wrote in the Weekly Standard that a “Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power,” citing, among other things, Trump’s objection to a large American troop presence in South Korea.

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Why Trump Is Panicking Robert Kagan

Anyone looking for further converts to the Hillary Clinton campaign might do well to look at the Marco Rubio campaign. If Clinton is the leading liberal hawk, Rubio is the foremost neocon candidate. In 2014 National Review published an article about him titled “The neocons return.”

Whether it’s Cuba or Iran or Russia, he stakes out the most intransigent line: “I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should not engage at all, who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy Adams not to go ‘abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.'” Not surprisingly, he’s surrounded himself with neocon advisers, ranging from Max Boot to Jamie Fly to Elliott Abrams.

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NEOCONS THREATEN TO START NEW PARTY IF TRUMP WINS GOP NOMINATION

Establishment Republicans are in disarray over Trump’s accession and make no secret of their willingness to abandoned the party and even cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton. A prominent neocon and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Max Boot, has denounced Trump as a fascist.  

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The Neocon War Against Ted Cruz

In a piece this week for Commentary, Max Boot attacked U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and his presidential campaign. Boot pans Cruz’s speech before the Heritage Foundation on Dec. 10, asserting that Cruz represents an “anti-Reagan.” But does he?

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Neocon Max Boot Hates Edward Snowden

Max Boot has it out for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The CFR neocon, a signatory to a screed calling for an invasion that ultimately killed more than a million Iraqis, is pissed about Snowden’s “A Manifesto for the Truth” published by German news magazine Der Spiegel.

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The Neocon Pathology

Daniel Larison dismantles Max Boot’s unhinged argument that we should get involved in the Syrian civil war to “settle the score” with Hezbollah:

To seek to “settle” a score from 1983 by increasing U.S. involvement in a potentially even more dangerous civil war in Syria is nothing more than the foolish pursuit of revenge. It also demonstrates a complete failure to understand the original error of the Lebanon intervention, which [Max] Boot and [Lee] Smith think Reagan ended too quickly.
If intervention in Lebanon should have taught us anything, it is that the U.S. has no business meddling in another country’s civil war. To cite the costs of the disastrous Lebanon intervention as a “compelling” reason to intervene in Syria is perverse. If the U.S. made policy decisions today based on carrying out vendettas from thirty years before, there would be no end to the wars that we would feel “compelled” to join or start. The truth is that there are no compelling reasons for the U.S. to become more involved in Syria’s conflict. Many Syria hawks have been desperately trying to find some for two years, but to no avail.

Source 

A Perfect Distillation of Neocon Boosterism and Its Dangers

Taking to the pages of Commentary to criticize Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, Max Boot offers a paragraph that may be the quintessential example of neoconservative boosterism and its dangers. Writes Boot of Snowden:

He claims he is willing to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle in Hawaii "because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." In reality, of course, the United States is the greatest champion of liberty the world has ever seen -- this is, after all, the nation that defeated Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and has championed democracy from Libya to the Philippines, freeing untold millions from oppression.

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An Open Letter to NeoCon Hoodlum Max Boot

Mr. Boot, we both agree that the U.S. has been supporting those rebels. Can we agree on the widely documented fact that those rebels are largely terrorists and have committed serious terrorist acts? This point is even acknowledged by one of your neoconservative colleagues, Elliott Abrams.

Even the New York Times acknowledged that the Syrian rebels has “an explicit stamp of approval from Al Qaeda,” and the group itself “is a direct offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Iraqi officials and former Iraqi insurgents say, which has contributed veteran fighters and weapons.”

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Neo-Con Hypocrites Leverage 'Human Rights' Against China

A man who has championed every war America has fought in recent history, as well as desperately pleading to start a wide array of wars yet fought, including against Syria and Iran, and who has played a part in devising and supporting military campaigns that have cost millions of lives, millions more maimed, displaced or otherwise affected, would be the last person one would expect to peddle "human rights." And especially, one would not suspect such a man to make the bold claim that the United States, whose enforced sanctions against Iraq alone killed over a million women and children through starvation, is the "the greatest champion of human rights in the world."

Yet that is exactly what Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations member, as well as a contributor to a myriad of Neo-Conservative, pro-war corporate-financier funded think-tanks, has done.

Neo Con Cheerleading for War in Syria

Op-ed today (Friday) by Max Boot illustrates why the neocons are an amazing group of dangerous buffoons. Not a one of these clowns have ever served in the military and none actually understand the process of assessing risk and military planning. Boot presents his madness in the Washington Post and makes his case of why we ought to be on the ground in Syria:

Today, in the case of Syria, any military action needs to be carefully thought through, but we should not refuse to act simply because of the worst-case scenarios being raised by the Pentagon.