Neoconservatives have two core beliefs. First is their insistence that the United States has the right or even the responsibility to use its military and economic power to reshape the world in terms of its own interests and values. Constant war thus becomes the new normal. As Professor Eliot Cohen, a former State Department adviser under George W. Bush, put it, “For the great mass of the American public … and for their leaders and elites who shape public opinion ‘war weariness’ is unearned cant, unworthy of a serious nation… .”
The second basic neoconservative principle, inextricably tied to the first, is that Washington must uncritically support Israel no matter what its government does, which makes the defense of all things Israeli an American value. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, made the neoconservative viewpoint clear when he recently wrote that Benjamin Netanyahu would win the GOP’s presidential nomination, if he could run, because “Republican primary voters are at least as hawkish as the Israeli public.” Other neoconservatives continue to pursue the goal set out by the “Clean Break” memo provided to then-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996, which recommended the reordering of the entire Middle East to benefit Israel. The memo was written by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, James Colbert, and David and Meyrav Wurmser.
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