The Neocon Revival

The upending of the political landscape by the Trump revolution has affected every political grouping and rearranged our politics in ways that are still revealing themselves. His populist America First views on foreign policy and international trade have split the GOP, opened up growing divisions among the Democrats, and even disrupted the ideological certitude of the libertarians.

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The ‘Foreign Meddling’ Double-Standard

I was interested to read a piece by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept about the latest incarnation of the developing liberal-neoconservative merger, detailing the founding of a new group that calls itself the “Alliance to Secure Democracy.” This hybrid creature is a two-headed monster, with Clinton foreign policy honcho Laura Rosenberger, who served as a key figure in the Obama administration, and Jamie Fly, the neocons’ neocon, formerly with the now defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (the reincarnation of the infamous Project for a New American Century), at the helm.

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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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Diary of an Ex-Neocon

I am an inveterate reader of ex-communist memoirs—from Benjamin Gitlow’s The Whole of Their Lives to the more well-known Witness by Whittaker Chambers—for reasons that are uncomfortably akin to voyeurism. The prospect of entering a subterranean world known only to its inhabitants, with its obscure rituals and secret handshakes, is inherently thrilling to those of us with a taste for ideological hegiras told in the first person. And so I approached Scott McConnell’s Ex-Neocon anticipating a juicy morsel indeed. After all, the neocons, unlike the communists, have left an indelible imprint on our contemporary world, as even a casual glance at the smoking ruins of the Middle East will confirm. And yet I found something quite different—and far more satisfying.

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Sanders, Clinton, and the Neoconning of the Democratic Party

Has the Democratic party moved so far to the neoconnish right that red-baiting is now back in fashion in those circles? One would certainly think so if the latest Clinton-Sanders debate is any indication.

I’ve covered the Republican presidential debates in this space while mostly neglecting the Democratic debates for the simple reason that foreign policy is apparently not something Bernie Sanders wants to emphasize. And, for some reason, the debate moderators have proved supremely uninterested in asking questions about the one issue a US President has virtually total power over. This time, however, it did come up, and what happened on that stage in Florida underscores the limited but very real differences between the Clintonian and Sanderista wings of the party. It also illustrates the weaknesses of Clinton’s position, if, as expected, she wins the nomination and goes into the general – weaknesses that will only be manifested if she’s up against Donald Trump instead of some routinely interventionist Republican.

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GOP Debate: The Triumph of ‘Isolationism’

Donald Trump opposed the Iraq war, thinks we should be happy Putin is taking on ISIS in Syria, and more recently called Charles Krauthammer a “warmonger.” This last alone would be enough to provoke his excommunication from the ranks of acceptable GOP nominees, but to make matters worse The Donald is horning in on the neocons’ hate-all-Muslims shtick while combining it with heretical “isolationist” views. You can hear the teeth-grinding all the way from Washington and the West side of Manhattan.

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The Long Road From 9/11

To reference America’s longstanding occupation of great portions of the Middle East, and our government’s support for bloodthirsty tyrants, from Riyadh to Tel Aviv, was considered close to treason. The writer Susan Sontag was pilloried for registering the mildest dissent: led by the Bush administration’s intellectual bully-boy-in-chief, the writer Andrew Sullivan, a campaign was unleashed against anyone who opposed the neoconservative project of “draining the swamp” of the Middle East. Sullivan, you’ll recall, even went after some obscure poet whose poem he claimed had blasphemed the memory of 9/11 – a misreading he later acknowledged, but only after the damage had been done and the heretic had been defamed.

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Monsters of Ukraine: Made in the USA

We’re in the summer doldrums of the news cycle, a perfect time for our government and the media – or do I repeat myself? – to drop certain inconvenient stories down the Memory Hole. My job, of course, is to retrieve them….

Remember Ukraine? I seem to recall blaring headlines about a supposedly “imminent” and “massive” Russian invasion of that country: the Anglo-Saxon media was ablazewith a veritable countdown to D-Day and we were treated to ominous sightings of Russian troops and tanks gathering at the border, allegedly just awaiting the order from Putin to take Kiev. And it turns out there has been an invasion, of sorts – although it isn’t a Russian one. It’s the Kiev regime’s own foot-soldiers returning from the front and turning on their masters.

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The War Against the ‘Trolls’

Poor Anne Applebaum. Every time she writes one of her interchangeable neocon screeds on how Putin is responsible for all the world’s evils or why we need to invade this or that country, her mortal enemies – the commenters! – launch an attack. They wonder why we should listen to anyone who was such a big fan of going to war in Iraq, and – when she’s writing about US foreign policy in Eastern Europe – they make acerbic references to her routine refusal to disclose that she’s married to the former Polish Foreign Minister, and a citizen of Poland, relationships that just might possibly have an impact on her worldview. Her latest neocon screed is designed to put an end to her torment: now she wants curbs on online commentary and a ban on online anonymity. There’s all this "rude commentary" out there, you see, an alarming proportion of it directed not only at her precious inviolable self but also at her fellow neocons:

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I’m Sick and Tired of Neocons

Justin, you’re also an expert on the Neo-Conservatives, one of my least favorite ideological groupings.  Tell us about the Neo-Conservatives and the lost legacy of the conservative movement.

RAIMONDO:  Well, what happened is that during the Cold War — conservatives used to be like Bob Taft, anti-interventionists for small government at home because they realized that you couldn’t have an empire and a republic, limited government at the same time.  But that died out after McCarthyism.  And the fervent anti-Communism of so many people on the right logically led — as Murray pointed out in his great book The Betrayal of the American Right, logically led to warmongering.  Because if we’re out to root out the Commies on the home front, then what’s to stop us from doing it abroad?  So naturally — perhaps not so naturally — what happened was that a lot of ex-Communists, ex-Trotskyites and right-wing Social Democrats jumped on the conservative bandwagon early on, like James Burnham, for example, who was one of the founding editors of National Review.  And Bill Buckley gathered these people around him.  They soon took over the conservative movement and so the conservative movement became the militaristic bunch of nut jobs that we see today.  Their big dream, as Murray pointed out, was to nuke the Soviet Union.  And they made speeches to their followers saying, yes, we’re going to nuke the Soviet Union; it’s going to be great.  Of course, the Soviet Union failed, like Mises predicted that it would, without any nuking being necessary.

So all these right-wing Social Democrats originally started in the Democratic Party and they were grouped around “Scoop” Jackson, the Democrat from Boeing, as we used to call him –

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The Price of Peace

The Heritage Foundation, which has been a bulwark of the War Party since its inception in 1973, has an annual budget of $82.4 million: much of this is spent lobbying on behalf of larger military appropriations and US military intervention worldwide. The American Enterprise Institute (otherwise known as Neocon Central) has an annual budget in excess of $30 million: an influential Washington actor during the Bush II years, AEI has been the locus of neoconservative influence in the foreign policy realm, offering a quasi-academic perch to virtually every neocon known to man in between their stints in government. These two mega-giants are complemented by a brace of neocon foundations, thinktanks, and ad hoc front groups, such as the Hudson Institute ($12.2 million), the Foreign Policy Initiative ($1.6 million), the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies ($8 million), JINSA ($3.3 million) and a host of others whose combined budget is more than a match for the oldest, most well-established peace groups.

Standing behind the War Party are some of the biggest corporate donors around: Martin-Marietta, Lockheed, General Electric, all the big military contractors, and the biggest (and most bailed-out) banks. This is not to mention the big neocon foundations: the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, as well as smaller right-wing nonprofits such as Carthage, Earhart, and Castle Rock.

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Romney’s Neocons

Alongside the very neocons he denies have any influence in RomneyWorld, Zakheim joined the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, a neocon front group organized in 1990 to support the first Gulf war: in 1998, CPSG issued a new clarion call for an invasion of Iraq addressed to President Bill, with the Usual Suspects (including Zakheim) as co-signers. Zakheim’s career as an up-and-comer in neoconservative precincts continued with the formation of the Project for a New American Century – Bill Kristol’s interventionist pressure group – on whose behalf he signed a series of open letters calling for war with Iraq. As recently as February, Zakheim continued his letter-signing spree, demanding – along with dozens of fellow neocon “camp followers” – that the President intervene in a vague-but-more-muscular fashion in Syria. In 2000, he co-authored a PNAC position paper on defense spending which called for a huge increase on the grounds that “the best defense is a good offense.” He shared credit for this proposal with Wolfowitz, Cohen, John Bolton, and Rumsfeld advisors Devon Cross and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. As Undersecretary of State and Pentagon comptroller during the Bush administration – during which time the Pentagon lost track of $1 trillion — he was a key cog in a foreign policy shop dominated by his fellow neocons.

Aside from that, however, there are plenty of neocon “camp followers” – i.e. fellow travelers, as we McCarthyites used to say - serving the Romneyite cause. I won’t bother compiling a comprehensive list, since othershave taken up that task. As Ari Berman notedin The Nation way back in May:

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Syria: The vultures are circling

There’s a sea-change in the air when the Andrew McCarthys descry an American administration’s war machinations and the Richard Seymours hail US-supported “insurgents” as “liberators.” Remember this happened during the Clinton era, when the left supported the Balkan war of “liberation” in which we were on the same side as Qaeda - and conservatives balked. When the Republican-dominated House of Representatives threatened to withhold funding from Bill’s Balkan adventure, neocon grand strategist Bill Kristol threatened to leave the GOP.

Maybe this time he’ll carry out his threat. Kristol and his neocon comrades can issue all the letters they want, but it’ll be a cold day in Hell before grassroots conservatives will support the modern equivalent of the Hitler-Stalin Pact - a grand alliance between Washington and the world’s radicals. It doesn’t matter that the Israel Firsters are demanding they get in line and join the anti-Iranian popular front: any decent self-respecting conservative has to draw the line somewhere.