By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 06, 2016
In interviews and on the stump, Senator Ted Cruz likes to
attack President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and “some of the more aggressive
Washington neocons” for their support of regime change in the Middle East.
Every time we topple a dictator, Cruz argues, we end up
helping terrorists or extremists.
He has a point. But what interests me is his use of the
word “neocon.” What does he really mean?
Some see dark intentions. “He knows that the term in the
usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering
Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” former George W.
Bush advisor Elliott Abrams told National Review. Another former Bush adviser
calls the term “a dog whistle.”
I think that’s all a bit overblown. Cruz is just trying
to criticize his opponent Marco Rubio, who supported regime change in Libya.
There’s little daylight between the two presidential contenders on foreign
policy, and this gives Cruz an opening for attack.
But Abrams is right — and Cruz surely knows — that for
many people “neocon” has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk. It’s
an absurd distortion.
At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with
foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great
Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who
was mugged by reality and wants to press charges.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication,
co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic-policy journal.
Kristol later argued that neoconservatism was not an
ideology but a “persuasion.” William F. Buckley, the avatar of supposedly
authentic traditional conservatism, agreed. The neocons, he explained, brought
the new language of sociology to an intellectual tradition that had been
grounded more in Aristotelian thinking.
The neocon belief in democracy promotion grew out of
disgust with Richard Nixon’s détente and Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness, but it
hardly amounted to knee-jerk interventionism. When Jeane Kirkpatrick
articulated a theory of neoconservative foreign policy in Commentary magazine in 1979, she cautioned that it was unwise to
demand rapid liberalization in autocratic countries, and that gradual change
was a more realistic goal than immediate transformation.
During the Cold War, neocons weren’t any more hawkish
than anyone else on the right. They were advocating containment of the Soviet
Union while National Review conservatives were demanding “rollback” and Barry
Goldwater was talking about nuking the Kremlin.
Even through the late 1990s, neocons were far from
outliers in their belief that the United States should use its military power
to support democracies abroad. Many members of both parties held that view.
Remember, it was Bill Clinton who in 1998 signed the Iraq Liberation Act
calling for regime change.
After 9/11, some neoconservative intellectuals had
off-the-shelf foreign policy ready for George W. Bush — which, yes, was hawkish
in nature, but other Republicans and even Democrats supported their prescriptions,
at least at first. As the Iraq War went south, the neocons were the only ones
left defending it, and so got all of the blame.
The association between neoconservatism and Jews stems
partly from the fact that the first neocons were mostly Jewish, partly from the
reality that they are all to this day — gentiles included — pro-Israel. That’s
not particularly remarkable, though, since neocons want to help America’s
democratic allies everywhere and since most Christian conservatives are
pro-Israel, too.
Today the neocon sociological persuasion is simply part
of the conservative mainstream. The idea that self-identified neocons are
uniformly more “pro-war” than other conservatives is ludicrous.
Granted, neoconservatives contribute to the confusion. They
like to claim that the alternative to their approach amounts to “isolationism”
— another horribly misused word. Rubio recently leveled that charge at Cruz.
Cruz, for his part, says he wants to “carpet-bomb ISIS”
until the “sand glows.” There are many criticisms one can level at the
position, but isolationist isn’t one of them.
Neoconservatism is a product of the Cold War. It’s
understandable that neoconservative intellectuals who helped win the Cold War
might want to hold onto the label, but it’s time to give it a comfortable
retirement in the history books.
Meanwhile, the Right is having a long overdue, and
valuable, argument about how to conduct foreign policy. Keep it going, just
leave neoconservatism out of it.
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