Posted on 05/05/2025 8:41:12 AM PDT by Angelino97
Amid continued American entanglements in the Middle East, neoconservative commentators seek to shore up the tired status quo by delegitimizing foreign policy dissent. Nowhere is this more evident than on the ever-radioactive issue of the U.S. relationship with Israel.
Fearing an above-board debate, these gatekeepers have marshaled obscurantist phrases such as “Code Pink Republicans,” a guilt-by-association tactic meant to negatively polarize the conservative base in favor of staying the course on U.S.-Israeli relations.
Add to the mix old classics like the “isolationist” slur and the conspiracist obsession with the “Soros-Koch” complex, and neoconservative hawks are working overtime to stigmatize long-standing and legitimate bodies of conservative foreign policy critique.
Despite the rhetoric of modern neoconservatives, there is a long history of conservative skepticism about cheek-by-jowl U.S.-Israel relations.
Throughout the early Cold War, conservatives in Congress—including Republicans—opposed American entanglements in the Middle East, drawing on an earlier noninterventionist consensus that valued restraint overseas and fiscal prudence at home.
Conservative Republicans presented a vocal bloc of opposition to the Eisenhower Doctrine, which expanded American influence in the Middle East, ostensibly to counter Soviet influence and fill the vacuum left by the ignominious departure of the European colonial powers. One such dissenter was Iowan Representative H.R. Gross, one of the most fiscally conservative congressional members in history.
Gross was among the 28 mostly conservative House Republicans who opposed the doctrine and its legislative iteration, House Joint Resolution 117. As an inheritor of the America First tradition, Gross believed that the measure afforded the president undue unilateral authority to issue foreign assistance and wage war without congressional authorization or oversight.
Contrary to consensus opinion, he further argued that communism was not the source of instability in the Middle East, the real culprit being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Excoriating the “hypocrisy of the internationalists” in the United States, Gross highlighted the “934,000 Arab refugees who were chased out of Palestine when the state of Israel was carved out in the Middle East.”
Gross and his fellow dissenters resisted the prevailing Cold War orthodoxies, including the incremental involvement in a new front in the Cold War.
Dissenting Republicans voiced similar critiques during the American response to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Citing concerns over expanding executive authority, burdens to the taxpayer, and the threat of American entry into the conflict, 28 House Republicans (joined by 36 House Democrats) opposed House Resolution 11108, a bill that provided Israel with over $2 billion in security assistance in the wake of that war.
Gross, again, was among those leading the dissent. On the House floor, he attacked President Nixon for his unilateral actions during the height of the crisis and the bill itself for affording the president sole authority to turn loans into grants. He invoked the costs of the Vietnam War and warned that the upcoming bill was another example of “a spineless, irresponsible Congress [that] delegates its powers to a President.”
Gross’s stand alongside 27 Republican colleagues demonstrated that it was far from impossible for conservatives to take a principled stand in defiance of a Republican president and in support of nonintervention in the Middle East.
Freshman Congressman Steven D. Symms joined the veteran Gross in opposing the measure and the deepening involvement in the Middle East. During the height of the crisis, Symms asserted that the “United States has no more business interfering in Middle Eastern policy than we had entering Vietnamese politics 12 years ago.”
As chairman of the National Taxpayers Union, Symms commissioned a full-page newspaper ad challenging the bill on fiscal, moral, and strategic grounds. With Vietnam fresh in American memory, the ad asserted that the U.S. had “already paid grave costs in terms of American lives and American economic stability because of our involvement in other people’s wars” and added that “[w]e cannot afford more lives or the inevitable further deterioration of our economy which involvement in the Mideast conflict could bring.”
These principled strains of conservative opposition to U.S.-Israeli relations and hawkish Middle Eastern policy generally, despite their long pedigree, were snuffed out by the political turmoil of the mid-1970s.
While Symms enjoyed a long, if troubled, congressional career, half of the Republican opponents of American involvement in the Yom Kippur War were ousted in the Watergate-fueled wipeout of the 1974 midterms or declined to seek reelection. Into this vacuum flowed the subsequent “New Right”. This nascent political movement held a tight line on U.S. support to Israel and obscured these earlier strains of conservative dissent.
In the wake of the Global War on Terror, the insights of individuals like Gross and Symms and the noninterventionist tradition they drew upon have regained traction, including within the base of the Republican Party.
Conservative opinion, particularly among young people, is changing, reverting to earlier norms of dynamism and debate. Disillusioned by direct military intervention and regime changes by proxy, younger Americans, including conservatives, have soured on the stale logic of existing American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
On U.S.-Israeli relations specifically, younger conservatives, like their progressive peers, are less supportive of Israel. In addition to general critiques about bilateral relations and Israel’s conduct of their war in Gaza, noninterventionist conservatives increasingly point to Benjamin Netanyahu’s advocacy for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war that looms large in the conservative consciousness.
As the U.S. flirts with another major Middle Eastern war, this time against Iran, the veterans of the last one remember when Netanyahu boldly asserted that it would “have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
For a generation of Iraq War veterans who skew conservative, such failed predictions are not forgotten, especially considering Netanyahu’s latest push for war with yet another Israeli adversary.
It is in this landscape of shifting opinion that an embattled neoconservative establishment seeks to dismiss critiques as meritless or un-American. These gatekeepers go so far as to call conservative opposition “baseless” and “out of step with the president’s ‘America First’-style realism,” turning America First’s history of opposing foreign entanglements and unilateral executive authority on its head.
The growing conservative critique of unquestioning U.S. support for Israel and continued entanglement in the Middle East reflects a broader rejection of neoconservative orthodoxy, echoing the principled stands of past dissenters. Given the track record of the neocons, it would be wise to ignore their latest attempts at gatekeeping and listen to the voices of restraint.
An interesting phrase, to be sure.
Having been drafted during the reign of Lyndon the First, I learned early on that there can be such a thing. Given the last four years of Biden, a pro-war Liberalism is also a thing, we have learned.
Most people think that the Pre-WWII isolationists were all right-wingers.
But the fact is, the Communists were the biggest isolationists of all, that is, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. And it’s no coincidence that’s when the attacks on Charles Lindbergh really ramped up.
Right and Left don't persuade much these days. If one posits Right-wing pro-war and Left-wing pro-war, then what do the terms mean?
Certainly the "international" side to Communism was international, i.e. global in aim. As the old jackass himself said, "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"
That was in the later 1800s.
--- "...the fact is...." isn't always.
In this moment, "The most recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirm once again that America's fiscal outlook is on an unsustainable path — increasingly driven by higher interest costs. Growing debt, in addition to the rise in interest rates over the past couple of years, has significantly increased the cost of federal borrowing. In 2024, interest costs on the national debt totaled $881 billion — surpassing most other components of the federal budget."
Source: Any Way You Look at It, Interest Costs on the National Debt Will Soon Be at an All-Time High Peterson, 22 January 2025
So which part of Right-wing and / or Left-wing has the solution to:
As conservative in fiscal thought, stopping the spending is a first step. Continuing it is a mis-step.
Therefore the Liberals have no answer, and it seems today's neo-cons have none either.
As was Ayn Rand, who said that fighting for South Vietnam's democracy meant fighting for values to be determined by someone else (i.e., South Vietnamese voters).
There has always been opposition to foreign wars from the right.
One reads: "John Birch Society founder Robert Welch opposed the United States getting involved in Vietnam. But after half a million Americans were deployed in Vietnam, his exit strategy was not to pull out immediately, as the Left advocated, nor to continue the no-win policies that prolonged the war and resulted in more and more casualties, but to win quickly and then get out."
Source: April 30, 2025: The 50-Year Anniversary of the End of the War John Birch Society, 30 April 2025
It does come down to "involvement" and "practicality."
As to not being "around at the time," you probably never came across the humor about the Birch John Society, Used to chuckle about that.
What is not laughable is spending money we don't have for a possible "no-win" outcome.
Best wishes.
The OP is a Pat Buchanan acolyte. You can look it up in history books.
Safe to ignore.
OP?
Arab Muslims have conducted too many terrorist attacks against Americans and others to count. Furthermore, the tenets of their religion are imperialist supremacist and misogynistic to the core.
The main Jewish sin is success. They win too many Nobel prizes. They succeed overly in business. They, sadly, succeed overly in left-wing activity.
All, in all the choice is clear to me. Little Israel is not the problem. I’d like to see the vast Muslim conquest of formerly Christian nations rolled back. I’m talking less about military action than simply shining a light on that evil, man-made religion. Support women’s rights. At some point, mockery will be utterly corrosive.
Check this out. There is no Arab Muslim unity. Listen to the top of the line, right from his mouth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz334TQzsrc&ab_channel=RabbiPinchasTaylor
Thanks. He certainly speaks well.
I remember there was a brutal war between Iraq and Iran decades back. For that reason and others, I never assumed Muslim unity.
Now, I’d like European democracies to listen to their people and stop Muslim immigration and colonization of their countries.
A few things need to be agreed:
1. Not all wars are the same
The war for Independence was not the same as the war of 1812..and it goes from there to now.
2. “Conservative is a big tent”
3. Small government and big war are incompatible.
4. LBJ philosophy: If we throw enough money and manpower at the War on Poverty and the War on Communism we are bound to keep them both under control. Control is the goal. Winning is not the goal and is the wrong paradigm.
5......
It is a complex topic.
Does that make Trump a neo-conservative? He is planning to invade Greenland and Canada?
Funny that. Typical of liberals and Democrats. Against war UNTIL Hitler betrayed them. Is it feasible to argue isolationists had lucrative contracts with Hitler’s Germany they didn’t want to lose?
Original Poster
No, Trump is a Jacksonian
War is war.
The “war” on poverty, like all the other metaphorical wars, is not a war.
I've long thought that Nobel prizes in Peace, Literature and Economics are a joke.
But I did think that Nobel prizes in Science meant something.
However, I've come to realize that they're awarded by jurors from the scientific establishment. The same people who promote climate change, gender as a construct, and Covid vaccines. The same people who tell us to "trust the science."
I no longer think that winning a Nobel in anything really proves anything, other than that one has establishment connections and support.
“I’ve long thought that Nobel prizes in Peace, Literature and Economics are a joke.”
No disagreement there. Also, the Pulitzer prize is nothing to brag about.
“I did think that Nobel prizes in Science meant something. However...”
I imagine that ideological or other corruption is a problem.
One thing I would like to address in general is collusion. I think it is something that should be a concern and guarded against.
Bobby Fischer was not the first chess player to notice that the Soviets played as a team in tournaments that were structured to be individual competitions.
In some settings it is ok up to a point. For example, a family business might treat family members preferentially. Even there, talent from outside the family may be discouraged and leave.
Ethnic groups favoring their own can be a problem, be they Italian, Jewish, Indian, or whatever. The same applies to political leanings or to race. Large organizations should strive to avoid collusion and cliques of any kind. My father-in-law advanced far at work. His peers were, like him, Irish American. I think I heard someone refer to them jokingly as the “Irish Mafia.”
In any and all cases, accusation does not mean guilt. However, both real and apparent collusion should be avoided.
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