Posted on 07/31/2003 6:58:27 PM PDT by Destro
Why the Neoconservatives Just Keep Winning
One of the inescapable messages emerging from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was the vitality of the US neoconservative critique. Neocons not only proved to be the most adept at explaining the mass homicides, they also offered decisive solutions to the problems that entailed. And up to now these appear to have worked.
It’s never easy for a libertarian who fundamentally mistrusts state power to approve of the state-centered neo-Wilsonianism of many neoconservatives, or for an advocate of free markets to sanction their glorification of an uncompetitive form of US domination. Yet the neocons have caught their critics in a vise whether isolationist libertarians, conservative realists, old-left liberals or Clintonian multilateralists.
The triumph of the neoconservative worldview came in September 2002, when the Bush administration issued a new National Security Strategy. The document was a bureaucratic compromise that placed the neocon dogma of the Pentagon and its White House allies alongside conventional State Department multilateralism. Reading the document, anyone could see the power was in its innovation most prominently its promotion of US security and global supremacy and its defense of pre-emptive strikes to preserve this. In that context the State Department’s multilateral impulses were redefined by neocon priorities.
The success of the neocon message resulted from two processes: one involving definition, the other solutions. Underlining this was the fact that Washington neoconservatives make up a compact group of true believers who rarely let bureaucracy divide them. For example, a prominent neocon is Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who works under Colin Powell. However, he was appointed at the insistence of a neocon ally, Vice-President Dick Cheney. That’s why Bolton is still seen by many of his colleagues as a neoconservative Trojan horse.
Where the neocons were most effective after Sept. 11 was in defining the problem created by the attacks in a way that was both accessible and accepted. They argued, with reason, that what had occurred was the opening shot in a fight between good and evil. The evil was not Islam, but Muslim extremism, and the only way to overcome this was to attack America’s enemies before they again did the same to America. Since there were many such enemies around the world, what was required was a worldwide strategy to eliminate the threat.
This led to a distinctive facet of the neocon critique: the need to overcome and reshape countries menacing the US in effect to engage in nation building. While not embraced by all neocons, this approach posed a problem for their ideological adversaries. The reason was that neocons were advocating spreading US values such as democracy and free markets. Liberals and isolationist libertarians were outmaneuvered by this determined neo-Wilsonianism the former because it approximated traditional Wilsonianism, with its focus on the moral aims of foreign policy, albeit minus the deference to international institutions; the latter because they could not defend free minds and markets in the US while neglecting this overseas.
The last line of defense came from conservative realists, who always scorned the inflated aspirations of any kind of Wilsonianism, old or new, and who were too anchored in the traditional state system based on a balance of power to sanction US unilateralism. Yet they were neutralized because they, too, advocated force when the international system demanded it, and the post-Sept. 11 world fit the bill. Moreover, the neocons had been their allies during the last years of the Cold War and there was an ideological affinity there, even if realists had a different sense of priorities when dealing with the former USSR.
The realists collapsed when it came time to offer a policy rejoinder to Sept. 11. The realist belief in an international system built on state sovereignty was irrelevant to the retaliation US President George W. Bush and the US public demanded, one that involved undermining the sovereignty of enemy states. The process began in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq. Worse, the realists were compelled to support such actions, though they tried to save face by criticizing the clumsy preparations for war. Their adversaries routed, the neocons may yet be undone by the details. Many of the Bush administration’s critics would like to see the US fail in Iraq, largely as it would let them score a rare point against the neocons. It is far too early to assume that the US is trapped in an Iraqi quagmire, and it is, again, underestimating the neocons to suppose they will sit by and allow a disaster to happen.
However, the real battleground on which the neocons’ adversaries will have to fight is that of ideas. There are alternatives to American triumphalism and unilateralism, whose end-result would also be freedom and open markets. The only problem is that the neocons’ ideas are the only ones that sound convincing today, partly because they were so well adapted to the anxious post-Sept. 11 mood of Americans, most of whom did not care about what the neocons actually said.
When a body of principles so effortlessly conforms to a country’s sensitivities, it becomes extremely powerful. That’s why it is pointless to criticize neoconservatives. What would be far more useful is to offer self-sustaining and relevant policy alternatives to theirs, and ensure the US public agrees.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR
...and winning, and winning, and winning...
Only if you'd like to see Bush defeated as much as Hillary Clinton would.
Is that why nearly ALL the ex-Reagan aides support W. Bush?
Maybe you don't really know your paleo opponents. You should learn... they are every bit as scary, dangerous, and Bush-hating as the most vitriolic leftist Democrats.
There's no "maybe" about it. They are a scary, scary crew who would absolutely love to see Hillary Clinton, or whoever the Democratic nominee is in 2004, win the White House over George Bush.
Oh really? Did Pat Buchanan not try to defeat George Bush in 2000? Will he not be supporting another candidate against Bush in 2004 (unless Pat runs himself)? Have you ever read anything from the paleos on FR? They absolutely despise everything about him and want him out. They say constantly that there is NO difference in the GOP and the Democrats.
A-MEN! And they're as useless to the conservative movement as the libertarians, since their naysaying drives away most thinking people.
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