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Why the neoconservatives just keep winning
Michael Young
The Daily Star, 7/31/03
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
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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