The Neocons’ First Cousins
I’m about a third of the way through Tony Smith’s new book, A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise, and I hope this book gets the attention it deserves. I fear, however, that he is preaching to the choir (me) and that the people who really need to hear what he is saying will tune him out.
It is not that Smith, who holds the Cornelia M. Jackson chair in Political Science at Tufts University, is lacking for high-profile venues to promote his work. He just published an op ed in the Washington Post‘s Outlook section; he is the author of four other books; he just spoke at the New America Foundation.
The problem, however, is that Tony Smith has committed a terrible faux pas in Beltway circles: he has dared to compare the neoconservatives to their intellectual first cousins, the neoliberals. “Sources for many of the critical elements of the Bush doctrine,” Smith wrote in the Post, “can be found in the emergence of neoliberal thought during the 1990s.” This really is heresy; I should know, whenever I so much as suggest that the neoconservatives’ arguments are in any way related to arguments made by neoliberals in the 1990s, I am greeted by howls of protest and rage.
Perhaps Smith can avoid this fate because he is a self-described progressive, whereas I am not. When I enter into this debate, skeptics on the left can (with some justification) claim that I am merely trying to make trouble. Tony Smith, on the other hand, is trying to rescue the left from the allure of “progressive imperialism” as promoted by neoliberals. I support what he is doing because I believe that by rescuing the left, he is helping to rescue the country. As he says, “the neolibs are more powerful today in the Democratic Party than the neocons are among Republicans.”
If one accepts Smith’s core thesis, that the neoconservatives and the neoliberals are intellectual first cousins, and if you believe that the problem in our foreign policy is too much military intervention, not too little, then I think that a reasonable argument can be made that there is a greater danger of an overly interventionist foreign policy under a Democratic administration than there is under a Republican.
There are exceptions, to be sure; John McCain was the neocons’ candidate in 2000, and he continues to exhibit a great enthusiasm for foreign military intervention, even if the Weekly Standard‘s William Kristol has recently spoken highly of Rudy Giuliani. But the public is looking for good judgment, prudence, and restraint; they have little enthusiasm for grandiose expressions of America’s “mission”, and of the need for promoting democracy by force — key neoliberal and neoconservative precepts.
The test case for the permanence of “the neocon-neolib entente,” first formed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, will be the war in Iraq. If the lessons drawn from this misadventure remain confined to the “good idea, poorly executed” realm, then we should expect more military intervention in the near future. For now, Hillary Clinton appears unwilling to disavow the logic of the Iraq war; she objects chiefly to the Bush administration’s execution of it.
A truly new direction for U.S. foreign policy can only come from those willing to cast off both neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and embrace instead a prudential realism that elevates the importance of preserving and advancing U.S. national security.
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