The hour of the Neo-Con

While I’m hard to categorize politically- I have a social conscience that has always made me an awkward fit in conservatism as a movement- a case can be made that I’m a neo-conservative, a critter defined by Irving Kristol as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Neo-conservatism is looked upon these days as an archaic viewpoint. It had its heyday in the administration of the second President Bush. “Paleocons” (traditional conservatives who are often somewhat isolationist in their foreign policy convictions) regard it as discredited. It is not.

What is discredited is the neo-con concept of nation-building. Our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, in retrospect, in Vietnam) have taught the hard but necessary lesson that the United States cannot simply create democracies in countries that have no tradition of democracy and liberal values. A society has to evolve to a certain point before freedom of speech or freedom of the press are ideas that matter to people. Survival, loyalty to clan and tribe, matter more to most people in less developed societies. than political philosophy or ideology. That’s especially the case in places with longstanding and unexamined traditions of feudalism and outright authoritarianism.

But this remains a dangerous world in which history has placed the United States in a unique role, Somebody has always filled that role throughout history, There has always been a predominant power, economically and militarily, to which all the other nations look for leadership and stability. Rome filled that role in ancient times. England played it for centuries. It is not a role nations seek, but one history thrusts upon them.

For a long time, we tried to evade that role. We are, after all, located on the opposite side of the world from the other great powers. We are in a unique position to be economically self-sufficient in a way the nations of the Old World cannot be. And we have the world’s two great oceans to hide behind. The temptation to retreat into a “Fortress America” has always been there. The isolationist instinct that first gave birth to the slogan “America First” back in the Thirties led us to attempt to stand aloof from the gathering storms in Europe and Asia, and a strong argument can be made that it played a major role in allowing Hitler to achieve a degree of dominance in a conflict-shy Europe that made him much harder to stop than he might have been otherwise.

Pearl Harbor discredited the ideology that ironically pretends that neo-conservatism was discredited by Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. A nation that has Hawaii as its western outpost really isn’t protected by the Pacific Ocean after all. Even during the second third of the Twentieth Century, the world was a much smaller place than it was in the day of sailing ships and news taking weeks to travel back and forth between Europe and the New World. World War II, the jet plane, and the intercontinental ballistic missile should have been enough to convince us that isolationism simply isn’t an option in the modern world.

But as a colonel in the North Vietnamese army observed decades ago, democracies have trouble dealing with sacrifice and tend not to be very patient. Democracies have a great deal of trouble staying the course when it comes to lengthy wars, even relatively unbloody ones like Afghanistan. The mistaken wars in Vietnam and the second one in Iraq, and the mishandling of Afghanistan by several consecutive administrations of both parties, have produced a suspicion of foreign military involvement rooted in simple weariness with continual wars whose relationship to our immediate national security are hard to see, and which have failed spectacularly in achieving satisfactory results.

And as that North Vietnamese officer pointed out, authoritarian countries have a far greater capacity for long-term commitments and lengthy wars than democracies, whose people readily grow weary and can vote their nations out of them. Late in the Vietnam War and thereafter, the Democrats became the “dovish” party. Republicans, having abandoned their traditional antipathy for foreign entanglements, became the party of the muscular and assertive international projection of power, the party of the “hawks.” This reached its zenith when the Reagan and first Bush administrations drove the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.

But with the takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump, who revived the discredited slogan “America First,” the GOP returned to its isolationist past. People like Pat Buchanan and the Pauls ceased to represent a minority viewpoint on foreign policy among Republicans. Incredibly, we find ourselves today in a war-weary and profoundly isolationist nation, in which neither of our great political parties is a reliable advocate of the robust projection of American power and the vigorous defense of our national interests abroad. The world lacks a leader. This creates a vacuum that is an open invitation to mischief by bad actors. Ironically, our current squeamishness when it comes to projecting power has made the development of situations in which it becomes necessary for us to do so more likely.

Donald Trump has consistently questioned our membership in NATO. He speaks for the short-sighted but long-standing attitude which sees foreign conflict as “none of our business,” and fails to take into account how profoundly our economy and security are affected by what happens elsewhere. It decries “globalism,” as if withdrawing from our culturally, economically, and politically interdependent Twenty-First Century world and returning to the days when the world was bound together by clipper ships rather than jet planes, television, and the Internet were even an option.

It’s a profoundly unrealistic and self-defeating way of dealing with the world. In the wake of our ignominious abandonment of Afghanistan, negotiated by Trump and implemented by Biden, has largely convinced a world that has already seen what happened in Vietnam and Iraq that the United States is a broken reed, an unreliable ally, a friend that can be counted upon only to abandon you when things get rough. There is no sheriff in town, so the guys in the black hats can run wild.

But the Xi and Putin gangs seem to have revived the appetite of the American people for realism and responsibility just a bit. Recent polls have shown pluralities of the American people favoring the use of force, if necessary, to defend Taiwan from China. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a heart-warming and reassuring reaction of sympathy for a smaller nation heroically resisting conquest by a far larger and far more powerful bully.

There is reason to hope that the American people are waking up again to the realization that a series of foolish, ill-considered, and mismanaged wars is a reason to avoid foolish, ill-considered, and mismanaged wars, not to retreat into Fortress America and hide our heads in the sand. It fills this aging neo-con’s heart with hope that we as a nation might yet regain its awareness of how small and interdependent a world we live in and the impossibility of America side-stepping the place in the world to which history has called us.

For centuries, each nation in Europe has sought to avoid any of the others becoming the dominant power on the continent. The development of the European Union is lessening that fear to some extent, but it still remains. If there is going to be a military and diplomatic alliance among the democracies of Europe to prevent the continent from being dominated by a paranoid, expansionist, and authoritarian Russia, it must be led by something relatively new in history: a great power linked culturally and economically to the nations of Europe but which is not itself a European nation. The domination of Europe by a hostile and paranoid Russia would be an economic and cultural disaster for the United States. And there simply is no other nation which, as a practical matter, can lead an alliance of Europe’s democracies than the United States.

Our economy is also deeply interconnected to the nations of the Pacific and the Middle East. A Pacific region dominated by China would be an economic disaster for the United States, and the democracies of Asia and the Pacific depend upon a uniquely powerful Pacific nation like America for leadership and support. And in the post-9/11 era, it’s hard to avoid the significance of the Middle East to American security even without considering the region’s oil. Vital American interests are at stake all over the world, and all over the world, circumstances place the United States in a unique position to lead the way to peace and stability.

Vladimir Putin would like to destroy NATO. Donald Trump would like to destroy NATO. Neither makes any bones about it, and we dare not allow that to happen. Nor can we retreat from the other great theatres of international events. The notion of a “Fortress America” in which events in other parts of the world can be safely ignored is a delusion, and a dangerous one.

The well-being of not only the United States but of the world itself is absolutely dependent on our adopting a posture of vigorous internationalism purged of the foolish and discredited concept of nation-building. Our foreign policy needs to be less ambitious than it was in the administration of the second Bush and of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. But our well-being as a nation and the welfare of the human race both hang upon our willingness to be intelligently aggressive in the pursuit of our interests and those of our allies up to and including, where necessary and as a last resort, the use of military force to pursue well-defined and prudently-conceived objectives.

So no more “nation-building.” But as the American people seem at long last to have realized once again, there is no corner of the world in which events are removed from America’s vital interests. Hopefully, the result will yet be the re-birth of a neo-conservatism purged of the idealistic notion of remaking the world in America’s image, but soberly determined to protect America’s interests. Our security, and that of the world, depend upon it.

This is an odd moment in our history. Both of our political parties, and especially the Republicans, are profoundly dysfunctional. That must change, or else a new party or parties will have to emerge. But the good news is that the hour of the neo-con has come again, and we are showing signs of regaining contact with geopolitical reality.

The good guys are winning for a change

Donald Trump is backtracking from his assertion that Vladimir Putin is a “genius” for invading Ukraine. Tucker Carlson actually admits that he was wrong about Ukraine- although it’s Joe Biden’s fault that he’ was wrong.

America and the world have united behind a brave people determined to remain free and their heroic citizen-president. Russia thought overrunning Ukraine and putting a puppet in President Zelenskyy’s place would be easy. It’s turning out not to be.

Putin has been fighting with one hand behind his back. He’s been trying for propaganda reasons to at least appear to be exercising restraint. The more frustrated he becomes, the more likely that he takes the gloves off and fights dirty like he did in Chechnya. He will be even more discredited in the eyes of the world, but it won’t be pretty to watch much less experience. Not that it’s actually pretty now.

Putin has stepped in it. This invasion may be his undoing. But the odds are still overwhelming that Ukraine will be overrun. I don’t think President Zelenskyy will leave, and I’m very much afraid that Putin will have him killed. May God protect him.

But the salient reality is that Ukraine is going to be impossible for Russia to hold. The people of Ukraine won’t accept Russian occupation. A continuing insurgency will make Ukraine a hell for Russia. It will only be a matter of time before Ukraine recovers its independence.

Even Switzerland is joining in the sanctions. Germany has overcome its traditional reluctance to be actively hostile to Russia. Finland and Sweden are considering joining NATO. And barring a return of the Cheeto Benito to the Oval Office, NATO will not only survive but will be stronger and more united than ever.

Brave people are dying and will continue to die. The valiant people of Ukraine are suffering terribly and will probably continue to suffer for a long time. But what looked a couple of weeks ago like it was going to be another bleak triumph for authoritarianism and the bullies of the world seems to have turned completely around and rallied the world to the cause of humanity and democratic values.

However much suffering they inflict, it seems clear that at the moment the bullies are on the run. The forces of illiberalism and reaction are reeling. Right now, the good guys appear, at least in the long term, to be winning. It’s been a long time since that was the case, and it feels good.

Slava Ukraini!