Tag Archives: Francis Fukuyama

THE PATIENT RISE TO POWER OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES part 2 of 3

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Story continued from the previous post.

Brandenburg Gate1970s-1980s. The neoconservatives now shift from the Democrat to the Republican Party. The move made some sense. For one thing, in 1975, President Gerald Ford, a Republican, had appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a political neoconservative, as U.S. ambassador to the UN. Also, neoconservatives in general were not fans of the human rights foreign policy of U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1976-1980). And by 1980, as the Carter – Reagan presidential election loomed, most had become convinced that they would never become lieutenants of power in the Democrat Party. During the Carter – Reagan presidential campaign, many transferred “their hopes to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, expecting that a conservative victory would bring them all the opportunities and rewards they had been denied by the Democrats” (John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism).

But that was not to be. The stars had yet to align. After Reagan won the presidency he did bring in the neoconservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick as a foreign policy advisor and in 1981 named her U.S. ambassador to the UN. As with Gerald Ford, this gave neoconservatives at least one high-level access to the Reagan administration. But then in 1983, Reagan, during the Lebanese civil war, acted on reports from the Department of Defense and the NSA and withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon after a terrorist bombing in Beirut killed 241 American servicemen. Removing those troops did not set well with neoconservatives.

It became clear to the neoconservatives that President Reagan was never going to buy into their political philosophy. This was especially true regarding their foreign policy. Reagan may have gone so far as to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and promote the development of a bizarre “Star Wars” missile defense system against the Soviet threat, but he avoided neoconservative ideas for rolling back communism through military interventions.

In fact, Reagan was the U.S. president who, reached out skillfully diplomatically to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Over a several year period, and against great political pushback in both countries, they hammered out and signed nuclear arms control treaties. Further, Reagan and Gorbachev are key players for anyone wishing to understand the end of the Soviet Union.

Losing their perennial enemy. With Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“opening”), the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the formal dissolution in of the Soviet Union, or USSR, neoconservatism by the end of 1991 had lost the perennial communist enemy over against which much of its foreign policy had been organized. The net result, politically, was that whatever appeal neoconservatives may been accumulating during the Cold War decades as  dependable guides for U.S. foreign policy dwindled considerably.

engineers (Seattle Municial Archives)1990s. Clinton and the neoconservatives. Their political marginalization was ensured with the election of Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992. Clinton, a liberal internationalist and a Democrat, had no time for “the neocons.” But they had time for themselves, and they spent it rethinking their image. Although small in numbers compared to realist and idealist networks, neoconservatives are well-funded and resourceful. Garaged during Clinton’s two terms in office (1992-2000), they plied their time, re-engineering their basic political philosophy in a language and with policy proposals suited to what now occupied everyone’s mind in Washington: America’s changing role in the world – what would it be, now that the world was no longer divided into two opposing superpower camps?

Neoconservative thinkers addressed this by rolling out their views through the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a respected and influential right-wing think tank, and in National Interest, a foreign affairs journal founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol. Another outlet, The Weekly Standard, was founded in 1995 by William Kristol (son of Irving). These three outlets provided public platforms for a new generation of keen neoconservative intellects, including Elliot Abrahams, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer, to disseminate their views.

In 1997, several influential neoconservatives, led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which promoted an aggressive U.S. foreign policy that they called neo-Reaganite. In America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, former neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama writes that the 1990s, neoconservative intellectuals “proposed a foreign policy agenda involving concepts like regime change, benevolent hegemony, uni-polarity, preemption, and American exceptionalism.”

Perhaps their boldest move during these years of their marginalization and rethinking was when they sent a formal letter to President Clinton in 1998 arguing for regime change in Iraq. We’ll pick up the story here in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Werner Kunz & Seattle Municipal Archives respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

THE PATIENT RISE TO POWER OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES part 1 of 3

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the white houseIn January 2001, political neoconservatism moved from think tanks, journals, and university classrooms into the foreign policy decision-making process of the Bush White House as vice-president Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed leading neoconservative thinkers as advisers at the highest levels on their teams. The most notable of these appointments included, in the White House, I. Lewis “Scooter’ Libby as the vice-president’s chief of staff, and at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense), Richard Perle (assistant secretary of defense), and Douglas Feith (undersecretary of defense for policy). Many other neoconservatives also held advisory roles in the administration, such as Elliott Abrams, one of President Bush’s deputy national security advisers.

As we will see, Rumsfeld’s stacking of his team with neoconservative advisers at the Pentagon well-suited the militaristic foreign policy of the United States that emerged after 9/11. Many Americans at the time, and I admit to having been one of them, were unaware of neoconservatism as an approach to U.S. foreign policy or what that would mean militarily. And when we began hearing about it after 9/11, it seemed to have come from out of nowhere. Not so. The neoconservatives rise to power has a patient history tracing back decades.

I thought it would be good to look at its odd history, its leading figures, and its foreign policy influence, especially its militarism, in order to come to grips with its absorption into American conservatism today.

1930s-1950s. Francis Fukuyama, a former neoconservative thinker, wrote in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy that neoconservatism traces its origins to “a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (CCNY) in the mid- to late-1930s and early-1940s, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip Selznick, Nathan Glazer, and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.” (In an email to me in July 2006, Fukuyama said: “even though I continue to agree with them [neoconservatives] on some issues, I don’t feel like I’m in their camp anymore.”) During the 1930s-1950s, this loose-knit group of liberal politicians, social scientists, and intellectuals belonged to the Democrat party, and the two most important ideas around which most of these liberal intellectuals coalesced, writes Fukuyama, was an intense anticommunism and opposition to utopian social engineering.

1960s. Things now get interesting. During the 1960s, this loose-knot Democrats began tightening around what they had concluded were a number of wrong-headed approaches to the most pressing issues of the decade.

orange flowerDomestically, they were rattled by flower power and by the decade’s social upheavals, fearing that America was becoming ungovernable. They were, however, sympathetic to domestic social reform, racial justice, and to tackling poverty – all of which were towering issues in the 1960s. But they did not like the way President Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat) was handling these issues, and they reproached him for the expansive government policies behind his Great Society program, which arose in 1964-1965 to deal with such issues and sounded a bit utopian to these Democrats. Irving Kristol, for one, believed “that poverty could be overcome,” but not by government gigantism, “only by gradual economic growth that brought with it greater economic opportunities for outsiders” (Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy).

Regarding U.S. foreign policy, the group in principle was not opposed to international organizations, treaties, international law, and the UN, but their higher principle was that the United States ought to spread democracy in the world unilaterally. And they were serious supporters of Israel.

Key to understanding them for our purposes in this series of posts is that the group was strongly anti-communist. They loudly criticized what they perceived was the too-soft approach of the radical left to the Soviet threat, and their approach to diplomacy was more hard-nosed than what either realists or idealists practiced. They favored an aggressive agenda to Soviet expansion that included not only the promotion of American ideals, democracy, and free market economics overseas but also the rollback of Soviet expansion by military interventions. This went against the grain of all U.S. presidents during the Cold war era, as well as many other powerful Democrats and Republicans, who adhered to “containment” – the perennial U.S. policy of preventing communist expansion by means other than military interventions.

The group’s foreign policy in general made them unpopular with the political left, who criticized them for having left liberalism. It was during the 1960s the word “neoconservatism” began to be used invidiously by such opponents to describe the group’s move to the right and its emerging political philosophy.

In 1965, Kristol, with help from Daniel Bell, founded the journal Public Interest, which addressed questions about Democrat policy, such as urban renewal, law and order, education, and racial justice, and communism. “Led by Podhoretz and Kristol,” writes historian John Ehrman, “the neoconservatives used the pages of Commentary and Public Interest to warn against the dangers of radicalism at home and Soviet expansionism abroad” (The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994.)

Story continues in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Adam_Inglis & marcusrg respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)