The Tragedy of the Neocon
Run out of the Republican Party, the NeverTrump Neocons find themselves on the outside looking in as all of their wishes come true
Sing, oh muses, of those most lamentable of men, of the Bulwarkeans and the Dispatchers, men who through their own petty hubris and scorned jealousy left themselves standing on the outside as the projects for which they had begged in ages past came to fruition at the hands of their enemies. Sing… Of Bill Kristol, of Jonah Goldberg, of Jon Last, and let us hear the wretched tale of how they watched so many of their hopes and dreams for America come true only after they had spurned them all. It is a tale worth knowing.
When your entire brand… your entire self identity… is made up of your hatred of a man, how do you handle it when that man begins to systematically do things that you should by all rights be thrilled about?
This is what the staff at outlets like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project have faced this past year as Donald Trump—a man who climbed to the top on messages seemingly filled with loathing for their entire worldview—has begun to govern in aggressive alignment with it.
Trump has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities (a longtime wet dream of neoconservatives,) supported Israel in a limited armed conflict with Iran, sent special forces into Venezuela to black-bag perpetual neoconservative boogeyman Nicolas Maduro, and been tough on China and, at times, Russia. Hell, even Lindsay Graham is singing his praises.
These fading stars of the Neoconservative movement are left on the outside looking in as Trump’s policies in his second term have trended more and more in line with their own formerly espoused geopolitical beliefs.
Yet, ironically, they’re unable to rejoice because by now most of them have long since spurned anything recognizably “Neoconservative” in philosophical outlook. Indeed, they were so petulant that they left the movement entirely.
But… Trump, the Neoconservative? Seems a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it? Well, only if you take the term “Neoconservative” as the boogeyman of the populist right that it’s become, and don’t take a moment to consider what it actually stood for as an ideology—which is well worth doing.
Certainly the self-described Neoconservatives didn’t see it as such, hearing in Donald Trump’s cries of “America First!” and “Make America Great Again!” a turn towards absolute isolationism, seeing his choice to engage with foreign leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin as reflecting on and confirming their own suspicions of Trump’s desire to make himself a dictator in their image. But time has shown a very different operation to Trump’s actions and thinking, one that we’ll see may not be Neoconservative in name but which bears a striking resemblance to it in action, especially on foreign policy.
Writing for the American Enterprise Institute in 2003, Irving Kristol (often called “The Godfather of Neoconservativism”) wrote four “theses” to describe the Neoconservative outlook on foreign affairs. I’ve listed them below as we determine if Trump is a fit.
“First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment.”
This first thesis is self-evident in Trump’s policy outlook. During this term Donald Trump has attempted executive action to “pause funding and review all U.S. foreign assistance to assess alignment with American values”, to pressure colleges into signing a 'compact' forcing them to acknowledge they've been “saturating the campus with noxious values such as anti-Semitism and other anti-American values, creating serious national security risks” and so on.
For all of the talk of Trump as a danger to “traditional American values”, he has shown an almost laserlike focus on working towards inculcating them in the body politic using every lever at his disposal.
While his critics seem to only ever focus on what they believe to be infringements on freedom of speech and assembly, using flimsy cases of “speech” and “assembly” (such as Don Lemon actively coordinating with an invasion of a church service and Trump’s wish to crack down on riots in our cities,) President Trump is focusing on the entirety of “American values”... in a ham-handed way at times, perhaps, but the focus is clear and present.
As to a focus on America as a nation of immigrants, Trump himself has said “’I want a lot of people to come into our country but I want them to come in legally.” Trump’s enemies have done a good job of mixing up in the public perception the differences between legal and illegal immigrants, the latter of which the President has always been clear in his determination to “send them back” while the former of which he has shown an enthusiasm for.
Trump’s consistency on this stands in sharp contrast to those such as The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol (Irving Kristol’s son, it should be noted), who has a well documented history of waffling and flip flopping on immigration over the years as he’s tried to sail the political tides.
“Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.”
… our second thesis rather goes without saying. From formalizing a United States withdraw from the WHO along with 66 other international organizations, to his sabre rattling at our NATO allies to pull their weight in the “defensive alliance” by spending money on their own defense and ensuring adequate materiel to stage a realistic defense, Donald Trump is without question the most global-organization skeptical leader in modern American history and it’s hard to argue that he isn’t fiercely in favor of American independence from anything resembling a “world government”.
“Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies.”
On this point I will admit there may be disagreements, but at the same time it’s a very subjective topic. Donald Trump seems to approach every international interaction as being with a potential friend, even when his opposite party leads a government and a country that’s currently most certainly NOT a friend. His consistent approach: work with hostile nations to clear the way for a deal, while rattling sabers at allies he feels aren't upholding theirs.
This may appear as though he’s cozying up to our enemies and attacking our friends, but we now have enough data points of him following the same pattern where there’s little excuse to not be able to see the pattern through the chaos. In this way it may be more accurate to say that Donald Trump doesn’t view America as having friends and enemies, he views America as having counterparts in deals that are structured to gain the best advantage possible for America under that particular deal’s unique circumstances. It’s a highly American view, as well as being a highly capitalistic one, which is likely why it chafes people who aren’t big fans of the dog-eat-dog structure of capitalism as an economic system.
“For a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation… [A] larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extra ordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
TLDR: we defend foreign democracies.
Critics of Donald Trump’s “America First” ideological statement of principle have always painted this as being an inherently isolationist framework, but his actions have never aligned at all comfortably with anything one could view as being “isolationist” at all. If anything Trump is MUCH more active on the international stage than his predecessors, to the degree that his poking around in the affairs of others has been an object of criticism by many… including the former “Neoconservatives” who have fled into the waiting arms of leftist media.
Trump is happy to weigh in on foreign elections (for better or for worse), especially within our own hemisphere as part of his larger “Donroe Doctrine” in pursuit of a larger project to boost leaders who he believes to be more aligned with America’s interests and less with the interests of America’s geopolitical foes, particularly China and Russia.
Even Trump's criticism of European allies—often framed as dangerous to the common order—fits Kristol's framework. If your concern is the protection of “a Democratic nation” from attacks by “nondemocratic forces, internal or external”, given the moves and choices that have been made by the ruling governments of much of Europe, it’s hard to argue that they in many ways haven’t been internal attacks against the global Democratic order. While many of the former standard bearers of Neoconservativism cry foul over Trump meddling in the affairs of and verbally attacking our friends, there’s a strong argument to be had that under their own frameworks as previously expressed Trump should be MORE interventionist to try to stop these attacks by the European left on their own nations' democratic structures.
I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump wouldn’t consider himself to be a Neoconservative, but in his foreign policy outlook it’s hard to say he’s entirely NOT one. At this point he’s certainly earned a better claim to be its heir on foreign policy grounds than many of the people who still cling to the self-identity as a badge of honor, all while they spurn Donald Trump’s actions that advance their own previously professed ideological causes out of spite towards the man who’s advancing them.
The fact is that at this point these labels are all but meaningless, their proponents all moved on as the political winds have blown them to a new ideological endpoint along the ever shifting political spectrum. Some of the less deluded have grudgingly accepted this fact, that they’ve simply become a Liberal or have become a “New Right” kind of person, but many still cling to their outmoded ideological identifier as being meaningful in a world that’s passed it by.
Early in his piece, Kristol describes the mission of Neoconservatism as one “to convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.” But since that time the political ground has shifted drastically, and what “conservative politics” are “suitable to governing a modern democracy” have shifted with them, leaving so many to watch in fury as those they despise shape the world of Conservatism into a new form that in many ways aligns with their own world view but via methods that they’re no longer able to stomach.
Pity them, it’s a cursed life.
Lee Becker is a former columnist for Salem Media Group and a conservative writer featured in the Washington Examiner and The Federalist . He lives in Tennessee with his wife and children.