Below is the article summary. For the full article, see neoconservatism.
neoconservatism, U.S. political movement. It originated in the 1960s among conservatives and some liberals who were repelled by or disillusioned with what they viewed as the political and cultural trends of the time, including leftist political radicalism, lack of respect for authority and tradition, and hedonistic and immoral lifestyles.
Neoconservatives generally advocate a free-market economy with minimum taxation and government economic regulation; strict limits on government-provided social-welfare programs; and a strong military supported by large defense budgets. Neoconservatives also believe that government policy should respect the importance of traditional institutions such as religion and the family.
Unlike most conservatives of earlier generations, neoconservatives maintain that the United States should take an active role in world affairs, though they are generally suspicious of international institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Court, whose authority could intrude upon American sovereignty or limit the country’s freedom to act in its own interests. See also conservatism.
The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.
The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most importantly Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
" [T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union -- in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony? "
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, “the Kremlin is getting ready for the 'battle for Ukraine' in all seriousness." After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.
Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the US Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr. Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence. In addition to serving as Bush’s Ambassador to NATO, Nuland was Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-17, where she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and now serves as Biden’s Undersecretary of State guiding US policy vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.
The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who’s who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia’s advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: “[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.”
The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise. The West’s economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their “boomerang” effect on the rest of the world has been large. Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America’s limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia’s industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine’s. Russia’s GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.
The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the US with the military losses and the stagflationary consequences of war and sanctions. The knock-on effects could be devastating, if a right-wing demagogue in the US rises to power (or in the case of Trump, returns to power) promising to restore America’s faded military glory through dangerous escalation.
Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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Listen to former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick speaking on human rights and foreign policy
neoconservatism, variant of the political ideology of conservatism that combines features of traditional conservatism with political individualism and a qualified endorsement of free markets. Neoconservatism arose in the United States in the 1970s among intellectuals who shared a dislike of communism and a disdain for the counterculture of the 1960s, especially its political radicalism and its animus against authority, custom, and tradition.
Intellectual influences
Among their intellectual ancestors neoconservatives count the ancient Greek historian Thucydides for his unblinking realism in military matters and his skepticism toward democracy, as well as Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author of Democracy in America (1835–40), who described and analyzed both the bright and the bad sides of democracy in the United States. More recent influences include the German-born American political philosopher Leo Strauss and several of his students, such as Allan Bloom; Bloom’s student Francis Fukuyama; and a small band of intellectuals who in their youth were anti-Stalinist communists (specifically Trotskyites) before becoming liberals disillusioned with liberalism. The latter include Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz, among others.
Culture and religion
In its respect for established institutions and practices, neoconservatism resembles the traditional conservatism of the 18th-century Irish statesman Edmund Burke. Neoconservatives, however, tend to pay more attention than traditional conservatives to cultural matters and the mass media—to music, art, literature, theatre, film, and, more recently, television and the Internet—because they believe that a society defines itself and expresses its values through these means. Western (and particularly American) society, they charge, has become amoral, adrift, and degenerate. As evidence of the moral corruption of Western culture, they cite violent and sexually explicit films, television programs, and video games, and they point to popular music that is rife with obscenities that have lost their capacity to shock and disgust. Actions once regarded as shameful are now accepted as normal. For example, most people in the West now consider it perfectly acceptable for unmarried men and women to live together and even to have children. These phenomena amount to “defining deviancy down,” as the neoconservative sociologist and U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once charged.
Such degenerate behaviour, say neoconservatives, indicates a broader and deeper cultural crisis afflicting Western civilization. The American political scientist James Q. Wilson, for example, traced the crisis to the 18th-century European Enlightenment, which encouraged people to question established authority, to criticize religion, and to reject traditional beliefs. Other neoconservatives blame the “adversarial” counterculture of the 1960s, which dismissed traditional values and religion as old-fashioned, irrelevant, or even reactionary. Whatever its source, neoconservatives maintain that this degeneration represents a real and present danger to Western civilization.
Neoconservatives agree with religious conservatives that the current crisis is due in part to the declining influence of religion in people’s lives. People without a sense of something larger than themselves, something transcendent and eternal, are apt to turn to mindless entertainment—including drugs and alcohol—and to act selfishly and irresponsibly. Religion at its best is a kind of social cement, holding families, communities, and countries together. At its worst, however, religion can be fanatical, intolerant, and divisive, tearing communities apart instead of uniting them. Most neoconservatives thus believe that the principle of the separation of church and state, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, is a good idea. They also believe, however, that it has been pursued to extremes by adherents of modern liberalism, who are bent on banishing religion from public life, resulting in a backlash from religious-right conservatives.
Neoconservatives also hold that the modern liberal ideal of cultural diversity, or multiculturalism—the principle of not only tolerating but also respecting different religions and cultures and encouraging them to coexist harmoniously—tends to undermine the traditional culture of any country that tries to put it into practice. It also encourages the excesses of “political correctness”—that is, an overly acute sensitivity to offending people of other backgrounds, outlooks, and cultures. These trends, they believe, are likely to produce a conservative backlash, such as those that took place in Denmark and the Netherlands, where anti-immigrant political parties became increasingly popular in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Economic and social policy
In economics, neoconservatives believe that markets are an efficient means of allocating goods and services. They are not, however, wholehearted advocates of free-market capitalism. As Kristol remarked, capitalism deserves two cheers, not three, because its innovative character produces almost-constant social upheavals and disruptions. Moreover, as the neoconservative sociologist Daniel Bell argued, capitalism harbours various “cultural contradictions” that undermine its own social and ethical foundations. Capitalism presupposes a willingness to save, to invest, and to defer gratification; at the same time, through advertising and marketing techniques, it encourages people to indulge themselves, to live on credit, and to pay little heed to the farther future. Unregulated capitalism, moreover, creates great wealth alongside dire poverty; it richly rewards some people while leaving others behind. And since great disparities of wealth make the wealthy contemptuous of the poor and the poor envious of the rich, capitalism can create conditions that cause class conflict, labour unrest, and political instability. To reduce, though certainly not to eliminate, such disparities, neoconservatives support the graduated income tax, the inheritance tax, the modern welfare state, and other means by which a social “safety net” might be placed underneath society’s less-fortunate members.
At the same time, however, neoconservatives warn that well-intentioned government programs can produce unintended and unfortunate consequences for the people they are meant to help. More particularly, neoconservatives argue that social welfare programs can and often do create dependency and undermine individual initiative, ambition, and responsibility. Such programs should therefore aim to provide only temporary or short-term assistance. Nor should the goal of social programs and tax policy be to level the differences between individuals and classes. Neoconservatives claim to favour equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. While favouring the existence of the welfare state, they also believe that it should be scaled back, because it has become, in their view, too large, too bureaucratic and unwieldy, and too generous. In the mid-1990s, neoconservatives approved of “workfare” programs designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into the workforce. In domestic policy theirs has been an insistent and influential voice.
Neoconservatives have been especially influential in the formulation of foreign and military policy, particularly in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They contend that power—military, economic, or political—that is unused is for all practical purposes wasted. The military might of the United States should be employed around the world to promote American interests. And it is in the interests of the United States, they say, to promote the development of democratic regimes abroad, in as much as democracies (according to the “democratic peace” hypothesis proposed by some political scientists) do not wage war against one another. Neoconservatives wish, in the words of Pres. Woodrow Wilson, to “make the world safe for democracy.” And indeed, neoconservatives often describe their views on foreign policy as “Wilsonian.” They view Wilson as an idealist who came to the Paris Peace Conference (1919) at Versailles with proposals for a just and lasting peace that were denigrated and defeated by cynical European politicians bent on punishing Germany for its role in starting World War I. Back in the United States, Wilson’s proposals for a League of Nations and for the country’s membership in that organization were defeated by isolationist politicians. The all-too-real result of such cynical anti-idealism was another and even bloodier second world war. Thus, idealism, far from being impractical, can produce politically practical and even admirable results.
From the 1980s, neoconservative idealism took the form of an assertive and interventionist foreign policy that targeted anti-American regimes and leftist movements abroad. Sharp increases in U.S. military spending in the 1980s very nearly bankrupted the less affluentSoviet Union and helped to bring about its disintegration in 1991. Meanwhile, communist-led rebel movements in Latin America were crushed with the help of U.S. economic and military aid to regimes regarded as pro-American. In the George W. Bush administration, neoconservative officials in the Pentagon and the Department of State helped to plan and promote the Iraq War (2003).
Criticism
Critics contend that, for all their purported idealism and their talk about democracy, neoconservatives have been all too willing to prop up pro-American but deeply undemocratic regimes throughout the world. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (1979), which made the neoconservative case for supporting pro-American dictatorships, was simply and unapologetically cynical, according to this perspective.
Critics also take note of an apparent contradiction between neoconservatives’ views on domestic and foreign policy. With respect to domestic policy, neoconservatives are acutely aware of the possible unintended consequences of well-intended programs. But with respect to foreign policy, such skeptical awareness, according to critics, is almost entirely absent. In the months leading up to the Iraq War, for example, neoconservative planners seemed completely unaware that the invasion and occupation of Iraq might produce horrific consequences, such as large-scale sectarian violence and civil war.
Such criticism has led some neoconservatives, such as Fukuyama and Michael Lind, to renounce neoconservatism and to become ardent and outspoken critics. Such criticisms notwithstanding, neoconservatism remains an influential ideology.
