Kinder, Gentler Neo-Cons

Kinder, Gentler Neo-Cons

In addition to inflaming paranoia in some right-wing quarters, Democratic Presidents have a way of inspiring foreign-policy conservatives to form hawkish pressure groups. The Committee on the Present Danger bedeviled Jimmy Carter, and then helped staff Ronald Reagan’s Administration. The Project for a New American Century put the squeeze on Bill Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, and then provided George Bush with many of his top officials, who ran and wrecked the liberation of Iraq. Two months into the Obama Presidency, the ideological descendant of these organizations has already been born.

It’s called simply—and far more modestly than its predecessors—the Foreign Policy Initiative. Its leaders will be familiar to students of recent history: William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor. Kristol has been the most influential conservative publicist of the past two decades (I’ve written about him in this space before); for him, ideas are inseparable from political strategy and power. Kagan is one of the smartest foreign-policy minds around, but his intelligence is not of the self-critical or curious kind; he’s written many words about the war, but has never been able to acknowledge his own intellectual failures on Iraq (Kagan and I got into this exchange about whether such a thing as neo-conservatism even exists). Dan Senor is a very nice man— successful in the fields of politics, media, and finance—who slowly lost his credibility in the daily press briefings he gave as L. Paul Bremer’s spokesman during the first year of the occupation in Baghdad. Together, their record on the most important foreign policy initiative of this generation has not been stellar.

Usually, ideological grouplets announce their arrival with claims of world-historical importance that are in inverse proportion to their size and influence. But no sunny vistas and threatening storm clouds accompany the Foreign Policy Initiative’s birth. Its leaders are in favor of international engagement, human rights, and strong alliances. They are against isolationism and retreat. So am I! Maybe you too! There’s no talk of benevolent global hegemony or a new American century or a world of imminent threats. Instead, there are “many foreign policy challenges.” This is the anodyne language of establishment think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations—the kind of places that foreign-policy hawks have always held in a certain degree of contempt. Perhaps it’s a subtle admission of a recent chastening. Or perhaps not.

If you didn’t know the history of its founders, you could almost imagine that the Foreign Policy Initiative represents a constructive and nonpartisan effort to keep America engaged around the world. In which case, you would be surprised and disappointed if instead the group turned out to be a stick with which to beat the new Democratic Administration for its craven appeasement of evil.