Neoconservatism Explained

Posted on January 14, 2008 - Filed Under American Politics, College, Philosophy, Politics |

The initial impetus for writing this essay stemmed from reading a book review published in the Weekend Review section of the Irish Times on the Saturday of September 29th 2007. The book under review in the article was The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Guardian columnist Naomi Klein, and the book reviewer was Dr Tom Clonan, the Irish Times’ security analyst. It was obvious after a few paragraphs, even to a reader then only familiar with neoconservatism via one of Francis Fukuyama’s books, that either Klein had written an appalling misinformed account of neoconservatism, or that Clonon’s review was borderline libellous in it’s characterisation of Klein’s work, given the multitude of erroneous statements he attributed to the text.

According to the article, the “intellectual architect” of neoconservatism is the apolitical American economist Milton Friedman, former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and current US vice president Dick Cheney are both neoconservatives, and the “ultimate aim” of neoconservatism “is the creation of a new feudal order” where 80 percent of the world’s population “subsist in a state of what the neocons refer to as “planned misery” – unable to pay for adequate housing, privatised education and healthcare.” All of this is untrue, but given the dearth of understanding surrounding neoconservatism, misrepresentations such as this have become commonplace in the Western media.

The aim of this essay is not to defend neoconservatism from hostile and scurrilous criticism, or even to defend neoconservatism from accurate criticism. Rather, this essay seeks to explain neoconservatism as both a political ideology and a political movement, and examine the tension between the movement’s two core strands, domestic policy and foreign policy. Providing such an explanation is a complex undertaking due to the neoconservative movement’s diffuse and unfocused composition, but it also seems like a wholly worthwhile one in light of the various misconceptions that have gained traction with vast sections of the Western press, and therefore with the wider public in general.

This essay will contend with the challenge of explaining neoconservatism in the following way. First, the essay will consider whether neoconservatism ought to be thought of as a political ideology at all, given some of the movement’s peculiarities. Second, the essay will provide an overview of the history of neoconservatism. The essay will then examine neoconservative domestic policy in limited detail, before moving on to neoconservatism’s other distinct branch, which is concerned with foreign policy. Following this the essay shall turn its attention to some criticisms of neoconservatism, and shall then conclude with a detailed examination of a how modern neoconservatism has strayed from its roots to such a degree that it is now in conflict with some fundamental neoconservative principles.

However, before embarking upon this explanation, there follows a brief note on terminology. In this essay a “neoconservative” will be taken to mean either a self-identified member of the neoconservative movement, or someone who is generally associated with it. The word “neocon” shall not be used except for in instances of quotation, since this word is generally used as a pejorative by neoconservatism’s detractors rather than as a descriptive term. The terms “neoconservative movement”, “neoconservative persuasion”, and “neoconservative tendency” will all be taken to mean much the same thing (a fuller explanation of these three terms is provided later in the essay).

According to the neoconservative writer David Brooks, “if you ever read a sentence that starts with ‘Neocons believe’, there is a 99.44 per cent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.” Brooks maintains that this is because “while the neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on just about everything else.” Even if Brooks is exaggerating somewhat, the basic point he makes poses a serious problem for anyone seeking to classify neoconservatism as a distinct and reasonably coherent political ideology. If neoconservatives really do disagree with each other to the extent that Brooks claims, then how can neoconservatism be considered a coherent body of political thought, given the divergence of its adherents’ views?

This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that there is not much ideological overlap between neoconservatism’s twin areas of concern, domestic and foreign policy, and so it is quite common for self-identified neoconservatives to only subscribe to neoconservative precepts in their own area of expertise. (For example, Irving Kristol, regarded by many as the “godfather” of neoconservatism, wrote almost exclusively on matters of domestic policy and favoured a ‘realist’ approach to American foreign policy, whereas many latter-day foreign policy neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan refrain from writing about domestic policy issues.)

So can neoconservatism be thought of as a political ideology? To answer this question, a definition of “political ideology” is required, and such a definition is provided by Roger Eatwell, who writes that:

“A political ideology is a relatively coherent set of empirical and normative beliefs and thought, focusing on the problems of human nature, the process of history, and socio-political arrangements.”

Neoconservative ideas concerning human nature are inextricably bound up with the idea of ‘regime’, and so this complex relationship will be discussed elsewhere in the essay. As for “the process of history”, most neoconservatives subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis that the end of the cold war heralded “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, even if this universalisation may take a long time to realise and will not be without complications along the way. If some neoconservatives do not fully agree with the ‘inevitability’ of Fukuyama’s argument, they at least believe in the value of trying to realise the world envisaged by Fukuyama, where all governments are liberal democracies.

Neoconservatism is more coherent on the matter of Eatwell’s “socio-political arrangements”. The authoritative neoconservative Irving Kristol suggests a few areas of domestic policy on which there is broad neoconservative agreement: the importance of economic growth (with an affinity for tax cutting and an acceptance of budget deficits); a toleration of ‘big government’ and state intervention (provided such intervention falls short of what could be considered as statism); and a deep concern regarding a perceived decline in society’s moral values. Kristol also suggests areas of foreign policy where there exists a neoconservative consensus. Striking a central theme of neoconservative’s foreign policy outlook, he writes that:

“World government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to a world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.”

Finally, Kristol explains the United States’ national interest in terms of ideological interest as well as in terms of traditional, “more material concerns”, by writing that:

“Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces, external or internal.”

This last quote conforms with a by now well-known neoconservative foreign policy theme that posits that a more democratic world represents a safer world for the United States.

Given that Irving Kristol is more associated with the domestic policy wing of neoconservatism than the foreign policy wing, it is instructive to also include here the thoughts of erstwhile foreign policy neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, who has forcefully argued that neoconservatism can indeed be considered a political ideology in its own right. In the field of foreign policy, Fukuyama identifies four core principles that informed neoconservative thinking until the end of the cold war. These are:

“[A] concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.”

Stated as above, the core principles of neoconservative domestic and foreign policy do not seem to conflict with each other, even if there may seem to be no obvious connection between the two strands in some places. Therefore, given that Roger Eatwell considers anarchism, Marxism, and fascism to all be candidates for inclusion in the bracket of ideologies, it does not seem like too great a stretch to claim that neoconservatism also deserves to be thought of as its own distinctive ideology.

Contrary to what might be expected however, most neoconservatives prefer not to think of neoconservatism as an ideology, and many even shy away from describing neoconservatism as a ‘movement’. Instead, Irving Kristol discusses “the neoconservative persuasion”, Joshua Muravchik writes of “a distinctive neoconservative sensibility” and Norman Podhoretz explores the “neoconservative tendency”, and not the ‘neoconservative movement’, because neoconservatism “never had or aspired to the kind of central organization characteristic of a movement”. Irwin Stelzer (who considers himself a neoconservative) suggests that this reluctance to refer to neoconservatism a movement “stems from recognition by those in broad agreement with some of its principles that there are non-trivial differences among them on important points of policy”.

Whether neoconservatism is an ‘ideology’, a ‘movement’ or a ‘persuasion’ “that manifests itself over time, but erratically”, in Kristol’s words, matters less than the obvious fact that neoconservatism exists in some form or other, and that is has had an important shaping effect on US government policy in recent years. This essay will now consider the origins of neoconservatism, and in doing so seek to explain how a group of Trotskyite City College of New York (CCNY) students came to found a movement that would decades later come to be seen as the intellectual engine behind the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.

While it is true that early neoconservative thinkers such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan began their intellectual life as admirers of Trotsky, their affection for the Russian revolutionary was short-lived. Having entered CCNY in the mid- to late 1930s, each member of the group had renounced their Marxist sympathies by the outbreak of the Second World War. Indeed, perhaps because their favourite Marxist was Trotsky, who was himself all too aware of the problems inherent in the Soviet Union, the most profound effect of this early dalliance with Marxism was an intense anticommunism, and a sharp dislike for fellow liberals who sympathised with communism. Fukuyama writes that:

“Understanding the genesis of this liberal anticommunism is critical to understanding the origins of neoconservatism and the opposition to utopian social engineering that is the most enduring thread running through the movement.”

The second major influence on neoconservative thought arrived in the 1960s, in the midst of political turbulence in the United States. The erstwhile Trotskyites of the CCNY group were by now lecturing on newly radicalised college campuses and contributing to academic journals, and although they sympathised to some extent with the aims of the New Left and the Counterculture of the 1960s, more often than not the CCNY academics found themselves on the other side of arguments with this new force in US politics. Partly as a response to this, in 1965 Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell founded the political journal The Public Interest, in which contributing academics could criticise what they perceived to be misguided elements of then-president Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program.

A more detailed look at neoconservative domestic policy prescriptions is provided later in the essay, but for now it is enough to note that, just as with the CCNY group’s critique of Soviet communism, the central theme of The Public Interest’s articles was that social engineering could only succeed to a very limited degree, and so despite the best intentions of American liberals, many of the policies they advocated were ineffective at bringing about social justice. Thus, writers such as Irving, Glazer and Bell found themselves aligned with traditional conservatives in their opposition to many of the social policies originating on the American left, and in time this group of former Marxists came to be thought of less as disillusioned liberals and more as a new breed of conservative, “neo”-conservatives.

The origins of neoconservative foreign policy are somewhat different, although there is of course a degree of convergence in some areas (most obviously, the stringent neoconservative opposition to communism). Francis Fukuyama identifies two figures as being central to the development of neoconservatism’s foreign policy branch, but the extent of their direct influence on the movement is debateable. The first of these is the German émigré political theorist Leo Strauss, who has been the subject of various scathing attacks from respectable publications such as Le Monde and the New Yorker ever since the fringe American political website the Executive Intelligence Review posted an article about Strauss entitled “Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons”. While this essay will contend that the extent of Strauss’ influence on neoconservatism has been exaggerated, it is still worth considering some of his main ideas here, if only to defend him and those he taught from some of the more outlandish charges that have been flung at them since the Iraq war.

The Western press’ portrayal of Leo Strauss as the sinister postmortem architect of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq is bizarre and appears to be wholly without merit. Indeed, it has moved admirers of his such as Francis Fukuyama to aver that “more nonsense has been written about Leo Strauss and the Iraq war than on virtually any other subject”. Joshua Muravchik has similarly defended Strauss from what he sees as wildly inaccurate characterisations of the University of Chicago lecturer, such as the suggestion that he was an arrogant Machiavellian who encouraged rulers to lie to the masses lest the truth demoralise them, or the suggestion that this Jewish intellectual who had witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic first hand was anything other than a friend of liberal democracy.

Leo Strauss did not write about contemporary political issues, but instead devoted his academic career to studying classical political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, as well as some more recent thinkers like Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. As Fukuyama notes:

“Strauss did not produce doctrine in the sense that Marx and Lenin did, and it is extraordinarily hard to extract from his writings anything that looks like public policy analysis.”

Much of Strauss’ writing is concerned with the distinction between what he termed “ancients and moderns” in political philosophy, the “ancients” being those political philosophers who came before Machiavelli, and the “moderns” being those who came after him. Strauss worried that post-Enlightenment philosophy had placed too much stock in rationality alone, and thought that political systems based purely on reasoned, secular principles would be more vulnerable than systems animated by a sense of something like a civic religion, as advocated by Plato in the Republic. As Fukuyama remarks:

“If there is any central theme to Strauss’ scepticism about the modern Enlightenment project, it is the idea that reason alone is sufficient to establish a durable political order or that the nonrational claims of revelation can be banished from politics.”

Strauss of course had personal experience of the fragility of modern liberal democracy, having left Germany in the 1930s as the Nazi regime was coming to power.

Related to this concern of Strauss’ was another criticism of modernity, this time in the area of political science. Although Strauss is sometimes portrayed as an admirer of Machiavelli, Strauss was deeply critical of the Italian philosopher for introducing to political science what he describes as “the deliberate indifference to the distinction between king and tyrant”. Strauss held deep reservations about of the role of the fact-value distinction in political science since he felt it inhibited an observer’s judgement when confronted with tyrannical regimes. As Strauss himself explained:

“It is no accident that present-day political science has failed to grasp tyranny as what it really is. Our political science is haunted by the belief that “value judgements” are inadmissible in scientific considerations, and to call a regime tyrannical clearly amounts to pronouncing a “value judgement”. The political scientist who accepts this view of science will speak of the mass-state, of dictatorship, of totalitarianism, of authoritarianism, and so on, and as a citizen he may wholeheartedly condemn these things; but as a political scientist he is forced to reject the notion of tyranny as “mythical”.”

Unlike most other aspects of Strauss’ work, this area can be seen as having a direct influence on neoconservative thought. While most of the American right pursued a resolutely ‘realist’ foreign policy during the cold war, the neoconservatives placed far more emphasis on the nature and character of communist regimes, and so rejected the ‘realist’ belief that all states’ actions were essentially predictable based on certain calculations of self-interest. Instead, neoconservatives understood the communist world as a tyrannical foe that must be defeated, not accommodated, as so they disapproved of Henry Kissinger’s efforts at détente as much as they approved of Ronald Reagan’s description of the USSR as an “evil empire”.

A final idea of Strauss’ worth examining here pertains to the nature of regimes and their influence on the character of their citizenry. Strauss agreed with Plato and Aristotle that a regime is more than just a set of formal institutions involved in the governing of a people. Instead, the three men understood the idea of regime as an altogether more organic phenomenon, continually being shaped by the habits and mores of the society which it ordered, while at the same time exerting its own shaping influence on the character of its citizens. Therefore, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, “a democratic regime produces a certain kind of citizen”, and this citizen will differ in key respects from the kind produced under, say, a communist or a monarchic regime.

The essay will return to this Straussian conception of regime later, but for now it is sufficient to only make the obvious link between this particular notion of Strauss’ and the modern neoconservative preoccupation with the business of “regime change”. This policy arose from the thought that “foreign policy reflects the values of [nation states’] underlying societies.” Therefore, according to Fukuyama:

“Regimes that treat their own citizens unjustly are likely to do the same to foreigners. Thus efforts to change the behaviour of tyrannical or totalitarian regimes through external rewards or punishments will always be less effective than changing the underlying nature of the regime.”

Equally appealing to neoconservative advocates of regime change policy was the thought that replacing Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes with democracies would, in the long run, lead to reduced levels of religious extremism, since it was presumed such fanaticism was the result of living under oppressive governments. Whether true or not, this line of thought held fresh appeal for many foreign policy hawks in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist atrocities.

The other key figure in the development of neoconservatism’s foreign policy branch was the mathematical logician and defence analyst Albert Wohlstetter, who like Strauss spent much of his career teaching in the University of Chicago. Wohlstetter’s influence on neoconservatism is both more direct and less extensive than Strauss’, since Wohlstetter’s work centred exclusively on issues of national defence, with nuclear weapons being his main area of interest.

In the early years of the Cold War Wohlstetter contributed to the development of the first strike/second strike concept, which posited that a country such as the United States could not rest secure in the knowledge that it had a nuclear deterrent; it must instead ensure that, were the Soviets to launch a surprise full-scale nuclear assault on US nuclear facilities, it would still have means of reprisal available to it after the initial onslaught. Wohlstetter’s deep suspicion of the USSR dovetailed seamlessly with the general neoconservative anticommunism, and so it is perhaps not surprising that many of his protégés such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz have become key figures in the neoconservative movement.

Another area of interest to Wohlstetter that was to have a major impact on the development of neoconservative foreign policy in the 1990s was the role of advanced technology in warfare. Former US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz credits Wohlstetter as being one of the first people to foresee the advantages that having more accurate weapons would confer on the United States’ ability to wage war. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke write:

“Wohlstetter advocated two ideas: to adapt the delivery systems – for example, cruise missiles, originally designed for nuclear weapons, so that they could deliver conventional payloads – and to have technology that minimized collateral damage while maximising strike capability, the sort of which became manifest in the US interventions of the 1990s.”

Thus Wohlstetter was pivotal to the development of the weaponry that was essential for the type of humanitarian intervention championed by neoconservatives such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan during the 1990s, such as the NATO-led Kosovo mission in 1999, in which not a single American soldier died.

For much of the Cold War the neoconservatives found themselves on the fringe of foreign policy debates, opposed to the ‘realism’ to which most Democrats and Republicans subscribed. However, after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 a number of neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions suddenly began receiving a more sympathetic hearing in Washington. Reagan shared the neoconservatives’ deep suspicion of the Soviet Union, and was given to speaking about it in stark language, such as when he described it as a “sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” Reagan also appointed a number of prominent neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle and Jeane Kirkpatrick, to positions of limited power in his administration, and dramatically increased military spending. Thus, when the Soviet Union splintered and collapsed at the end of the Reagan presidency many neoconservatives felt entitled to claim at least some of the credit for this.

Having concluded its history of neoconservatism, this essay now turns to the matter of modern neoconservatism as it exists today. Despite starting out as a movement primarily concerned with domestic policy issues, modern neoconservatism is concerned almost exclusively with foreign policy. A glance at the homepage of the leading neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard reveals the publication to be wholly concerned with foreign policy matters, save for a few articles pertaining this year’s US presidential election. Therefore, the essay shall only briefly discuss neoconservative domestic policy, such as it exists at all.

In the sphere of domestic policy, neoconservatism has been subsumed into the wider conservative movement. Fukuyama writes that in the late 1970s and early 1980s “many neoconservatives began adopting domestic policy positions of traditional conservatives”. However, there was also an element of convergence involved in this fusion of traditional and neoconservative thought, since both groups had tended to come to the same conclusions on various issues, even if their means of arriving there differed.

For example, neoconservatives had for years railed against certain government welfare policies that they viewed as being corrosive on the character of those who benefited from them. In Welfare: The Best of Intentions, the Worst of Results, Irving Kristol suggested that rather than helping poor people, many government welfare policies had the opposite effect by encouraging undesirable behaviour in their recipients, such as marital breakdown or out of wedlock births, and so rather than helping to preserve family unity these policies contributed to its disintegration and fostered a culture of dependence among recipients. While traditional ‘small government’ conservatives were unlikely to have conducted such nuanced investigations themselves, they were nonetheless quite happy to agree with neoconservatives like Kristol that most welfare programs should indeed be cut back, if not cut out altogether.

Neoconservatives and traditional conservatives also found much to agree on in the area of public morality, where again for different reasons neoconservatives like Kristol and traditional conservatives came to agree that pornography and obscenity were worthy candidates for censorship. Kristol believed that the tolerance of such pursuits was “incompatible with any authentic concern for the quality of life in [a] democracy”, whereas as religious-minded conservatives no doubt held other views as to why such material ought to be censored.

If there is one area where neoconservatives do differ substantially from other conservatives, it is the area of fiscal policy. To put matters simply, neoconservatives do not care about budget deficits. Interestingly, in spite of the media fixation on the level of neoconservative influence on the Bush administration’s foreign policy, the fiscal recklessness of the administration fits very easily with this distinctive neoconservative characteristic (however, in truth the soaring deficits of the Bush presidency have far more to do with six years of voracious pork barrelling by the Republican-controlled Congress on Capitol Hill than any strict adherence to this aspect of neoconservatism).

Neoconservative foreign policy is today in an altogether healthier state that neoconservative domestic policy in terms of debate, coverage and influence. It will be recalled that neoconservatives felt entitled to claim some credit for the Soviet Union’s collapse, since they believed that their policies had at least in part contributed to its downfall. Whether or not this is true, it is unmistakeable that the neoconservatives had been right in their assertion that the Soviet threat was worth confronting rather than accommodating, as the ‘realist’ foreign policy experts had advised, since the realists had assumed that the USSR was set to remain as a permanent fixture in global politics for decades to come. Thus, flushed with their recent perceived success, neoconservative foreign policy types entered into a debate about what role United States should play during this new, “unipolar moment”.

This debate soon resulted in a split in the neoconservative movement. As Halper and Clarke recount:

“The debate fell between those who advocated the narrower definition of national self-interest and those who believed that America’s role in the post-Soviet world should be a democratic crusade.”

Those advocating a more ‘realistic’, self-interested foreign policy were generally the older, more established members of the neoconservative movement such as Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Jeane Kirkpatrick, whereas those arguing for a broader US role in world affairs were generally younger neoconservative thinkers like Charles Krauthammer and Joshua Muravchik. Halper and Clarke identify two key ideas around which these neoconservative “Young Turks” found consensus:

“US interventionism against the weapon state and the export of democracy as the central purpose of American foreign policy.”

By the end of the 1990s it was this latter, more interventionist stain of neoconservatism that had become the dominant neoconservative international relations perspective. This development was in large measure due to the work of two younger members of the neoconservative movement, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who laid out their vision of what they termed a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy in a 1996 article in Foreign Affairs. This Kristol/Kagan stain of neoconservatism has been described as “hard Wilsonianism” since it shared with Woodrow Wilson’s famous 1918 fourteen-point war aims the basic goal of promoting peace, democracy and free trade. However while Kristol and Kagan may have advocated Wilsonian ends, their means to those ends differed sharply from traditional Wilsonianism, which sought to establish a world order based on international institutions. Kristol and Kagan instead advocated using the United States’ military power as an engine for changing the world, and a central component of this strategy involved regime change since according to Francis Fukuyama’s account:

“They asserted that getting tyrannical regimes to play by civilised rules through agreements, international law, or norms was ultimately unworkable, and that in the long run only democratization could ensure compliance and converging interests.”

Halper and Clarke, who are both critics of neoconservatism, summarized the new Kristol and Kagan-led neoconservative foreign policy as consisting of three interconnected elements:

“Force as the preferred policy option, black-and-white moralism as the preferred form of analysis, and unilateralism as the preferred mode of execution.”

Francis Fukuyama suggests in After the Neocons that this Kristol/Kagan conception of neoconservative foreign policy has come to be indelibly associated with neoconservatism in general, and that any attempts to reclaim the term are likely to prove futile at this point.

The essay now turns its attention to some common criticisms of neoconservatism. As space is limited, the essay will confine itself to an examination of the movement’s more substantive criticisms, and so charges that neoconservatism is some sinister Jewish-dominated cabal concerned primarily with the security of Israel, or that it seeks to bring about a world where 80% of people subsist in “planned misery”, will not be considered.

One of the more reasonable criticisms of neoconservatism centres on the neoconservative’s enthusiasm for resorting to military force in international affairs. As Halper and Clarke point out:

“If the dominant policy instrument is military, then the policy mindset is to look for enemies.”

Halper and Clarke maintain this belligerent attitude to foreign policy not only blinds neoconservatives to possible areas of agreement and compromise with America’s adversaries, but also in many cases serves to undermine American credibility by causing neoconservatives to talk of military options that do not in fact exist, such as in the case of North Korea, which has some 11,000 artillery pieces arrayed against South Korea’s capital Seoul. Since it is high unlikely at best that the United States would ever risk the annihilation of an allied city with a population of ten million people, Halper and Clarke suggest aggressive neoconservative posturing in such cases serves only to make solutions more difficult to come by.

Another salient criticism propounded by Halper and Clarke is that modern neoconservatism lacks the intellectual vigour of it forerunner. While earlier neoconservatism maintained something of a coherent philosophical underpinning and ideological framework, Halper and Clarke argue that present-day neoconservatism is concerned almost exclusively with foreign policy, and even within this field they tend to focus narrowly on only particular areas of interest to them. Halper and Clarke attribute this decline in the quality of neoconservative thinking to the fact that today’s generation of neoconservatives “has a narrower range of intellectual experimentation” that the one that preceded it, with the result that the modern neoconservatives “give the impression of being born intellectually middle-aged.”

The above criticism is partly related to the final and most important criticism of neoconservatism in this essay. The modern neoconservative tendency to only focus on certain areas of foreign policy has led to today’s neoconservatives advancing a foreign policy, centred on the idea of promoting regime change in unfriendly states, that is incomplete at best, and in some respects completely at variance core neoconservative principles. While today’s neoconservatives feel quite comfortable advocating military solutions to foreign policy challenges, they have little to say about the business of nation building, a task that stems directly from successful military intervention. As Halper and Clarke observe:

“War, as an instrument of change, cannot address enduring political and cultural problems – the resolution of which is a precondition to market democracy – efficiently or effectively. If the nation-destroying aspect of war is to work, it can do so only in conjunction with the nation-building aspects of after-war.”

This narrow understanding of what “regime change” entailed goes some way towards explaining why things have gone awry, to put it mildly, in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. As Fukuyama explains:

“Excessively optimistic assumptions about post-Saddam Iraq set the stage for the failure to think through the requirements of post-conflict security and nation-building. Regime change was conceived not as a matter of the slow and painstaking construction of liberal and democratic institutions but simply as the negative task of getting rid of the old regime.”

However this criticism of modern neoconservatism runs deeper than complaints about inadequate preparation for the ordeal of governing post-war Iraq. It will be recalled that Francis Fukuyama identified one core tenet of neoconservatism as being “a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.” This wariness derived in part from the domestic policy wing of neoconservatism, which saw the American left’s attempts to improve the lot of society’s disadvantaged as being well-intentioned but ultimately hopelessly misguided.

The other chief source of anxiety in regard to the viability of social engineering, especially at the state-wide level, arises from an understanding of the Straussian conception of regime. While it will be recalled from earlier that a certain reading of Strauss would seem to advocate a policy of regime change, on the basis that this is the most certain way to ensure good behaviour from troublesome states, the complexity of the relationship between citizenry and state, with each one mirroring the other to some degree, means that top-down regime change is certain to prove difficult and likely to prove unpopular. Thus Fukuyama writes:

“While classical political philosophy suggests that the founding of new regimes can lead to new ways of life, it does not argue that they are particularly easy to found.”

Another aspect of neoconservative regime change policy that deserves criticism is the notion that democracy is the default political system to which a society returns when given the chance. As Fukuyama observes:

“Neither Strauss nor any of the ancient political philosophers believed that democracy was the default regime to which societies would revert once dictatorship was removed.”

It might sound odd to hear such arguments coming from Francis Fukuyama, author of the rather triumphalist post-Cold War book The End of History and the Last Man, who so confidently predicted that all nations would eventually embrace liberal democracy as their form of government. However Fukuyama maintains that there is nothing hypocritical in him maintaining the validity of his hypothesis while simultaneously criticising today’s neoconservatives for their belief in the viability of a foreign policy based on the idea of regime change. This is because, he claims:

“The End of History … presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. … The neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will.”

Fukuyama concludes by condemning today’s neoconservatives and renouncing his association with the movement by declaring:

“Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.”

It is not for this essay to judge whether neoconservatism is capable of another rebirth similar to the kind it experienced in the 1990s, but right now its prospects do not look too good. Whether orchestrated by the neoconservatives or not, the Iraq war has left the movement in disarray, with many of the more thoughtful latter-day neoconservatives such as Fukuyama and George Will now repudiating their association with the ideology, while others such as Kristol and Kagan seek to pin the blame for the Iraq war’s disastrous aftermath on an incompetent Bush administration, or, in the case of Charles Krauthammer, on the Iraqi people.

There is of course a sad irony in the neoconservative’s present predicament, given how earlier domestic policy neoconservatives worried that government schemes to improve the world might well end up making it worse. Through neglecting the intellectual legacy their forerunners, today’s neoconservatives have succeeded in damaging not only their own political movement but also American foreign policy.

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