The Times Higher Education Supplement

For analysis and debate of neo-conservatism on openDemocracy: Godfrey Hodgson, “From frontiersman to neo-con” (April 2004) Danny Postel’s interview with Shadia Drury, “Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq” (October 2003) Mark Blitz, “Leo Strauss, the Straussians and American foreign policy” (November 2003) openDemocracy forum debate

Beyond the human and financial cost, the effect of sharply diminished American credibility has been felt in official Washington, and in the money centres of New York, Atlanta and Chicago. Most damaging for the neo-conservatives, however, has been the revelation that their utopian strategic plan for the Middle East is naive and unworkable. The limitations of American power have become a public spectacle; with each day, Americans have learned more about how the post-conflict plan for Iraq’s reconstruction was developed without the benefit of Arabic-speakers or country experts, riven by bureaucratic and exile factions, and without addressing the critical tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Moreover, the relentless focus on Iraq has allowed Afghanistan to fester, North Korea and Iran to continue along their nuclear paths and Saudi Arabia to stumble towards catastrophe. Perhaps the most ominous result of Iraq’s seizure of the attention of top United States foreign policy and national security managers is the neglect of China, which already may have replaced the US as the leading power in East Asia.

In the corporate sector, failures of this magnitude would result in the speedy replacement of those responsible. This may yet happen. But even if November’s election brings a change of administration, the question arises: will the neo-conservatives’ influence on American foreign policy endure?

From Vietnam to Iraq

The implication of two 2004 studies broadly sympathetic to neo-conservatism – Surprise, Security and the American Experience by John Lewis Gaddis and Power, Terror, Peace and War by Walter Russell Mead – is that the unilateral exercise of American power draws on certain social and cultural themes, centring on an insular and aggressive nativism, that have animated America’s interaction with the world from the earliest days of the republic. The implication is that, far from being an aberration, neo-conservatism is part of an established historical tradition.

There is even a case to be made that neo-conservatism has affinities with the missionary zeal (socially progressive as well as often militantly anti-communist) that animated the “best and the brightest” generation – George Ball, McGeorge and William Bundy, Robert MacNamara, Paul Nitze, Walt Rostow – who presided over America’s engagement in Vietnam.

This generation came to political maturity during the Eisenhower years of the 1950s when, as today, the US enjoyed an unchallengeable global power projection capability. Its leading figures came to believe that military power could press against the evil represented by communism and install American-style democracy, bypassing the forces of local nationalism, in a region (south-east Asia) with a long and vibrant cultural history but without any democratic legacy. All this was done with little reference to rich, available resources of regional and linguistic expertise.

The recurrence of this pattern among the ostensibly very different group represented by President Bush’s neo-conservative advisers in the aftermath of 9/11 suggests that the United States is indeed in the grip of a syndrome, a problem that is structural and not merely cyclical: an “axis of disorder” which at times of stress inhibits calm and deliberate decision-making.

At these stress-points, it appears that the combination of a crusading idealism, an assertion of the universal applicability of American values, and the willingness (indeed eagerness) to use force to back them can overwhelm the venerable “checks and balances” considered integral to the American political process. Some argue that Republican administrations may be more vulnerable to this process, since the party’s driving spirit has shifted from cosmopolitan globalists towards America-first populists – a development accelerated by the increased influence of a conservative and fundamentalist talk-radio culture.

In the case of Iraq, a determined special interest was capable of leading a march to war without any effective counterweight to its seizure of the levers of power. The central failure was in the Condoleezza Rice -led National Security Council; despite her training in traditional statecraft and alliance management, Rice was unwilling or unable to highlight the imbalances in decision-making arising from the neo-conservative dynamics in the defense department and vice-president’s office.

Beyond the executive, Congress abandoned real oversight in giving overwhelming, almost instinctual support to the war. Just as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed the Senate unanimously and thus formalised US involvement in Vietnam, leaving two relatively obscure Democratic senators (Alaska’s Ernest Greuning and Oregon’s Wayne Morse) to ask the first tough questions, so it took two outsiders (the hoary senator with an independent streak, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, and former Vermont governor Howard Dean) to make opposition to the Iraq war respectable.

The media was also guilty of institutional failure in ways that echo the past. Just as in the early 1960s, establishment newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post had enthusiastically backed involvement in Vietnam, so in 2002-03 major media outlets were uncritical in the face of administration assertions about al-Qaida/Saddam links and the latter’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Network and cable television businesses, from which most Americans now derive their news, compounded this failure. Their imprisonment by the competitive search for market share leads them to fear offending power; as a result, they are satisfied with recycling soft, compliant questions and stories. At least part of the media, notably the New York Times which (another Vietnam repeat) diverged earlier than the Washington Post from the official line, has conducted a self-critical post-mortem on its own coverage .

The present danger

The recurrent pattern of institutional weakness over Vietnam and Iraq suggests a systemic weakness – one that creates an ever-present danger of a neo-conservative special interest group turning a manageable, controllable challenge (as, in principle, was Iraq) into a major crisis. In the near term such a sequence could unfold over Iran; in the more distant future, it could develop as the United States and China compete for regional or global hegemony.

The warning-signs exist whenever unchecked special interests within an administration can act on their belief in American exceptionalism, demonise an opponent, and present his position in monolithic terms as a target for destruction.

Thus, the true legacy of the neo-conservatives may be to have revealed a systemic problem that must be addressed if the American foreign policy process is to recover its consistency and predictability. The current neo-conservative moment may be passing, like a comet that streaks through the skies at regular intervals before disappearing into space. The result, in the short- to medium-term, may be a more familiar, collegial and substantive, American foreign policy. This will provide opportunities for the United States’s allies not just to agree with American policy but to influence it for the better.

But as comets return, so will the neo-conservatives’ themes - especially the preference for unilateral military power as the option of first resort. Neo-conservatism offers a recurrently powerful ideological booster-rocket in support of America’s military pre-eminence. If another “perfect storm” on the 9/11 model recurs, where fear and confusion suspend the political process, the American response is likely to be predominantly military rather than political, diplomatic or economic - irrespective of the party affiliation of the White House incumbent.