[elusio]

The Errors of the Neo-Cons
By William S. Lind

The architect Andres Duany recently sent me a copy of a new and influential
neo-con tract, Robert Kagan's "Of Paradise and Power". As one would expect
from a neo-con scholar (I refuse to call them "neo-conservatives" for the
simple reason that there is nothing conservative about them; the neo-cons
are really post-Marxist Trotskyites), it is a well-written, well-argued
essay. Its thesis is that America and Europe are now on fundamentally
divergent courses, America seeking to become the dominant world power while
Europe seeks a Kantian paradise of perpetual peace. That is largely true.

Not true at all are Kagan's portrayals of America's imperial past or future.
Like all good neo-cons, he argues that America has always been on a course
toward world dominion, which is a vast misreading of American history. More
dangerous is his assumption that America's current quest to rule the world -
a quest mandated by the neo-cons, who now rule Washington - will succeed.
Behind that assumption lie two others, two central errors that "Of Paradise
and Power" illustrates well.

The first is that the American armed forces cannot be defeated. Kagan does
not so much argue this point as presume it:

The sizable American military arsenal, once barely
sufficient to balance Soviet power, was now deployed in a world without a
single formidable adversary... With the check of Soviet power removed, the
United States was free to intervene practically wherever and whenever it
chose...

This military dominance, so complete that America can use armed forces
almost casually, is in turn a product of the Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA), the domination of war by advanced technologies owned solely by the
United States.

In fact, war is going in a very different direction, one the neo-cons are
apparently incapable of comprehending. Hi-tech state armed forces are
capable of fighting only other hi-tech state armed forces, in what have
effectively become not wars but jousting contests. Real war is waged by
amorphous "fighters," indistinguishable from civilians, using low-tech
weapons such as Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), sniper rifles and suicide
bombs, often fighting not for a state but for a larger cause such as
religion or tribe. This kind of war, Fourth Generation War, simply bypasses
the RMA and renders it an expensive joke. It is not intimidated by the
American armed forces, and it can defeat them, as we will see in both
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kagan's other error, and one of the neo-cons' central points of pride, is
American exceptionalism. This assumption is implicit in "Of Paradise and
Power," but without it the book falls apart. What it means, put simply, is
that what happened to other countries that attempted to establish world
dominion cannot happen to the United States.

Kagan acknowledges the role history, at least the history of the twentieth
century, played in Europe's present aversion to the game of Great Power. In
the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War, German and
Russian ambitions to rule the world brought disaster to both countries. The
eastern third of Germany now seems lost forever, and Russia has fallen back
to her boundaries at the time Peter the Great came to the throne. Nor did
other Europeans states prosper from Germany's and Russia's defeats; on the
contrary, all Europe was devastated.

But Kagan does not go back far enough. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
centuries, both Spain and France made their bids to establish the "universal
monarchy," and they too suffered disaster. Spain ended up a backwater and a
joke, and France inflicted the French Revolution on herself and the world.
The law is universal: Any country that attempts to establish itself as
ruler of the world, through the Great Power's tools of diplomacy and
military force, overextends, crashes and falls.

But somehow America won't. Why? Kagan doesn't say, beyond mumbling about
American power being "benevolent," which is just how everyone else saw their
power too.

During the Bosnian Crisis of the Clinton years, I asked one of the CINCs,
and old friend, whether the people making American policy knew the history
of the Balkans. He replied, "They know the history. They just don't think
it applies to them." It seems to matter little what Party is in power in
Washington; at least in foreign affairs, hubris rules. So it did earlier in
Madrid, Paris and Berlin.

William S. Lind

i agree with him!!!
elusio

[arcis]

By the way,

"The eastern third of Germany now seems lost forever"

Could you explain this statement a little bit more detailed?

[elusio]

i think its post WW2 Germany east when it was a little bigger i guess... im not quite sure... [that seems the smallest point to highlight...]

elusio

[Demosthenes]

Why is this here?

[Freedom]

Why is this here?

The "Neo-conservatives" are a pretty influential "think tank", with great sway in the Bush administration, Richard Pearle and Paul Wolfozwits(spelling?)are advocates. Basically they are full of crap, almost "socialist" and they dislike "Hayek"(i mean what they fuck?") but i always kinda liked Paul Wolfozwits(spelling?) so maybe they are not that bad. I think its a pretty okay topic for the conservative board.

Here is "neo conservatism" in the words of the "head neo con". The Neo Conservative website is: http://www.aei.org as far as think tanks go i like http://www.cato.org , http://www.cei.org , i'm more of a "blog" man myself. I dont know many conservative think tanks apart from the aforementioned 3.

The Neoconservative Persuasion Print Mail



By Irving Kristol
Posted: Friday, August 15, 2003

ARTICLES
The Weekly Standard
Publication Date: August 25, 2003

What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is "neoconservative," and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as "neocons" are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any "there" there?

Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: 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. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.

One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the "have-nots" and the "haves" engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.

The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy--because it seems to be in the nature of human nature--that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.

This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his The Man Versus the State, was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

But it is only to a degree that neocons are comfortable in modern America. The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives--though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government's attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.


And then, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.) These attitudes can be summarized in the following "theses" (as a Marxist would say): 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. 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. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing.

Finally, for a great power, the "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. 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 extraordinary 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.

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-à-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination. This superiority was planned by no one, and even today there are many Americans who are in denial. To a large extent, it all happened as a result of our bad luck. During the 50 years after World War II, while Europe was at peace and the Soviet Union largely relied on surrogates to do its fighting, the United States was involved in a whole series of wars: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War. The result was that our military spending expanded more or less in line with our economic growth, while Europe's democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs. The Soviet Union spent profusely but wastefully, so that its military collapsed along with its economy.

Suddenly, after two decades during which "imperial decline" and "imperial overstretch" were the academic and journalistic watchwords, the United States emerged as uniquely powerful. The "magic" of compound interest over half a century had its effect on our military budget, as did the cumulative scientific and technological research of our armed forces. With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you.

The older, traditional elements in the Republican party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published.


Irving Kristol is a senior fellow at AEI and the author of Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.



Source Notes: This article appears in the August 25 issue of the Weekly Standard

[Noumenon]

In fact, war is going in a very different direction, one the neo-cons are
apparently incapable of comprehending. Hi-tech state armed forces are
capable of fighting only other hi-tech state armed forces, in what have
effectively become not wars but jousting contests. Real war is waged by
amorphous "fighters," indistinguishable from civilians, using low-tech
weapons such as Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), sniper rifles and suicide
bombs, often fighting not for a state but for a larger cause such as
religion or tribe. This kind of war, Fourth Generation War, simply bypasses
the RMA and renders it an expensive joke. It is not intimidated by the
American armed forces, and it can defeat them, as we will see in both
Afghanistan and Iraq.

This paragraph is completely untrue. When was the last time our high-tech military fought another high-tech army? Our military technology is highly effective in suppressing low-tech resistance, as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. What we should worry about is if we are really ready to fight a military on the same level as our own. I think we are not, as our military isn't especially big, and we are evolving away from cold war stretegies in order to face new threats.

What rock are you living under if you think we were defeated in Iraq and Afganistan?? Maybe Lind is really Comical Ali, saying that the US has been defeated even as our tanks were rolling through Baghdad? The only way low-tech military can defeat us is if they have a lot of support from the local population, which was the case in Vietnam, but not in Afghanistan or Iraq. And the fact that there is a little bit of leftover resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq does not mean that we lost those wars. Did we lose World War II because the Nazi Werewolves fought a guerilla war afterwards? The idea is moronic.

I am opposed to imperialism and anyone who promotes that idea. I don't think Bush's administration as a whole is imperialist, although there might be a few in it who are. The administration is trying to exert US power, but that is not the same as imperialism. It is just basic self-interest, which every country is guilty of.