THE COLD WAR, ANTI-COMMUNISM, AND NEOCONSERVATISM

Douglas J. Feith

Some years ago, a candidate for mayor of New York City visited a senior-citizen center in the Bronx and spoke about what he said was the issue of the day: crime. He roused his audience by telling them: “A judge I know was recently mugged, and do you know what he did? He called a press conference and said to the reporters, ‘This mugging of me will in no way affect my decisions in matters of this kind.’ An elderly woman then stood up and, with a heavy European accent, shouted, ‘Then mug him again!’ ”¹

In discussing neoconservatism, the story is apt because it brings to mind that famous quip by Irving Kristol in which he defined a neoconservative as a liberal who was mugged by reality. Kristol, the founding editor of a journal called The Public Interest, was one of the two men commonly recognized as the fathers, or perhaps godfathers, of neoconservatism. The other is Norman Podhoretz, who edited Commentary magazine for thirty-five years.

Historians debate neoconservatism’s birth date. Some say it was in the 1930s, when Kristol was a college student dabbling in left-wing (but anti-Stalinist) ideology. Kristol himself pegs 1965 as the start of the neoconservative “current of thought,” because that was when he founded The Public Interest.

Who are the neoconservatives and what are their main ideas? They are men and women who started their political lives left of center, as liberals or, in the case of Kristol and some others, as Trotskyites. By the mid-1960s, however, they were questioning prevailing liberal thought, especially the premises of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs for fighting poverty. They were skeptical about social engineering projects. They warned that the premises of such projects were often simplistic and overly optimistic and the results were often unintended and negative. Though national security is a prominent feature of neoconservative thought, from the beginning, neoconservatives devoted a great deal of attention also to domestic policy issues.

Kristol wrote that neoconservatism “describes the erosion of liberal faith among a relatively small but talented and articulate group of scholars and intellectuals, and the movement of this group (which gradually gained many new recruits) toward a more conservative point of view: conservative, but different in certain important respects from the traditional conservatism of the Republican party.”

Kristol says that most neoconservatives were “from lower-middle-class or working-class families, children of the Great Depression, veterans (literal or not) of World War II, who accepted the New Deal in principle, and had little affection for the kind of isolationism that then permeated American conservatism.” His account of the original neoconservatives is that they regarded themselves “as dissident liberals—dissident because we were skeptical of many of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives and increasingly disbelieving of the liberal metaphysics, the view of human nature and of social and economic realities on which those programs were based.”²

Further, the neoconservatives took arguments of cultural conservatives that relied on morality, and gave them intellectual heft and compelling articulation that delighted the cultural conservatives. Before the neoconservatives, cultural and Bible Belt conservatives were often dismissed as intellectually non-serious, because many intellectuals dismissed anything religious as non-serious. The neoconservatives were able to explain that moral considerations are actually not only intellectually respectable but crucial to the functioning of a healthy society.

If I had to capture the essence of neoconservative thinking in a phrase, it would be “skepticism toward all ‘isms.’” Neoconservatives are not a political party. They don’t have an agreed-upon set of policy prescriptions for domestic or foreign affairs. What they do have is a common perspective on how to analyze public policy. Kristol rejected the idea that neoconservatism is an ideology; he described it is a “persuasion” or a “current of thought.”

The neoconservatives criticized ideological orthodoxies of the Left and Right. They set themselves up as opponents of political ideologues of all stripes. Different people use the term ideologue differently. It usually has a negative connotation, and generally refers to a set of ideas premised on assumptions that people hold as a matter of faith, not reason. Though dictionaries generally define ideologue neutrally, as a person interested in ideas, it’s clearly not a compliment to call a person an “ideologue.”

I define an ideologue as a person indifferent to the facts. When an ideologue has theories or preconceptions that are contradicted by facts, the ideologue does not modify his assumptions; he ignores or suppresses the facts. As the saying goes: you can’t reason a man out of something he didn’t reason himself into.

Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives in the mid-1960s soured on Great Society political liberalism not because they became indifferent to the poor or decided that the poor did not deserve help from the government. Rather, they examined the actual effects of Great Society programs and concluded that many were bringing about the opposite of what they were intended to do. The programs produced public housing projects for the poor that gave tenants no stake in their property and turned into breeding grounds for drug abuse and violence. Efforts to improve public safety were accompanied by large public expenditures for additional social services despite a lack of evidence that such services reduced crime. The neoconservatives were more concerned with results than intentions, which is another way of saying they were anti-ideological.

A NEOCONSERVATIVE TRANSFORMATION

My own personal experience is not in domestic policy issues but in national security issues, so I will devote most of my reflections to neoconservatism’s contribution to that area of policy. I’ll talk about the neoconservative movement in the first person, from my own experience, because my political evolution toward neoconservatism was similar to that of many others of my generation.

Let me share with you some family background.

My father was a Jew born in Europe in 1914. The Nazis killed both of his parents, four of his sisters, and his three brothers. As a sailor on British merchant vessels when World War II started, he managed to come to the United States during that war and join the U.S. Merchant Marine. In the course of his American wartime service, he survived the loss of three ships to enemy fire.

My mother was born in the United States, and she and my dad created together a rather typical, politically liberal Jewish suburban home. The New York Times was delivered every day, and we read it and believed it. My mother thought Alger Hiss was innocent and the Rosenbergs probably were, too. My parents voted for Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. I remember once sitting beside my father on the edge of his bed, looking through papers on his night table. He had cards showing he was a member or contributor to the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, and the Democratic Party.

I grew up with liberal ideas on the major political issues of the day. At the same time, our home had important bourgeois features that were not in any way in tension with our liberal politics. My parents were patriotic. They gave their children religious instruction, a strong sense of family, and a commitment to principles of hard work and personal responsibility.

When I was a kid in the early 1960s, being a liberal meant supporting color-blind government, free speech, a strong American defense, and friendly relations with Israel. If one supports all those things nowadays, one will generally be considered a conservative.

When I was a kid, liberals like us readily accepted the idea that America was an exceptional country in that it was founded with a mission not only to safeguard its own people’s liberty but to demonstrate to the world the possibility of popular self-government. Liberals today tend to ridicule or belittle the concept of American exceptionalism, arguing that it is arrogant.

I was in high school in the late 1960s and in college in the early 1970s. Those years were dominated by the remarkably bitter controversy about the Vietnam War. Though America’s involvement in the war was the work of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, both of whom were liberal Democrats, liberals turned against the war and the antiwar movement became increasingly strident and radical. Antiwar demonstrations routinely featured speakers who denounced President Johnson as a war criminal, condemned America as an imperialist aggressor, and sympathized with America’s communist enemies. Not everyone in the antiwar movement struck such notes, but over time they grew more and more pronounced.

In high school, I was prepared to enter the army if drafted, but my views on the war were negative, generally in line with those of the liberal editorial page of the New York Times. I considered myself a Democrat, and I don’t think I had a single friend who was a Republican. In fact, I wasn’t aware that any of my parents’ friends were Republicans. Nevertheless, I found myself increasingly uneasy about what I was hearing from the Democratic Party, which was adopting the rhetoric and ideas of the antiwar movement, of the New Left, and of the 1960s counterculture. In his 1976 essay “What Is a ‘Neoconservative’?” Irving Kristol observed: “If there is any one thing that neoconservatives are unanimous about, it is their dislike of the ‘counterculture’ that has played so remarkable a role in American life over these past fifteen years.”³

In 1968, support in the Democratic primaries for “peace candidate” Eugene McCarthy was strong enough to dissuade President Lyndon Johnson from even running for reelection. By 1972, the strength of the party’s New Left wing was sufficient to bring about the nomination of George McGovern to run against Richard Nixon.

When I entered college, I knew very little history and had not thought deeply about foreign affairs, but like everyone else, I participated in many discussions of the Vietnam War. Much of the antiwar argumentation sounded persuasive to me. I didn’t see how that remote war could meaningfully affect us at home. The famous domino theory was so widely ridiculed that I wouldn’t credit it. President Nixon, who became the focus of the antiwar effort, struck me as an unappealing character who lacked credibility even before the Watergate scandal broke.

Two things in particular, however, caused me to move away from the antiwar cause. First, I was repelled by the prevalence of extremist anti-American rhetoric: the condemnations of U.S. officials as fascists and the spelling of Amerika with a K to make the whole country appear fascist, the attacks on capitalism and on the “bourgeoisie,” and the sympathy expressed toward the Soviet Union, which I knew to be an inhumane, totalitarian state.

Second, and of critical importance, I came to realize that pacifist notions underlay much of the argumentation of the antiwar Left. The pacifism was asserted through slogans such as “Nothing ever gets resolved by force” and “War is not the answer.”

As limited as was my knowledge of history, I was certain that there were forces for evil in the world that could not be contained, much less eliminated, through diplomacy. The Nazi regime and the Soviet regime each had its own totalitarian, revolutionary ideology and a record of murdering millions. I knew that diplomacy, though tried far beyond the point of reasonableness, could not have solved the Hitler problem. I knew that the Nazi threat was in fact resolved by force. I knew that the Soviet Union was a serious enemy, too—able and willing to use military force to spread its influence. I knew, therefore, that whether or not war was the answer depended on what the question was. When someone asserted that war was never the answer, it struck me as the proverbial thirteenth chime of a clock, which calls into doubt the integrity of all the previous chimes.

Many types of theories can be very seductive when one knows very few facts; an impressive teacher can easily make a complex theory sound compelling to a student who has no substantial knowledge in the field. I had started college as a physics major and was trained in the scientific method. I had absorbed the lesson that theories are nothing more than hypotheses until they are rigorously tested against the facts. There were few historical points I felt confident I knew to be facts, but the idea that Hitler had to be resisted with force was one of them.

The pacifism of so much antiwar argumentation was the flaw that caused me to look with skepticism at the key arguments of the antiwar movement. Those arguments began to unravel in my mind, and I became open to rethink everything I thought I knew about foreign policy and government. I expanded my reading beyond the New York Times and other liberal publications. Of greatest significance, I became a regular reader of Commentary magazine, which brought me intellectually into neoconservative circles. My physical entrance, as it were, into those circles in Washington, D.C., is another story.

When I was a student at Harvard College, I learned that Leslie Gelb, the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, was going to be giving a guest lecture on U.S.–Soviet relations at Wellesley, the nearby women’s college. One never passed up an opportunity to visit with the women of Wellesley, of course, so I accepted an invitation to attend and to join a dinner with Mr. Gelb afterward. At the dinner I suggested that the Nixon administration’s posture toward the Soviet Union was too accommodating on arms control, human rights, and other issues. After a while, Mr. Gelb offered that, given my views, perhaps I should be working for Senator Henry Jackson. He told me that if I sent him my résumé, he would send it along to Jackson’s aide Richard Perle. I did so, and he did so, and Perle hired me for a summer internship in Senator Jackson’s subcommittee office immediately after I graduated from college.

Jackson was an impeccably credentialed liberal Democrat with a purity rating in the 90 percent range from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. He was also a defense hawk and the Senate’s leading voice of opposition to the Soviet Union. Jackson was deeply skeptical of the Nixon-Kissinger détente policy. He brilliantly dissected the Nixon administration’s arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and laid open their flaws. He publicized the Soviet regime’s failures and brutalities, especially its mistreatment of pro-democracy dissidents and its refusal to allow its oppressed Jewish citizens to emigrate to Israel. He successfully pushed for enactment of a law called the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which made most-favored-nation trade status for the Soviet Union conditional on Moscow’s granting emigration rights to Soviet Jews. Jackson showed how highlighting human rights can be used to galvanize popular American support for an assertive foreign policy and to undermine the standing of America’s anti-democratic enemies.

As the Vietnam War wound down and then ended in 1975 with the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam, the main national security debates in the United States were about our policy toward the Soviet Union. Having broken with the Democrats over their lurch leftward under the leadership of George McGovern and others, the neoconservatives were by no means comfortable with the Republican administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union.

RISE OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES

You’ll recall that I identified Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, as one of the leading neoconservatives. In light of the strong popular opposition to the Vietnam War and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, Podhoretz wrote, the United States “had to find a way to restrain Soviet expansionism that did not depend entirely or even largely on the use or the threatened use of American military power.” Accordingly, Nixon and Kissinger developed détente, the essence of which was “to offer incentives (mainly consisting of economic benefits) for Soviet moderation and restraint, and to threaten penalties (mainly consisting of the withdrawal of those benefits) for aggressive or adventurist activity.”⁴

Podhoretz was the key neoconservative intellectual critic of the Nixon administration’s strategy toward the Soviet Union. “[O]ne might say of this strategy,” Podhoretz wrote, “what Edmund Burke said of Lord North’s treatment of the American colonies: ‘This fine-spun scheme had the usual fate of all exquisite policy.’ Brilliant though it was in achieving perfect internal coherence, it failed because it misjudged the nature of the Soviet threat on the one side and the nature of American public opinion on the other.”⁵

Podhoretz noted that neither Nixon nor Kissinger “had any sympathy for the Soviets.” Nor did they “ever doubt that the Soviet Union had expansionist aims or that it was capable of great ruthlessness in the pursuit of those aims.” While both men

always make their obeisances to the role of ideology in determining Soviet behavior on the international scene, for the most part they saw the Soviet Union as a nation-state like any other, motivated by the same range of interests that define and shape the foreign policies of all nation-states. From this perspective—the perspective of Realpolitik—Communist Russia was not all that different from Czarist Russia, the facts of geography, history, and ancestral culture being far more decisive than the ideas of Marx and Lenin.⁶

Here is the essence of the neoconservative critique of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy. The neoconservatives believed that the so-called Realist School of international relations, which argued that nations act on the basis of objective material interests in promoting their military and economic power and that their respective ideologies and forms of government have little to do with determining their actions, was altogether inadequate to explain the behavior of ideological regimes like that of the Nazis or the Soviets. Podhoretz wrote that if the Soviet leaders behaved in accordance with Realpolitik—not in accordance with communist ideology—then

it would certainly be possible to make a deal of the kind contemplated by the policy of détente. If, in other words, the aims of the Soviet Union were limited, they could be respected and even to a certain extent satisfied through negotiation and compromise, with the resultant settlement policed by means other than, and short of, actual military force.⁷

“But,” Podhoretz asked:

what if the Soviet Union is not a “normal” nation-state? What if in this case ideology overrides interest in the traditional sense? What if Soviet aims are unlimited? In short (and to bring up the by-now familiar contending comparisons), what if the Soviet Union bears a closer resemblance to the Germany of Hitler than to the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm?

Podhoretz answered that Wilhelmine Germany was “an expansionist power seeking a place in the imperial sun and nothing more than that.” Hitler, however, was more than an assertive Realpolitiker. The Nazi führer, Podhoretz explained,

was a revolutionary seeking to overturn the going international system and to replace it with a new order dominated by Germany (which also meant the political culture of Nazism). For tactical reasons and in order to mislead, Hitler sometimes pretended that all he wanted was the satisfaction of specific grievances, and those who were taken in by this pretense not unreasonably thought they could “do business” with him. But there was no way of doing business—that is, negotiating a peaceful settlement—with Hitler. As a revolutionary with unlimited aims, he offered only two choices: resistance or submission.

Podhoretz argued that the Soviet Union posed the same kind of threat to the West.

Neoconservatives recognized the importance of ideas—not just of military and economic interests—in world affairs. This neoconservative perspective dates back to the American Founding Fathers, who believed not only that they owed it to their own community to create self-government to protect the liberties of their people, but that they were doing something that would demonstrate to the world the possibility of popular self-government.

One of the main contributions of modern neoconservatives to the field of national security was an emphasis on the role of ideas in international affairs. This emphasis helped explain the motivations of ideological regimes in the world and also gave attention to the moral dimension of national security policy. Whereas the so-called realists spoke of the Cold War as essentially a clash of great powers—often referring to the Soviet Union simply as Russia, as a way of deemphasizing the ideological nature of its regime—the neoconservatives saw the Cold War as a battle between liberal democracy and totalitarian communism.

Podhoretz argued that the Soviet regime “has committed itself by word and deed to the creation of a ‘socialist’ world.” He went on: “There is no reason to think that it can be talked out of this commitment or even (as, at bottom, détente assumes) bribed out of it.” Even if the Soviet leaders had become cynical and no longer believed Communist Party ideology, Podhoretz wrote,

they are (to borrow from their own vocabulary) objectively the prisoners of Marxian and Leninist doctrines. Without these doctrines, which mandate steady international advances in the cause of “socialism,” they have no way to legitimize their monopoly of power within the Soviet Union itself. Hence even if they wanted to limit their aims and become a “status-quo power,” they would be unable to do so without committing political suicide.

Podhoretz concluded that

the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West is not subject to resolution by the traditional tools of diplomacy. Or, to put the point another way, given the nature of the Soviet threat, détente is not possible. Certain agreements may be possible from time to time, but they will invariably cover ground (cultural exchanges, arrangements for travel and communications, and the like) that is peripheral or even trivial from the point of view of the central issue. Where really important ground is touched upon, the agreement will invariably result in a Soviet advantage.

This was the case, Podhoretz noted,

not because the Soviets are necessarily better at negotiating than we are or because they will necessarily cheat. They may or may not be better and they may or may not cheat. It is, rather, because in any negotiation between a party with limited aims and a party with unlimited aims, the party with limited aims is bound to lose in the very nature of things. Even a deal that on the surface promises mutual benefits will work out to the advantage of the side pursuing a strategy of victory over the side pursuing a strategy of accommodation and peace.⁸

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this neoconservative critique of the Nixon administration’s Cold War strategy. It brought together practical political leaders like Senator Jackson with intellectuals like Podhoretz, Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick of Georgetown University, and Professor Eugene V. Rostow of Yale Law School.

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE BEDROCK: REAGAN VS. CARTER

Neoconservatives in the 1970s were guided by two basic points about national security. First, ideas have consequences. Ideas matter. So-called realists are not being realistic when they overemphasize the importance of guns and money and deemphasize the importance of ideas in world affairs, ignoring or downplaying America’s practical as well as moral interest in supporting individual rights and democracy abroad.

The second point is captured by the slogan: “Peace through strength.” This provides not only an answer to pacifists who deny the relationship between peace and military power, but also an observation about the limits of diplomacy. In stressing “peace through strength,” neoconservatives were not rejecting the value of diplomacy, but they were warning that diplomacy unsupported by military power cannot be expected to produce or sustain peace.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, Kissinger remained secretary of state throughout Gerald Ford’s presidency. When Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination for president in 1976, he drew heavily on the critique of the Nixon-Kissinger détente policies. Reagan often sounded both of these major neoconservative themes: “Ideas matter” and “Peace through strength.”

During the Carter administration, neoconservatives criticized President Carter for failures relating to both of these themes. Carter did not appear to understand the Soviet Union and the ideological nature of the Cold War. He warned against Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism.” He famously kissed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at one of their summit meetings. Admitting to being shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day in 1979, he said: “This action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”⁹ That did not inspire confidence.

President Carter also lacked appreciation for the concept of peace through strength. His diplomacy was naive, as was especially evident in his efforts to involve the Soviet Union in Arab-Israeli peace talks. Although Carter became famous for hosting the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations that produced the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, attentive students of the subject remember that Carter administration officials initially opposed Egyptian President Sadat’s peace initiative on the grounds that a separate bilateral deal would impede negotiation of a comprehensive Arab-Israel peace. The crowning example of Carter’s weakness was the Iranian hostage crisis, when Iranian followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini broke into the U.S. embassy in Teheran and held a large group of diplomats and embassy officers hostage for more than fourteen months.

Neoconservatives were important voices of opposition to the Carter administration’s national security policies. Former military and civilian officials, many who served formally or informally as advisers to Democratic senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, formed organizations such as the Committee on the Present Danger and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that used neoconservative argumentation against what they saw as the naïveté, weakness, and anti-Israel inclinations of the Carter administration.

In the 1980 presidential election, because of the still-unresolved Iran hostage crisis, foreign policy was a prominent concern. Ronald Reagan deployed against Jimmy Carter a critique that drew heavily on the themes that neoconservatives had developed to oppose the policies of Carter and Nixon.

Reagan appointed many neoconservatives to prominent positions in his administration: Jeane Kirkpatrick became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; William Bennett became drug czar and then secretary of education; Eugene Rostow became director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz became assistant secretaries of state; Richard Perle became an assistant secretary of defense; and I, still a junior member of the neoconservative community, became a member of the National Security Council staff and eventually a deputy assistant secretary of defense. There were quite a few others as well.

After Ronald Reagan became president, the term neocon came into widespread use. It helpfully shed light on the sociology of the Reagan administration. Reagan supporters and advisers could be divided into neoconservatives, a fairly small group of intellectuals whose important writings resulted in disproportionate intellectual influence, and the lifelong conservatives, sometimes laughingly called “paleoconservatives.”

The neocons and the ordinary conservatives had different backgrounds but generally got along well in the Reagan administration. The neocons started life as liberals or far leftists, not members of Young Americans for Freedom, and they were disproportionately Jewish. The neocons read and sometimes wrote for Commentary, as opposed to National Review. Politically, neoconservatives believed they could help Reagan attract support from traditionally Democratic constituencies because the neocons had no connection with the history of support for isolationism or opposition to civil rights. Each of these Reagan-supporting groups identified with the president; the neocons thought of him as a fellow neocon, given that Reagan began his political life as a liberal Democrat and a labor union leader.

President Reagan’s strategy against the Soviet Union was the approach proposed by Podhoretz, Richard Perle, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Senator Jackson, and others throughout the 1970s. It repudiated the Nixon administration’s goals of stabilizing U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and relaxing tensions. Reagan’s goal was victory. Once when asked to describe his strategy, he famously responded that it’s simple: we win, they lose. It sounded flip but it was serious. It was based on the conviction that Soviet communism and the Marxist ideology on which it was based were rife with “internal contradictions” and doomed to collapse.

Like the neoconservatives, Reagan believed that Marxism-Leninism was premised on a flawed view of human nature. It aimed to create “the new Soviet man,” an unnatural being who could be brought into existence only through gross coercion. Reagan rejected the idea that the communists could, even by coercion, change the nature of the human being, who is a self-serving creature though capable of virtuous action. Reagan further believed that coercion was ultimately unsustainable and the natural desire of people for freedom would defeat the communists’ efforts to reshape the public through social engineering. He was confident in his bold comment that “the march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history” (borrowing another good communist phrase).¹⁰

This integration of philosophical insight into strategic thinking is a hallmark of neoconservatism, distinguishing it from the so-called Realist School.

Reflect for a moment on the magnitude of the accomplishment of Reagan’s Soviet strategy. It helped destroy the Soviet Union utterly, ending the nuclear balance of terror. It released the nations of Central and Eastern Europe from the Soviets’ imperial grip. It created opportunities for freedom and independence for the peoples of the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s disintegration was arguably the greatest strategic victory in history. Under President Reagan’s leadership, the West not only defeated its enemy, which possessed an enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons, but destroyed the Soviet Union as a state, and did so without war.

President Reagan implemented this strategy through multiple means: imposing trade restrictions, opposing the Soviet gas pipeline to Western Europe, tightening export controls, arming the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, getting NATO to support deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, developing missile defense, exposing Soviet human rights violations, embarrassing the Soviets politically before the world, and encouraging Soviet dissidents who were demanding democracy and respect for individual liberties.¹¹

These means reinforced one another. Economic and military pressure helped persuade Gorbachev and his politburo colleagues that the Soviet Union needed radical reform or it would fall hopelessly behind the Western powers technologically. Gorbachev embraced the idea that only greater liberality regarding thought and speech could remedy this problem. Thus, the themes of human rights and democracy played a role in inducing Gorbachev to launch experiments in glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) that brought about the crumbling of the authority of the Soviet leadership and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev evidently did not understand his own political system well enough to realize that such liberalization would so undermine the system’s foundation of lies that the whole edifice would fall. Reagan recognized that vulnerability. His encouragement of dissent, democracy, and freedom was not only a tribute to American principles; it was strategic. It was neoconservatism in action.

In the Reagan years, conservative and neoconservative generally melded to the point that neoconservatism could reasonably be called simply “Reaganite thinking.” By the mid-1990s, Kristol could write: “It is clear that what can fairly be described as the neoconservative impulse (or, at most, the neoconservative persuasion) was a generational phenomenon and has now been pretty much absorbed into a larger, more comprehensive conservatism.”¹²

NEOCONS DURING THE BUSH YEARS

The term neocon came back into popular use after George W. Bush’s election. It became a useful handle for journalists and others because they wanted to understand the philosophical makeup of the new administration and were wondering who would predominate. Would it be the Reaganites? Or would it be the traditional conservatives of the Realist School, people aligned with George H. W. Bush, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft?

It turns out that George W. Bush was, in many ways, a Reaganite. He believed in an active U.S. national security policy, especially after 9/11. He believed in peace through strength and saw military power as necessary, a crucial component of effective diplomacy. In confronting America’s enemies he was willing to pursue victory and not just stability.

That said, the term neocon quickly lost its integrity during the George W. Bush years. First of all, it began to acquire a bigoted connotation. George W. Bush was strongly pro-Israel and, because the neoconservatives were disproportionately (though by no means exclusively) Jewish, critics of the president and his friendly-to-Israel advisers used neocon as a term of contempt. The implication was that the person in question was a Jew with loyalty to Israel rather than to the United States. Satirizing the bigots, the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article in President Bush’s first term that defined neocon as follows: “ ‘Con’ is short for conservative and ‘neo’ is short for Jewish.”¹³

The term became an epithet, a verbal piece of nastiness used to smear officials considered too hard-line or too militaristic, not unlike the word fascist, commonly used by leftists to attack someone simply by voicing opposition and vicious contempt. So it is now with the word neocon, when used by opponents of the George W. Bush administration.

It became common to attribute to neocons—especially to neocon officials—positions we did not hold, intentions we never had, and actions we never took. Neocon officials have been falsely accused of advocating war without considering alternatives. It is widely but falsely believed that neocon officials proposed to spread democracy by the sword and favored war against Saddam Hussein to democratize the Arab world or to advance Israel’s interests rather than America’s. It has also been widely but falsely reported that the neocons in the Bush administration argued that the Iraq War would be easy and that there was no need to plan for its aftermath. All of these notions are false and my book War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism presents the official documents that demonstrate their inaccuracy.

Of the many books that inaccurately depict the subject, one is especially noteworthy: America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama is a prominent, impressive scholar, himself a neoconservative before he recanted. In his book, he inaccurately attributes the aforementioned ideas and actions to neocon officials (other than the accusation that the neocons supported war in Iraq for Israel’s sake, which he refutes). His thesis is that sound neoconservative thinking and experience over the years were ignored or misapplied by the neocon officials in the Bush administration. Remarkably, he fails to quote so much as a sentence, even a word, from any of the Bush administration’s neocon officials. The only neocons he cites to support his thesis are journalists and non-government commentators. This is unworthy of the scholarship of Fukuyama’s other work. He was unable to find comments from neocon officials to support his allegations because, when we spoke or wrote about the points at issue, we didn’t make the points he attributes to us. In fact, we didn’t agree with them.

The term neocon was further abused by its application to people like Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush, though there is nothing “neo” about them. If they are neocons, then who are the traditional conservatives?

The term neoconservative—and with it neocon—is no longer useful. It has been distorted, besmirched by calumny and bigotry, and misapplied to the point that it has lost the philosophical and sociological meaning it once had. This is a cautionary tale about political labels, which often change their connotations and even their meanings over time. Labels can be useful—it is hard to have philosophical and political discussions without using them—but they must be used with care and caution, with knowledge of their origins and evolution, and with skepticism.

All of which reminds me of a riddle Abraham Lincoln liked to pose: If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer is four, because calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

What, then, to do with neocon? The term, unfortunately, is ruined, but the neoconservative philosophical persuasion endures. In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, neoconservatives played a distinctive role in challenging many long-unchallenged assumptions of both liberals and conservatives. Neoconservatives highlighted the practical significance of the moral dimension of social welfare programs, U.S.–Soviet relations, and other topics. They brought a grateful, patriotic sensibility into public policy debates. Their contributions were valuable; their “current of thought” merged so thoroughly into the conservative mainstream that it is no longer distinctive. Neoconservatives always contemplated the United States with gratitude; attentive students of the conservative intellectual tradition in America will understand that America should reciprocate that appreciation.