With all the attention paid to neo-conservatives in the international media nowadays, one would think that there would be a standard definition of the term. Yet, despite their now being credited with a virtual takeover of US foreign policy under President George W Bush, a common understanding of the term remains elusive.
It may be useful to offer some description of their basic tenets and origin, if for no other reason than to distinguish them from other parts of the ideological coalition behind the administration’s neo-imperialist trajectory; namely, the traditional Republican machtpolitikers (might makes right), such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the Christian Rightists, such as Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Gary Bauer and Pat Robertson.
As neo-con godfather, Irving Kristol once remarked, a neo-conservative is a “liberal who was mugged by reality”. True to that description, neo-conservatives generally originated on the left side of the political spectrum and some times from the far left. Many neo-cons, such as Kristol himself, have Trotskyite roots that are still reflected in their polemical and organizational skills and ideological zeal.
Although a number of prominent Catholics are neo-conservatives, the movement remains predominantly Jewish, and the monthly journal that really defined neo-conservatism over the past 35 years, Commentary, is published by the American Jewish Committee. At the same time, however, neo-conservative attitudes have reflected a minority position within the US Jewish community as most Jews remain distinctly liberal in their political and foreign policy views.
Neo-conservative foreign policy positions, which have their origin in opposition to the “new left” of the 1960s, fears over a return to US isolationism during the Vietnam War and the progressive international isolation of Israel in the wake of wars with its Arab neighbors in 1967 and 1973, have been tactically very flexible over the past 35 years, but their key principles have remained the same.
They begin with the basic foreign policy realism found in the pessimistic views of human nature and international diplomacy of the English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, that neo-cons share with most US practitioners: that “the condition of man [in a state of nature] … is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.” Or, as Machiavelli, another favorite thinker of the neo-cons, wrote, “Men are more ready for evil than for good.”
But neo-cons take “man’s” capacity for evil particularly seriously, and for understandable reasons. For neo-conservatives, the Nazi Holocaust that killed some 6 million Jews during World War II is the seminal experience of the 20th century. Not only was it a genocide unparalleled in its thoroughness, the Holocaust also wiped out family members of hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens in the United States, including, for example, close relatives of the parents of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
For neo-conservatives, as for most Jews, the Holocaust represents absolute evil, and the factors which contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the subsequent extermination of Jews must be fought at all costs.
“The defining moment in our history was certainly the Holocaust,” Richard Perle, a key neo-con and leading advocate of war with Iraq, recently told BBC’s Panorama. “It was the destruction, the genocide of a whole people, and it was the failure to respond in a timely fashion to a threat that was clearly gathering. We don’t want that to happen again, and when we have the ability to stop totalitarian regimes we should do so, because when we fail to do so, the results are catastrophic,” he said.
For neo-conservatives, the 1938 Munich agreement, under which Hitler was permitted by Britain and France to take over Czechoslovakia, is the epitome of appeasement that led directly to the Holocaust. As a result, Munich and appeasement are constantly invoked in their rhetoric as a way to summon up the will to resist and defeat the enemy of the day. Hence, almost every conflict in which the United States has been engaged since the late 1960s
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