Editor: Bret Stephens World is just like David Brooks World? Though David somtimes forgets he’s JEW, but Stephens was trained by being the editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, the political arm of The Zionist Faschist State! In the following paragraphs Stephens applies weak white-wash to Neo-Conservatism! Prerfectly attuned to the New York Times readers prejudices!
Although the term “neoconservative” has fallen into disuse — except as an occasional slur used by the MAGA right, the progressive left and social-media antisemites who really mean to say “Jew” — I’ve never been shy about describing myself as one. In Donald Trump’s whipsawing performances with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies in Washington on Monday, I’m reminded of why.
Neoconservatism emerged in the early 1970s as a loosely coherent movement of disenchanted liberals who were critical of the welfare state and turned off by the anti-Americanism of parts of the antiwar left. But the movement also took a dim view of the Nixon administration, particularly in its pursuit of arms control with the Soviet Union, its relative indifference to human rights issues behind the Iron Curtain, and its realpolitik approach to foreign policy in general.
I learned this the hard way 14 years ago, when Henry Kissinger nearly kicked me out of his Park Avenue office for having the ill grace to ask him about China’s brutal treatment of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident. The former secretary of state, then 88, was still too concerned with currying influence in Beijing to say anything nice about his fellow Nobel Peace laureate.
Little wonder, then, that many of Trump’s most ardent conservative opponents in recent years are, or were, old-school neocons. Like President Richard Nixon’s, Trump’s politics are a mix of statist economic impulses, populist grievances, the conceit of being above the law and a transactional approach to foreign policy that discounts the moral force of American ideals. What Trump lacks in his predecessor’s intellectual sophistication, he makes up for with his gifts for crude showmanship.
Editor: Mr. Stephens can’t quite match Barry Gewen’s essay of 2010 in The New York Times,
Leave No War Behind
By Barry Gewen
June 11, 2010
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This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of “Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,” by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. “Neoconservatism” demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.
Vaïsse defines neoconservatism by disassembling it. He sees three “ages” to the movement. The first began in the mid-1960s with intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer gathering around Kristol and Bell’s new magazine, The Public Interest, and also around Commentary, under its editor Norman Podhoretz. At the time, all of these writers were sympathetic in principle to an activist government, especially when it came to the economy, but questioned the expectations of Great Society planners of antipoverty and related social programs — or, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Challenging what they saw as liberal overreaching and wishful thinking with hard, often crushing, empirical facts, these early neoconservatives were, in a sense, the skeptical conscience of liberalism.
But skepticism about the effectiveness of particular programs soon mutated into broader disenchantment with almost every kind of government intervention and into the conviction that the free market alone offered acceptable solutions to social problems. As neoconservative pragmatism calcified into laissez-faire dogma, some of its godfathers defected. Daniel Bell, a self-described “right-wing social democrat,” for one; Moynihan, who, Vaïsse writes, “contended that he was the modern incarnation of a Wilsonian Progressive,” for another. By the time President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” neoconservatism was a spent force in domestic policy, hardly distinguishable from the libertarianism of the American Enterprise Institute.
In the second and third ages, as Vaïsse describes them, neoconservatives turned their attention to foreign policy. This wasn’t surprising. The original neoconservatives were devout anti-Communists for whom opposition to Stalinism and the Soviet Union was as much a left-wing as a right-wing position. This is why the neoconservatives of the second age reacted against what Vaïsse calls “the conquest of the Democratic Party by the forces of the New Left,” begun in 1968 and completed in 1972, when George McGovern won the presidential nomination. The McGovernites, strenuously opposed to the Vietnam War and distrustful of American power, struck more hawkish Democrats as naïve about Communism, even isolationist. The neocons rallied behind Henry Jackson, known as Scoop, a Democratic senator from Washington who, though a supporter of the Great Society’s domestic programs, was the most unrepentant of cold warriors. He nurtured the careers of many young men later known as the toughest of the tough-minded — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Douglas Feith.
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Editor: Stephens presents his arguments:
What would a traditional neocon say about Trump’s latest diplomatic efforts between Russia and Ukraine? A few points.
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First, we’d note that dictators who are contemptuous of the rights of their own people tend to be equally contemptuous of the rights of other countries.
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Second, dictators who do not abide by the rule of law at home will not honor international agreements, either.
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Third, Putin does not see Trump’s chummy manner, his effort to forge personal ties, as an invitation to be reasonable.
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Fourth, neocons subscribe to a “broken windows” theory of international order: If disorder goes unchecked, or if aggression is rewarded, in one part of the world, it will encourage disorder and aggression in other parts.
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Fifth, neocons believe that American ideals do not undermine American power; rather, they march hand in hand. When the United States lent destroyers to the United Kingdom in 1940, we created the conditions that allowed us to prevail in World War II.
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Sixth, international guarantees are mostly worthless unless backed by credible and overwhelming power.
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Seventh, the only way to guarantee an end to this conflict is steadfast opposition to Putin through sanctions, ostracism and military and economic support for Ukraine and every other country Russia threatens.
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Neocons may have long ago fallen out of fashion. To watch Trump in recent days is to be reminded that some old fashions deserve to be made new again.
Editor: Reader see ‘Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss The Hidden Dialogue’ by Heinrich Meier Translated by J. Harvey Lomax, to guage the political mendacity of Mr. Stephens New York Times chatter!
The number of people who have signed up for Britain’s new left-wing party has surpassed 650,000: a figure that dwarfs the membership of every other outfit in Westminster. Preparations are underway for its founding conference, likely to be held in November, where registrants will decide on its initial platform and develop some of its democratic structures. As part of the ongoing debate on such questions, Sidecar recently published an interview with James Schneider, the former communications director for Corbyn’s Labour, in which he set out his case for an organisation that would avoid the electoralist pitfalls of the 2010s by basing itself mostly outside Westminster and striving to construct different forms of popular power.
For our next instalment in the series, we turn to Andrew Murray. Born in 1958, Murray joined the Morning Star as a lobby journalist at the age of nineteen. He moved sidelong into the labour movement in the 1980s, playing a key role in the foundation of Unite, one of the country’s largest unions, and later serving as its Chief of Staff. During the 2000s he was appointed to the executive committee of the Communist Party of Britain and co-founded the Stop the War Coalition, set up to oppose the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. An early supporter of Corbyn’s leadership, Murray was seconded from Unite to assist with its 2017 general election campaign, before joining the team as a Special Political Adviser. He is also the author of numerous books on UK politics: a devastating indictment of railway privatisation, Off the Rails (2002); an account of the structural processes that produced the Corbyn project, The Fall and Rise of the British Left(2019); and an analysis of the political lessons to be drawn from that experience, Is Socialism Possible in Britain?(2022).
Murray spoke to Oliver Eagleton about the politics of the nascent party, its priorities at this early stage, the discussions about its leadership, and the attitude it should cultivate towards social movements and working-class institutions.
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OE: How can the party provide that kind of political expression?
AM: Well, that is the main question. Debates about the organisation’s structure (federal, coalitional, central) or even its leadership (sole, joint, collective) are secondary to its political positioning. The new party needs to be absolutely, clearly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It needs to see itself as creating the space for a transition to socialism. Parts of its political profile can perhaps be assumed: certainly its position on Gaza and its opposition to austerity. But it needs to go further, in my view, by generalising outward from these two urgent issues and offering a systemic alternative.
This is, broadly speaking, what the party’s supporters want. It is also what millions of people across the country are craving, including many of those who are gravitating towards Reform. In the present political landscape you have a crumbling centrism identified with Starmer and with Rishi Sunak before him, which takes a managerial approach to the colossal problems that have accumulated since 2008, and then you have a right-wing pseudo-opposition which the FT’s Martin Wolf rightly describes as ‘plutocratic populism’, which engages in all sorts of demagoguery, including posing as pro-worker, when in fact it is the project of millionaire Thatcherites. With this as the current polarisation, the left has a unique opportunity to redraw the lines of division: placing the centre and the hard right on one side, and itself on the other. The issues that it can use to do so are clear: opposition to austerity, opposition to medieval levels of social inequality, and opposition to war. Our slogan in the Stop the War Coalition is ‘Welfare not Warfare’. The government’s might as well be ‘Make the Poor Pay For War’. It is right now embarking on a major military build-up while slashing social spending – and it is doing so in lockstep with the pluto-populists, who don’t even pretend to have the same non-interventionist inclinations as Trump’s national-populists in the US.
So, undoubtedly, there is a political space to be occupied. Corbyn’s leadership filled it from 2015 to 2019, but it was tethered to the Labour Party, which already had an entrenched position in the British status quo that many of its parliamentarians and staffers were determined to defend. The new party is in a very different situation. It will be unencumbered by these problems; it will be a novel and galvanising force. But at the same time it will not have the strength that comes from being a part of the political fabric for 120 years, nor the historic roots and power bases which, although they have massively atrophied for the Labour Party, have not disappeared entirely.
America’s democracy is under threat. President Trump smashes alliances, upends norms and tramples the Constitution. So it’s normal to ask: What can one citizen do to help put America on a healthier course?
I have some hard experience with this question. Back in the early part of the first Trump term, I asked myself that question and decided to try to do more. I accepted a 50 percent pay cut from The Times and, among other things, helped start a nonprofit called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Those of us who launched it figured that social distrust is the underlying problem ripping society apart, but that trust is being rebuilt on the local level by people serving their own communities, people we call Weavers. We wanted to support them in every way.
The work was humbling. I learned that my life as a writer did not prepare me to run an organization — I’m not good at management. I made some boneheaded decisions that led to some public humiliation. Eventually The Times sensibly decided that I couldn’t work as a journalist as well as at a nonprofit that was funded by foundations and rich donors.
So I stepped back from the day-to-day at Weave and now serve in a nonpaying role as chair. But these painful experiences did have some upsides. First, under the leadership of Fred Riley and the current team, Weave is thriving. We have plans to be operating in 75 communities within three years. Second, Weave reminded me why I went into journalism. My job there was to travel around the country, interview Weavers in Nebraska, Louisiana, North Carolina and beyond and tell their stories.
I was immersed in the life of every nook and cranny of this country, and I’ve tried to keep that going to this day. I still spend more than half the year in hotel rooms somewhere.
This experience has produced in me one central conviction about what ails America: segregation. Not just racial segregation — which at least in schools is actually getting worse — but also class segregation. I’m constantly traveling between places where college grads dominate and places where high school grads dominate, and it’s a bit like traveling between different planets.
Editor: I’ve highlighted just one sentence in the above paragraph…
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Editor : In the final paragraphs Mr. Brooks become prescriptive, not to speak of maudlin!
In my view, those of us who oppose Trump have two jobs: to resist and reform — to resist Trump and to reform the systems that cause Trumpism. The reform part is by far the most important mission, and the reforms should have one aim: to disrupt the caste system.
That will require policy reform — directing investments, as Biden began to do, into those job categories that don’t require college degrees. It will require institutional reform. Many of us work in sectors where there is very little room for Trump supporters — in media, nonprofits, the academy, the arts world. That segregation has to end.
Mostly it will require ground-up social reform. The rest of us can do something pretty simple: join more cross-class organizations and engage in more cross-class pastimes. Even something small makes a difference. This summer I’ve been wearing a New York Mets hat. As is their wont, the Mets have been trampling all over my heart for the past few months. But over that time, in places all around America, I’ve had scores of people from all walks of life come up to me to talk about the Mets, which often leads to conversations about other things. My Mets hat has reminded me of a nice reality: We still could be one nation, despite all the ways we’ve segregated it up.
Throughout July secret contacts between Ukraine and Russia had brought the two countries closer to an understanding of how the war could be frozen. But subsequent talks between Mr Putin and Steve Witkoff, a confidant of Mr Trump from his real-estate days, created a series of impossible new territorial demands on Ukraine. At the summit on Friday Mr Putin once again demanded that Ukraine retreat from the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces that it still holds, which together represent the most fortified sections of the front line. This would put Mr Putin in a far stronger position to attack again in the future, should he choose to do so. In return, the Russian president offered to give back tiny chunks of occupied territory in Sumy and Kharkiv provinces, and to freeze the current lines in Zaporizhia and Kherson.
Years of war have strained the Ukrainian people, and Russia continues to press its advantage in metal and men on the front lines. Unsurprisingly, opinion polls show a clear switch to pragmatism on concessions for peace. A majority of those asked are now in favour of acknowledging de facto occupation of the areas Russia already holds in exchange for genuine security guarantees from the West. But there are nonetheless consistent and overwhelming majorities against making any further territorial concessions to Russia. According to Anton Hrushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, less than one in five would be prepared to accept the kind of land swap Mr Trump is said to be favouring.
A Ukrainian intelligence officer says the Americans are being “unbelievably aggressive” in pushing Ukraine to forfeit more land. The Russian interest is clear enough, he says. “They want to maximise the package they will get in return—from sanctions relief, to the return of seized assets, to the re-opening of energy markets.” What, he says, is far less clear is why the Trump administration was pushing so forcefully to promote Russia’s interests.
Despite the obvious headwinds, Mr Trump appears committed to his quick-fix peace. The Economist understands a three-way meeting between Mr Trump, Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky could come as early as the end of next week. Before that, on Monday, the Ukrainian leader is scheduled to arrive in Washington for his first visit since his humiliation in February. European leaders will join him in a show of support. But some of the ingredients appear ominously similar to his previous visit. Channelling the logic of Mr Putin, Mr Trump is already preparing to blame Ukraine if his plans blow up, Ukrainians fear. “Make a deal,” he advised Mr Zelensky, via Fox News. “Russia is a very big power. [You] are not.” ■
This is where Europe has a key role. After the Alaska summit Mr Trump spoke with European leaders and Mr Zelensky for one hour in a call, during which they emphasised that Ukraine must decide on territory and must get weapons supplies and security guarantees. In a statement the European leaders declared that “We will continue to strengthen sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia’s war economy until there is a just and lasting peace. Ukraine can count on our unwavering solidarity as we work towards a peace that safeguards Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests.” There is evidence that Mr Trump listens to Sir Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron and Alexander Stubb, so their interventions over the next few days will carry some weight in steering him away from trying to impose a bad deal on Ukraine. There is little support in Congress or among the American public for a full rehabilitation of Russia.
Europe would carry a lot more weight if it were doing and spending more. Mr Trump and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, both think, with some justification, that supporting Ukraine should be primarily a European responsibility. For a long time that was not the case and only in recent months has Europe’s cumulative military aid through procurement deals finally exceeded that of America, according to the Kiel Institute, a think-tank. Europe can do more by providing funds for buying weapons from America, building up its own munitions and helping Ukraine to complete the build-out of its own military-industrial complex. This is essential in any scenario. It would also signal that if Mr Zelensky and Europe ultimately reject a deal that Mr Trump and Mr Putin agree on, and America then abandons its support entirely, Ukraine is still capable of fighting on.
After Anchorage Mr Trump suggested that he wanted not a transitory ceasefire, but a final peace that would “hold up”. In fact, deal or no deal in the coming days, the conflict will continue. For Mr Putin, the war has become an instrument of political control at home, providing a pretext for the repression that keeps him in power, despite the heavy costs in lives and to Russia’s economy and increasingly rickety financial system. As well as expanding Russian territory, he hopes to divide the Western alliance and weaken Europe. The danger is that Mr Trump is blind to, or even untroubled by, the Kremlin’s agenda. The talks on Monday could produce a breakthrough. But Europe and Ukraine must prepare for the worst and make clear that they are ready for that challenge. ■
The honours for Mr Putin were in sharp contrast to the public humiliation that Mr Trump and his advisers inflicted on Mr Zelensky during his visit to the White House earlier this year. Since then relations with Ukraine have improved, but Mr Trump has often been quick to blame it for being invaded; and he has proved strangely indulgent with Mr Putin. Mr Trump told Fox you have to “weave and bob” to reach deals, but his constant shuffling in the run-up to the summit suggests indecision and frustration with a Russian leader who will not respond to his entreaties.
The Alaskan venue was rife with symbolism: the proximity of Russia and America across the Bering Strait, the sale of Alaska by Tsarist Russia to the United States in 1867; and the American lend-lease agreements that armed the Soviet Union to help it resist Nazi Germany (an important supply route ran through Alaska). Mr Putin recalled all this and recounted how, on the red carpet, he had greeted Mr Trump with “Good afternoon, dear neighbour.”
It surely makes sense for big nuclear powers, even geopolitical rivals, to talk to each other. Whether they need to roll out the honours at home for no gain is more doubtful. The only sop to Mr Trump came when the Russian leader said he was “sincerely interested in putting an end” to the war, and agreed that it would not have happened had Mr Trump been president in 2022.
Yet Mr Putin insisted that “we need to eliminate all the primary causes of that conflict”. Given that he thinks the primary cause is Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty, and its right to join European institutions including NATO, his formula is a recipe for continuing the war. Mr Trump did nothing to disabuse him. The Russian president left with a smile, and even tried a little English in public: “Next time in Moscow”, he told his host. To which Mr Trump replied, “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”
Editor: Here is the final salvos of the Economist, as the perverors of a ‘History Made To Measure’! I offer a condesation, without the maps!
IN JULY 2021 Vladimir Putin published an essay with arguments he would later use to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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There is truth in Mr Putin’s claim that Ukraine and Russia are close kin, as the following maps demonstrate.
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For Mr Putin the origin of Russian-Ukrainian identity is Kyivan Rus, a confederation of princedoms that lasted from the late 9th to the mid-13th century (see map 1).
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In the mid-11th century, however, Kyivan Rus began to fragment into semi-autonomous principalities (see map 2). These included Galicia-Volhynia, which covered parts of modern Ukraine and B.
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When the Mongol empire and its successors began to decline in the 14th century, rival polities rose to fill the vacuum.
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In 1648 the Cossacks, settlers on the steppe who amalgamated into disciplined military units, led an uprising against the commonwealth.
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Early Cossack warriors practised a limited form of democracy, a contrast to Muscovy’s autocratic regime.
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But the Cossack state had a hard time. In 1654, threatened by the Poles as well as the Ottomans to the south, Cossack leaders pledged allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy.
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By the end of the 17th century the Hetmanate’s territory had split into two: Muscovy took control of the east bank of the Dnieper river, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seized the west.
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In the late 18th century the Russian empire broke up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with help from Austria and Prussia.
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On the eve of the first world war the Russian empire stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic (see map 4).
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In 1917, weakened by the war, Russia experienced two revolutions. The first overthrew the Romanov dynasty. The second was the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks.
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Ukraine’s territory expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, signed in 1939, the two countries carved up eastern Europe.
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But Ukraine also experienced great suffering. In the 1930s Josef Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture led to a famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, which killed millions of people.
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In the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, set out to reform the Soviet Union through openness and reform—glasnost and perestroika.
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Ukraine suddenly became home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994 it agreed to denuclearise in exchange for security assurances from America, Britain and the Russian Federation.
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In 2004-05 the “Orange revolution” highlighted Ukraine’s democratic ambitions. Thousands protested against a rigged presidential election that gave victory to a pro-Russian candidate.
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Editor: the final paragraphs of this History Made To Measure , that is about the self -willed forgetting, of the various roles toxic political actors, played in the Political Coup against Viktor Yanukovych: Victoria Nuland, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the toxic political meddler George Soros, and of course the subrosa political actor Barack Obama. Not forgetting Historian Timothy Snyder who benefited from the largess of Robert Silvers of The New York Review Of Books!
His response to the Maidan marked Russia’s first military incursions into independent Ukraine. In 2014 the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine (see map 7). Russia’s separatist proxies—led by the Russian intelligence officers— declared “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. By December 2021, just before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the conflict had killed more than 14,000 people. The war continues.■
Correction (January 30th) The borders in maps 3 and 4 have been updated since this story was published. The chronology of the founding of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917 has also been clarified.
What to make of Mr. Brooks’ assertion in 2019? In the present, America is an Occupying power in Iraq, the white phosphorous attack on Falluja, Abu Ghraib and an American embassy that is 104 acres in size, are historically verifiable facts.
The embassy has extensive housing and infrastructure facilities in addition to the usual diplomatic buildings. The buildings include:[10]
Six apartment buildings for employees Water and waste treatment facilities A power station Two “major diplomatic office buildings” Recreation, including a gym, cinema, several tennis courts and an Olympic-size swimming pool The complex is heavily fortified, even by the standards of the Green Zone. The details are largely secret, but it is likely to include a significant US Marine Security Guard detachment. Fortifications include deep security perimeters, buildings reinforced beyond the usual standard, and five highly guarded entrances.[citation needed]
Not to forget Sec. Powell’s pivotal UN speech, about non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sec. Rice’s looming ‘mushroom cloud’ and Judith Miller’s New York Times propaganda. Brooks makes up his list of heretics, whose collective abode were those ‘dream palaces‘.
There is first the dream palace of the Arabists.
Then there is the dream palace of the Europeans.
Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters.
Mr. Brooks’ literary invention of Joey Tabula-Rasa allows him to add a strategic distance between his bellicose sensibility, and that of 20 year old Joey T-B. Who is a manufactured political naif, whose uncritical acceptance of the Wise Political Elders judgement is an inept propaganda device.
Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month.
This essay was written for an audience of Weekly Standard readers looking for a set of political rationalizations for the ‘Iraq War’ : an endeavor of the now defunct Project for a New American Century. Its Statement of Principals and its signatories:
June 3, 1997
American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America’s role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.
We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership. As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests? We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital — both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements — built up by past administrations. Cuts in foreign affairs and defense spending, inattention to the tools of statecraft, and inconstant leadership are making it increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world. And the promise of short-term commercial benefits threatens to override strategic considerations. As a consequence, we are jeopardizing the nation’s ability to meet present threats and to deal with potentially greater challenges that lie ahead.
We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities. Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
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Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett , Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky,Steve Forbes Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz
Mr. Brooks’ evolution/de-evolution from Neo-Conservative war monger, to a self-appointed Political/Moral Prophet, with his books , riffing on the themes of an ersatz Sociology made to measure: The Social Animal, The Road to Character and The Second Mountain places this essay, in a past that Mr. Brooks might find inconvenient? Although, like the adroit grifter, he might characterize this essay as a part of his moral/political evolution to his current point of enlightenment.
I came to Afghanistan skeptical of American efforts to transform this country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth. It is an infinitely complex and fractured society. It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.
Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the “recipients” of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful.
Every element of my skepticism was reinforced during a six-day tour of the country. Yet the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.
In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.
That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.
Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.
Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.
Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.
In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.
Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.
Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.
Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.
I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:
After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.
Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response amid economic crisis and war weariness says something profound about America’s DNA.
Editor: Mr. Brooks demonstartes his Neo-Conservative politics, in this sucessoer to the utterly purile ‘The Collapse’ !
For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of democracy.
Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff. On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous. On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging.
Many people around the world have always resisted America’s self-appointed role as democracy’s champion. But they have also been rightly appalled when America sits back and allows genocide to engulf places like Rwanda or allows dangerous regimes to threaten the world order.
The Afghans are the latest witnesses to this reality. The American bungles in Afghanistan have been well documented. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of our people. But the two-decade strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has meant that global terrorism is no longer seen as a major concern in daily American life. Over the past few years, a small force of American troops has helped prevent some of the worst people on earth from taking over a nation of more than 38 million — with relatively few American casualties. In 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school. Within four years, 6 percent were enrolled, and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent.
But America, disillusioned with itself, is now withdrawing. And there’s a strong possibility that this withdrawal will produce a strategic setback and a humanitarian disaster. The Taliban are rapidly seizing territory. It may not be too long before Afghan girls get shot in the head for trying to go to school. Intelligence agencies see the arming of ethnic militias and worry about an even more violent civil war. The agencies worry about a flood of refugees, and terrorist groups free to operate unmolested once again.
…
Over the past decades America and its allies have betrayed our values and compromised with tyrants innumerable times. But at their core the liberal powers radiate a set of vital ideals — not just democracy and capitalism, but also feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice. These things are all intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.
If the 21st century has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people, foreign and domestic, don’t like that package and feel existentially threatened by it. China’s leaders are not just autocrats, they think they are leading a civilization state and are willing to slaughter ethnic minorities. Vladimir Putin is not just a thug, he’s a cultural reactionary. The Taliban champion a fantasy version of the Middle Ages.
These people are not leading 20th-century liberation movements against colonialism and “American hegemony.” They are leading a 21st-century Kulturkampf against women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, individual dignity — the whole progressive package.
…
I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.
If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.
Editor : The purile feeds on the purile !
What does David Brooks see when he looks in the mirror?
The War on Terror-era neocon is at it again, scolding America for withdrawing from Afghanistan and advocating we stay in the game.
Marcus Stanley of Responsable Statecraft of July 21, 2021 provides The Reader with actual political and moral thought, not the chatter of a well paid Technocrats who follow the NYT Party Line!
If you were politically aware during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, David Brooks’s recent column calling for America to stay in Afghanistan and take a more aggressive role overseas might feel uncomfortably familiar.
Once again, as he did when promoting the Iraq invasion, he calls for America to be the “indispensable nation” and “democracy’s champion.” Once again, there is the obliviousness to the human costs of a supposedly humanitarian U.S. intervention. That was already strange in 2003, but it’s now grotesque after the death of more than 1.3 million human beings in just the first ten years of the War on Terror that Brooks had championed.
The studied turning away from the costs of our wars to those who live in the places where they are fought turns almost surreal in the part of his column devoted to Afghanistan. Brooks cheerfully informs us that “in 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school…and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent,” all at the cost of “relatively few” American casualties. The cost of a quarter of a million Afghan dead, over 70,000 of them civilians, in a country with a smaller population than California gets zero mention in his column. Neither does the widespread human rights violations associated with the foreign military presence, ranging from torture and detentions to ignoring the return of institutionalized child rape by U.S.-aligned Afghan security forces, something that even the Taliban never tolerated.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, Brooks observes, America “lost faith in itself and its global role, like a pitcher who has been shelled and lost confidence in his own stuff.” Apparently the U.S. is losing its mojo in the democracy-championing business. With the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 the champions of the War on Terror seem to think we are reaching some kind of statute of limitations for the relevance of our past actions. One might have more confidence in this assertion if there had been real accountability and reckoning in Washington for the individuals and ideology that drove the catastrophic decisions made after 9/11.
But this article underscores that there has been no such reckoning. What it instead illustrates is the through-line that links the ideology of global dominance that drove our decisions then, and the way we still look at the world today. The invasion of Iraq was justified by commentators like Bill Kristol using a Manichean distinction between “a world order conducive to our liberal democratic principles and our safety, or… one where brutal, well-armed tyrants are allowed to hold democracy and international security hostage.” Twenty years later, Brooks, a champion of that invasion, still depicts the world as “enmeshed in a vast contest between democracy and different forms of autocracy…a struggle between the forces of progressive modernity and reaction.” And it’s true, as Brooks claims, that this view is close to that espoused by some in the Biden administration.
The problem here is not the belief that American values differ from those held by rulers of other countries, or that we can and should advocate for those values on the global stage. It’s the black- and-white, all-or-nothing vision that divides the world into two hostile camps and abstracts from historical complexity. That complexity includes both the complex origins of cultural and values diversity between sovereign nations and the difficult history of America’s own repeated and systemic violations of the values we claim to uphold. By raising moral condemnation of our rivals to a fever pitch and blurring the distinction between nations as diverse as a Communist dictatorship like China and an Islamic theocracy like the Taliban, it turns difficult and situation-specific challenges around the world into a single global crusade that only America can lead.
But the lesson of the last 20 years is the way in which trying to impose American dominance in the name of our own moral superiority can betray the democratic and humanitarian goals it claims to pursue. Saddam Hussein was a more brutal and arbitrary dictator than the leaders of China and Russia today, and one might have thought that no intervention would have made the situation in Iraq worse. Yet American intervention did just that, and dramatically so. Likewise, Brooks’s call to remain in Afghanistan relies purely on condemnation of the Taliban as evil, without tallying the costs of continued American intervention in sustaining a bloody and stalemated civil war.
Of course, many things have changed since 2001, and Brooks’ article does reflect those changes. He now appeals not to center-right values of democratic capitalism, but to the left values of “feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice.” He tries to tap domestic partisan energies by claiming that foreign rivals are united with Donald Trump domestically in leading a reactionary “21st century kulturkampf” against these progressive values. It takes a certain chutzpah to appeal to the dream of racial justice to support continued bombing of brown villagers in Afghanistan, or the values of multiculturalism to claim America’s cultural and moral authority to impose its values on the rest of the world. But Brooks has never lacked for chutzpah.
The more subtle difference, acknowledged by Brooks in a brief statement that “we’re never going back to the Bush doctrine,” is a belief we can avoid the overreach of boots-on-the-ground invasions of foreign countries while still pursuing claims to unilateral U.S. global leadership. This recasts the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as driven not by ideological overreach but by a short-sighted failure to anticipate the practical difficulties of invasion and occupation. Calls for new hot wars are out; a sweeping, ill-defined global cold war with the forces of reaction domestically and abroad is in. But cold wars carry their own dangers — including igniting a hot war in any of the numerous simmering low-level conflicts with our ideological enemies around the world, from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait.
Brooks closes by saying that without aggressively fighting this new global conflict between authoritarianism and progressive values we won’t be able to “look at ourselves in the mirror without a twinge of shame.” It’s an odd moral calculus that tries to ignore shameful acts facilitated by the United States itself and instead calls on us to be ashamed of the actions of foreign governments based on the vague hypothetical claim that U.S. intervention could prevent them. But it’s at the heart of the humanitarian interventionism Brooks sold 20 years ago and is still selling today. We should hope that this time there won’t be buyers in Washington.
PUCK is the want-to-be Version of Gradon Carters Vanity Fair, that morphed into ‘Air Mail’ , bathed in reductive nostalgia, held afloat by garish ADVERTISEMENTS! No more Dominick Dunne: But nerver fear, Neo-Con gouhl Julia Ioffie, offers the parched reader of the inefable? Reader don’t miss Jonathan Greenblatt’s interview in The Times! Fellow Travelers!
The reader quickly realizes the ‘why’ of the Jerusalem Post hiring, of the 28 year old Bret Stephens, to be its editor. This newspaper is the propaganda arm of the Zionist State. And Stephens regurgitates the ever evolving rationales for this European Settler State, he knows it by wrote, but is also able to extemporize, at will, on its themes. Mr. Stephens is given to impugning his opponents, like the anguished Liberal Zionist Beinart. Reminding this reader of Paul, in the commentary by Karl Barth, of ‘The Epistle To The Romans’ or of Luther’s ‘1517 Disputation Against Scholastic Theology’ and his ‘The Heidelberg Disputation’. Stephens is a zealot, that shares that commonality with the Protestant Reformation and its Biblical precursor..
The last two paragraphs of his essay is about the waning power of Jewish Identity, where such a concept appears as ineluctable, as conceived by Stephens, being the sine qua non of the Zionist State’s survival.
It used to be that Israelis depended on a secure and thriving American Jewry to help stand up their fragile state. Today it is American Jewry that is fragile, threatened by dwindling cultural influence, stagnant demographic trends, increasing alienation from the Democratic Party and abiding discomfort with the G.O.P., and rising anti-Semitism — sometimes masked as anti-Zionism — from across the political spectrum.
Should American Jews start looking for the exits — just as every other Diaspora community in history has done, and continues to do — they will be grateful to find a Jewish state that resisted the siren song of “one state.”
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