A New Kind of Neocon? - Democratic Underground

Emit

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Sat Sep-29-07 01:43 AM
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A New Kind of Neocon?

This is an older article from last year, but the topic is pertinent to today's discussions, IMHO.

In late September, the National Interest convened a meeting to consider “What a Post-Bush Foreign Policy Might Look Like.” Gvosdev invited two foreign policy experts, one a Republican and one a Democrat, to predict how an administration of, say, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) or Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) would change U.S. global strategy, and in particular, whether they would reverse current policies. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that a Republican president like McCain might embrace a “Bush lite” approach (that's the best-case scenario—some say a Republican super-hawk would try to “out-neoconize” Bush), and a Democrat like Senator Clinton would adopt more sensible and internationalist diplomacy, à la Bill Clinton.

To the surprise of some of those attending the National Interest event, it was the speaker representing the Democratic perspective, Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, who ended up “out-neoconizing” Bush. ...

That a Republican conservative was urging a more realistic and less interventionist foreign policy and a Democratic liberal was advocating a hegemonic global strategy aimed at strengthening American military presence abroad as well as at promoting “democracy” worldwide should not shock anyone familiar with the history of U.S. politics and foreign policy. ...

~snip~

But at the same time as realists and conservatives in the Republican Party are hoping to challenge the dominance of the neoconservatives over their party's foreign policy, many leading Democratic activists and liberal intellectuals seem to be calling on their party to embrace an even more “pure” or radical version of the neoconservative ideology. Indeed, during his presentation at the National Interest event, Marshall insisted that his party does not and would not advance anti-war sentiment or hopes for military disengagement. “Our party needs to show it can take on the job of defeating Islamic extremists if we want to win the next election,” said Marshall, editor of the recent book With All our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihad and Defending Liberty. “We need to fight for liberal principles abroad as vigorously as we fight for them at home,” he said. He stressed that Democrats “shouldn't abandon democracy as a goal.”

Criticizing the Bush administration for declining to expand the military it relies on as a major policy instrument, Marshall proposed that a Democratic administration would grow the American military by 40,000 troops to better meet the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not everyone liked this idea; in response to Marshall's comments, one participant responded: “If the first item on the Democrats' plan for foreign policy is making the military bigger, color me Republican.”

~snip~

Moreover, as New York University historian Tony Judt pointed out recently, many hawkish liberal intellectuals and policy analysts who have ties to the Democratic leadership and are affiliated with newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, and the New Yorker and with think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have acquiesced to Bush's foreign policy agenda (see “Bush's Useful Idiots: Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America,” London Review of Books, September 21, 2006). Not unlike Marshall, they seem to be promoting the idea that the Democrats need to adopt the ambitious neoconservative creed while trying to “improve” it by making it more marketable and workable. They seem to suggest that the neoconservative doctrine was fine—it's just that the Republicans lacked the talent and the imagination to turn it into a success.