By the time of the Iraq war, the distinction between "neoconservatism" and "liberal internationalism" had been stylized to the point that it obscured the two camps' shared underlying premises. The main point of disagreement, to hear both sides tell it, was the extent to which the US should commit itself to multilateralism and international institutions. Liberals wanted to hold American policy hostag to an ineffectual and irrelevant European consensus, Robert Kagan charged in Of Paradise and Power; neocons recklessly alienated allies and undercut the multilateral institutions that had won the cold war, liberals parried. The argument risked forcing liberals into a superficial and tenuous multilateralism — the implicit claim was that if the Bush Administration had simply shown a little more diplomatic finesse and won the support of France and Germany, the problems of the Iraq debacle could have been avoided. The limitations of this shabby multilateral alternative are now on display in Afghanistan, where the war's originally unquestioned legitimacy among Europeans has done little to alter the basic dilemmas of occupation and power projection. [my emphasis]Both liberal hawks and neocons embraced an empirically dubious notion of "totalitarianism" which essentially equated leftwing and rightwing regimes, even though their internal dynamics and foreign policy goals were often dramatically different. "The result," says Luban, "was that the Wilsonian imperative to make the world safe for democracy did not necessarily entail making the world safe through democracy, as demonstrated by the US-backed decapitation of democratic regimes in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and elsewhere."
This concept of totalitarianism is the basis on which the notion of "Islamofascism" or even "Al Qa'ida" is equated to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia as a threat to the US:
The Manichean impulse was neoconservatism's most important inheritance from the cold war. Totalitarianism, with its rigid dualism, remained the central concept: each enemy a Hitler, each compromise a Munich, the only models Churchill and Chamberlain. Neoconservatism has no aversion to realpolitik, contrary to what is sometimes said, but it does conceive of the enemy in starkly different terms than the conservative realist. For the realist, interests are finite and enemies rational, and the most attractive possibility in such a world is often to strike a deal. For the neoconservatives, however, the enemy is always totalitarian, and any compromise can only offer temporary respite before a final confrontation. The need to defeat the enemy is not merely a pragmatic imperative, but a moral one; not only is the national interest at stake, but the fate of the entire free world. Every mission is messianiac; every struggle is millennial. Norman Podhoretz split the last seventy-five years of global history into World War II (the struggle against fascism), World War III (the struggle against communism), and the ongoing World War IV (the struggle against "Islamofascism"); this periodization veered close to self-parody, but it captured the essence of the neocon Weltanschauung.Luban makes the important point that the neocon rhetoric about democracy promotion was pretty much window-dressing for a more cynical set of foreign policy priorities. During the Reagan Administration, neocon star and Reagan's UN Ambassador Jeane Kilpatrick took the "totalitarian" concept full circle from being a way to equate fascism and Communism to being a way to say that rightwing dictatorships were better than leftwing ones. Totalitarian was redefined to mean basically leftwing regimes and movements, where rightwing antidemocratic regimes and movements were given a supposedly more benign "authoritarian" title:
The movement's early programmatic statement, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards," was a call for defending friendly dictators against left-wing popular movements, a course that set the tone for neoconservative foreign policy through the end of the cold war. Once again the theoretical backbone of the argument was furnished by the totalitarian-authoritarian distinction; in practice, Kirkpatrick's scheme largely collapsed into the distinction between unfriendly left-wing regimes, democratically elected or not, and friendly right-wing ones, no matter how brutal. [my emphasis](Wonky note: while the use of "totalitarian" in foreign policy was corrupted to be essentially meaningless, there is some value in using the concept in sociology or political science to describe methods of rule. It even has some valid application in the context of electoral democracies.)
Luban also explains that much of the difference in approach today between liberal hawks and neocons comes from their divergent interpretations of the American experience in Vietnam and their view of the American alliance with Israel:
Vietnam was the most obvious cause of the rift. As Irving Kristol suggested in his 1976 essay "What Is A Neoconservative?," it was not so much disagreement about the war itself that drove the neocons away from the liberal consensus; neocons, he noted, "went every which way" on Vietnam and many were skeptical of the war. The real issue was what implications should be drawn from the war’s disastrous outcome. Many liberals came to feel that Vietnam necessitated a reappraisal of the underlying Manichean framework that had motivated it - that it indicated something fundamentally flawed in the notion that America was obliged to stamp out communism wherever it might spring up, regardless of the moral and strategic cost. These were the implications that neoconservatives strenuously resisted. Vietnam may have been a mistake, some of them conceded – although as time passed and dogmas hardened, they came increasingly to hold that it had been a winnable war thwarted by a stab in the back from the left—but in any case it must not cause American resolve to slacken into moral equivalence or isolationism, the perennial neoconservative bogeymen. ...Tags: daniel luban, neoconservatives
Concern for Israel alone cannot explain why the neoconservatives turned against liberalism; after all, the Democratic Party in recent decades has been as indulgent a patron of Israel as the Republicans. But the neocons drew deeper lessons from the Arab-Israeli conflict about the indispensability of American power and the uselessness of international institutions. While liberals thought the conflict called for better diplomacy, the neocons blamed diplomacy itself, and a liberalism that was too impotent and equivocating to stand up for Israel. Their contempt for the UN and for European opinion in part can be traced to the view that the UN was actively hostile to Israeli interests and Europe insufficiently zealous in defense of them. American hegemony, in the neocon imagination, became the only reliable guarantor of Israel’s existence, and a US retreat into isolationism meant the abandonment of Israeli Jews to the same fate as their European predecessors. [my emphasis]
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