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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Neoconservatives and Military Intervention

Matt Purple continues last week’s discussion about neoconservatism. He objects to Salam’s distinction between neoconservatism and “vigorous right-wing military interventionism”: Perhaps that was true thirty years ago, but today it’s an impossible claim to make. The reflex to intervene militarily isn’t some occasional overindulgence of modern neoconservatism. It is the defining characteristic, what makes neoconservatism […]

Matt Purple continues last week’s discussion about neoconservatism. He objects to Salam’s distinction between neoconservatism and “vigorous right-wing military interventionism”:

Perhaps that was true thirty years ago, but today it’s an impossible claim to make. The reflex to intervene militarily isn’t some occasional overindulgence of modern neoconservatism. It is the defining characteristic, what makes neoconservatism distinct.

I’m not sure that this distinction could have made thirty years ago. Neoconservatives were typically among the most supportive of arming foreign anticommunist insurgencies in the ’80s, and they backed the foreign deployments and invasions that Reagan and the elder Bush ordered. They were not alone in that support, but then as now they kept pushing for more hard-line policies and resisted any attempts at accommodation during the Cold War. Indeed, one of the early neoconservative complaints against Reagan was that he was pursuing a policy that was too similar to detente. The Cold War imposed greater constraints on where and how often the U.S. could take military action, but neoconservatives were reliably in favor of such action whenever it was possible.

Once the collapse of the USSR removed those constraints, there has scarcely been a high-profile conflict in which neoconservatives haven’t thought the U.S. should be involved as a supporter of one side or as an active participant. It’s true that some hawks on the right are not neoconservatives, but reliable support for military intervention is an essential part of what makes neoconservatism what it is today. It is also true that they are usually more likely to favor more aggressive military measures than all other hawks, and whatever U.S. policy happens to be they are the first to denounce it as too passive, too weak, and too slow. There is (not much) more to neoconservatism than support for military intervention, but in practice neoconservatives distinguish themselves from almost everyone else in foreign policy debates by typically being the first and most eager to agitate for military action and/or the arming of one side in a foreign conflict.

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