Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States “on the right side of history.” ~Roger Cohen

Has ‘neocon’ really become such a thing?  He says it is used to describe Paul Berman et al., but when did this happen?  Examples would be useful at this point, and Cohen provides none.  There may some people who use the term indifferently these days to mean “crazy militarist,” but then they are actually making more sense than they realise.  On foreign policy, especially when it comes to the Near East and Russia, the differences between Tomasky’s “mainstream liberals,” liberal interventionists and neoconservatives are far more of degree than kind.  

Here’s Tomasky:

We recognized further the difference between a comparatively low-risk air war, as in Kosovo, and the far more momentous decision to commit 140,000 troops to the ground, and we understood that the latter was not to be undertaken lightly (especially when the top military man in the country was saying we’d need at least 300,000 soldiers to do the job).  

Kosovo was, in his words, a “proper, balanced and admirable” kind of intervention.  Proper and balanced, it would seem, because that aggressive war posed few risks to us.  Why it was admirable will always remain a mystery.