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Neoconservatives and Hegemonism

I agree with most of what Noah Millman writes here, but I don’t think this is right: “Hawk” won’t do because it doesn’t make any sense in many contexts. Many neoconservatives are eager for war in Syria. But is that a “hawkish” perspective? Hawks are properly those who are skeptical about the possibility of peaceful […]

I agree with most of what Noah Millman writes here, but I don’t think this is right:

“Hawk” won’t do because it doesn’t make any sense in many contexts. Many neoconservatives are eager for war in Syria. But is that a “hawkish” perspective? Hawks are properly those who are skeptical about the possibility of peaceful relations with potential rivals, and who favor erring on the side of greater military preparedness and a more forceful response to challenge. None of that describes a desire to dictate the outcome of the Syrian civil war, nor many of the other neoconservative pet projects of the past generation.

If the hawk label doesn’t refer in general to those advocating for aggressive and militarized policies, I’m not sure what it could mean. When I refer to Syria hawks, I mean those people calling for increased arms supplies to the opposition or military action against the Syrian government. Syria hawks obviously don’t include all hawks, and they may not even include all neoconservatives, but as a shorthand I don’t know how else we would describe them. The most accurate alternative I can think of is interventionist, but I don’t see why hawk shouldn’t be used to describe supporters of aggressive policies in Syria, Iran, or anywhere else. Returning to Beinart’s argument, it’s true that there are many foreign policy hawks that can’t reasonably be described as neoconservatives, in part because many conservative hawks don’t consider democracy promotion a particularly important goal and sometimes consider it to be dangerous. Certain neoconservatives may be skeptical about democratization in some countries, but only when they perceive democratization as empowering anti-American political forces, and even then they will usually maintain that U.S.-led democracy promotion efforts are necessary and advance U.S. interests. Put another way, neoconservatives are great fans of democratization when they see it as a vehicle for increased U.S. influence, and they tend to oppose democratic outcomes that they perceive as a rejection of that influence. Consider Georgia as an example: most neoconservatives loathe the new government because they decided against all evidence that it was “pro-Russian” and therefore opposed to the U.S., and it makes no difference to them that the government was freely and fairly elected.

Liberal hawks obviously make no claim to being conservative, and contemporary neoconservatives agree with liberal hawks on relatively little outside of foreign policy debates. Neoconservatives remain distinct as one group of foreign policy hawks among many, but insofar as they have been successful in dictating the terms of Republican foreign policy debate over the last ten or fifteen years the distinctions can be harder to recognize. The differences between other kinds of hawks and neoconservatives can also be blurred in part because neoconservatives pretend from time to time that they don’t exist as a group, and because other kinds of hawks often endorse neoconservative arguments without making much of an effort to point out where they don’t agree. For instance, many critics routinely call John Bolton a neoconservative when he is not, but Bolton encourages this confusion by endorsing some of the most hard-line and foolish policies whose only other supporters usually happen to be neoconservatives.

As I’ve noted before, a few neoconservatives and fellow travelers will sometimes proudly adopt the imperialist label. They do this either because they are actually nostalgic for the British Empire and see the U.S. as playing the same “liberalizing” role in the world, or because they think that American imperialism is defensible kind because it is the only truly benevolent kind. As hawks, they give priority to military preeminence above all other considerations and never object to military demonstrations of American power, but as so-called “hard Wilsonians” they see many more opportunities for such demonstrations in addition to securing U.S. interests. However, these are relatively few self-styled imperialists out there, so it is more useful to define neoconservatives as the loudest and most aggressive advocates of maintaining and extending U.S. hegemony around the world. I’ve used hegemonist in this way for many years, and it still seems the most accurate way to sum up this view. Neoconservatives are far being the only hegemonists, as Noah observes, but they are the most aggressive and explicit advocates for U.S. hegemony, and unlike other factions they tend to interpret every foreign policy issue in those terms.

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