Bashing George W. Bush has been the thinking person’s sport for four years now. Foreign policy intellectuals play their own version of the game: bashing neoconservatives. This is Bush-bashing with a Ph.D. It has proven surprisingly popular, attracting onto the field not only liberals but also some traditional conservatives and many conspiracy theorists, for whom the neocons are the new Trilateral Commission. Sadly, a lot of this commentary is plagued by the same vices as Bush-bashing in general: chronic exaggeration, fast-and-loose connection-drawing, and over-the-top hyperbole. Reading it is enough to turn you into a fervent anti-anti-neoconservative.

This is a pity, because with Bush’s re-election “the neoconservative question” is ripe for debate, and this high-stakes debate should be as well-informed as possible.

Instead, vitriol has already poisoned it. To blame are at least two propositions put forth by many critics of the neocons, including the authors of both these new books. The first is that there is such a thing as a tightly-knit and highly ideological community of neocons obsessed with unilateralism, military force, preventive war, and social engineering in the Middle East. It hardly helps that neocons have been defined not by themselves but by their critics. The second premise is that after 9/11, this group seized control of—Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke actually use the word “hijacked”—U.S. national security policy by virtue of their zeal and the on-hand nature of their pre- packaged agenda.

These premises lead many critics of neoconservatism, including these three authors, to make three crucial errors. First, viewing neocons as an ideological community invites these critics to treat neocon thinking as a self-contained text, subject to exegesis, as if it were a religious doctrine or a text-driven ideology like Marxism. (It may be relevant that Gary Dorrien is a professor of religion, not international relations.) This has one big consequence: it invites many critics to summarize and present neocon thinking (sometimes fairly, as in Dorrien’s case) without rendering the crucial service of evaluating its validity compared to alternative schools of foreign policy thinking such as traditional realism and liberal institutionalism.

Second, the “hijacking” imagery invites critics to oversell neocon influence. These and other commentaries suggest that when 9/11 drove up “demand,” so to speak, for new policies, a single factor on the supply side—the ruthless zeal of neocon ideologues—caused Bush to adopt a new foreign policy. This overlooks the rest of the “supply” situation: the fact that other ideas on offer at the time were, to put it kindly, unpersuasive. Finally, the combination of these two premises leads nearly all critics to grossly mischaracterize post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy as systematically unilateralist and militaristic, when in fact is has been multifaceted and highly experimental.

Halper and Clarke are self-declared Reagan-style conservatives, though of an exceedingly curious kind. They draw inspiration from Howard Dean, and Clarke, for his part, is a resident fellow at the Cato Institute, whose foreign policy is usually called isolationist. They trace the intellectual roots of today’s neocons to the people who first earned that label in the 1960s. This is bad intellectual history. The fact is, the first group called “neocon” wasn’t especially homogeneous; the second group isn’t much more so; and the two put together aren’t at all. Even when today’s neocons are literally the descendants of those so labeled in the 1960s, change is at least as evident as continuity in their assumptions about how the world works and what to do about it. ~Gerard Alexander

Mr. Alexander’s “review,” if we can designate this article with such a name, of two recent critiques of neoconservatism in foreign policy has missed quite a lot. He seems to treat these books as if they were the only word on anti-neoconservatism, ignoring the small library of essays, articles and books that might have satisfied his interest in a credible approach to the “neoconservative question.” I cannot address whether or not the books in question are as unconvincing as he claims, as I have not read them, but since this is the sort of response critiques of neoconservatism always receive I am immediately suspicious of everything Mr. Alexander has to say. More later.