Ross:

The last few weeks should bury, once and for all, the foolish idea that neoconservatism’s rhetorical commitment to democracy promotion is just a smokescreen for Likudnik dual loyalties or U.S. imperialism.

As an opponent of U.S. democracy promotion and its advocates, I would point out that I have generally taken democratists quite seriously that they usually mean what they say when they endorse global democratic revolution and democratization. It has never been “just a smokescreen” for anything, which is why it is so dangerous. If it were just a cynical ploy for nothing other than justifying the expansion of U.S. influence and toppling regimes hostile to Israel, that would be mildly reassuring, as it would mean that there was some identifiable, limited purpose behind it. I have tended to assume that avowedly “pro-Israel” people with hawkish, quasi-imperialist ambitions supported the policies that they did because they believed that these would advance their other goals, but perhaps I have been giving them too much credit. What we can say is that neoconservatives conflate values and interests together in the same way that they blur together the interests of the U.S. and allied states. This applies to Israel, but not only to Israel. As Ross mentions, neoconservatives indulge in the same sloppy, immediate identification with the cause of Georgia.

Certainly, one can point to examples of how the “freedom agenda” was aimed mainly at subverting unfriendly governments in order to replace them with more reliable clients, but that didn’t mean that many of the people endorsing the “freedom agenda” didn’t want a more radical policy than the one that Bush promoted. When the Bush administration backed away from democracy promotion in the second term, it was neoconservatives who complained loudest about the return of “realism.” Unfortunately, their support for democracy promotion really does seem to be an unreasonable ideological commitment that experience will not cure. Their critics on the right haven’t called them “neo-Jacobins” for nothing.

What I don’t quite understand is why sincere attachment to ideological democratism is supposed to be counted as a mark in the neoconservatives’ favor. If anything, genuine democratizing zeal is confirmation that neoconservatives are unwilling to make any important distinctions between values and interests, it means that they don’t really believe that democratic states will have fundamentally divergent interests over time, and it suggests that they do not believe that there are ever genuine trade-offs in policymaking, at least when it comes to their preferred policies. What Ross describes as the “shallow side” of neoconservative idealism isn’t just one side of it, but represents the whole of it. Values must conflict with interests, especially when American interests are defined as broadly and loosely as neoconservatives do, but they take it as a given that American ideals and power advance together. That’s not just an arrogant prescription for endless warfare and instability. It also happens to be painfully wrong, and it makes a mockery of both our values and our interests. The spread of democracy typically makes other nations more resistant to U.S. policies and gradually makes their governments more independent in their foreign policy decisions, and the stronger their democratic political cultures become the less likely they are to serve as reliable yes-men for U.S. policies.

Neoconservatives are typically very hawkish in their views on U.S. policy and favor U.S. hegemony, they are strongly “pro-Israel,” and for much of the last 20-25 years increasingly they have been enamored of democracy promotion as an important feature of U.S. policy. The first two may be compatible up to a point, but neither of them can be paired with the third for very long. At least during the Cold War there could be some justification that democracy promotion was occasionally useful as a complement to anti-Soviet containment, but as the Cold War recedes the strategic value of democracy promotion has declined dramatically. Instead of acknowledging that one of these three should be given priority and that the three goals seriously conflict with one another, neoconservatives have endorsed three sets of mutually contradictory policies with equal enthusiasm: maintain U.S. hegemony through activist and interventionist policies abroad, provide unstinting support to Israel regardless of what it does and pledge protection of Israeli security, and promote democracy abroad as much as possible.

The war in Iraq showed that these three are basically incompatible and undermine one another. The war was supposed to advance U.S. hegemony in the region and remove a threat to Israel, but effectively empowered Iran to Israel’s detriment, and this was compounded by the insistence on democratizing Iraq, which redounded to the benefit of those factions aligned with and supported by Tehran. More recently, it has become increasingly obvious that the close relationship with Israel and the prolonged U.S. presence in the Near East work at cross-purposes, and both of them contribute to anti-American attitudes and violent opposition in the form of terrorism.

Instead of backing away from any of the goals listed above, neoconservatives have become even more adamant in their support for all three, and their critiques of Obama’s foreign policy have largely been based on their perceptions that he is overseeing American decline abroad, that he is antagonistic to Israeli interests, and that he is insufficiently committed to promoting democracy. These critiques are usually tendentious and often inaccurate on many points, but these critiques show that the same goals remain. There has been absolutely no learning going on, and there is no awareness on their part that neoconservatives are still pursuing mutually contradictory policy goals.

The main answer that some of them have come up with is to revive the discredited “freedom agenda” (now to be called the Freedom Doctrine) as a sure-fire way to combat Iranian influence, and most of them are all in favor democratization in the Arab world so long as no Islamist parties can participate in elections. In other words, they still want to have it all, pretend that trade-offs don’t exist, and send U.S. foreign policy careening from one disaster to the next.