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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Hawkish Need to Take Sides

Ross Douthat discusses why some interventionists are so vehemently pro-military in Egypt. He contrasts his anti-intervention, anti-coup views on Libya and Egypt with those of Bret Stephens: The real difference that explains these mirror-image pivots, I think, is our respective senses of whether it’s always in the United States’s interest to go all-in for one […]

Ross Douthat discusses why some interventionists are so vehemently pro-military in Egypt. He contrasts his anti-intervention, anti-coup views on Libya and Egypt with those of Bret Stephens:

The real difference that explains these mirror-image pivots, I think, is our respective senses of whether it’s always in the United States’s interest to go all-in for one side or another in the Arab Spring’s various upheavals.

Stephens certainly seems to find it unthinkable that the U.S. wouldn’t take sides in an internal Egyptian dispute, but this isn’t limited to the Arab uprisings. One consistent neoconservative complaint is that their domestic opponents refuse to take sides in foreign conflicts and political disputes or fail to do enough for the side that neoconservatives think the U.S. should support. Hence their endless whining about the “failure” to support the Green movement (supposedly letting down people on “our” side), their horror at the suggestion that Georgia was responsible for the escalation of the August 2008 war (this is not possible because they are on “our” side), and their impatience with anyone who doesn’t want to treat the Syrian civil war as an opportunity to inflict harm on Iran (we have to back whoever is against Iran’s allies, because they must objectively be on “our” side). McCain’s much-derided “we are all Georgians now” remark five years ago was just pushing this bad habit of taking sides in other nations’ fights to its inevitable extreme. Of course, this is related to their reflexive hawkishness, but it is also based in the conceit that there is something inherently wrong with taking a neutral position in a foreign conflict because this is inconsistent with the exercise of “leadership.”

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