Andrew comments on Shadi Hamid’s remarks:

One the worst legacies of the Vietnam boomer syndrome has been turning complex foreign policy decisions – which should ultimately be pragmatic actions in defense of national self-interest – into idiotic left-right, patriot-traitor, soldier-hippie dichotomies.

It is understandable to associate this with Vietnam, but it is a habit of mind developed over many decades before Vietnam. It was perhaps more prominent during Vietnam in ways that had not occurred in many decades, but it is hardly unique to the last forty years. Before U.S. entry into WWII, and for decades afterward, opponents of entry into the war were derided in similarly abusive ways, and during WWI opponents were not simply denounced but were also sometimes jailed on account of their supposed radicalism. Were we to identify pro-war factions with political affiliations in the early 20th century, the left or center-left was typically more interested in intervening in foreign wars. Proponents of confrontational foreign policy and adherents of what Bacevich calls the “ideology of natioinal security” came from across the spectrum after WWII, facilitated by the anticommunist focus of policy, and the right or center-right adopted equally aggressive or even more aggressive policy views. Misinterpreting reality and inflating threats, which Bacevich identifies as two recurring themes in policymaking in the post-WWII era, became and remain the marks of what passed for serious, responsible foreign policy thinking.

What Kennan called the legalistic-moralistic strain in our foreign policy thinking, which may have existed before Wilson but has become much more pronounced ever since Wilson’s administration, forces the debate into these unsatisfying and distorting categories. As Lukacs said in his biographical study of Kennan:

Beliefs in world law, the outlawing of war, Leagues of Nations, United Nations, World Government, etc., are all outcomes of that–as is their consequence of “total war” against “Evil.”

In the end, the conviction that policy is a dedicated fight against Evil is not only used to justify all manner of wrongs, but ultimately it is used to justify ignoring and scrapping domestic and international law as and when the “fight against Evil” requires it. Left-right oppositions make little sense, and they are certainly insufficient to explain the divisions over the Iraq war. The legalistic-moralistic view leads to imputing vice to critics of policy and identifying support for the state’s policy with virtue. It also tends to lead to identifying opponents of a given intervention or the entire direction of policy as virtual fifth columnists. This is related to nationalist identification with the state, but even more important is the identification of the state’s policy with some higher good. This is what Claes Ryn described in America the Virtuous in the following way:

Power sought and exercised for the good of humanity is thought to be by definition virtuous and to need no restrictions. Today the result is the proliferation of militant, sometimes highly provocative but also moralistic political conduct and speech, as witness the uncompromising attitudes of so many leading American politicians and political intellectuals in discussing how to handle opposition to American aims in the world. What is creating arrogance and saber rattling is not adherence to old Western moral and cultural traditions but an unwillingness to heed them.

This adoption, or rather perversion, of the language of morality by supporters of aggressive policies abroad lends them an initial advantage in framing the debate and setting the terms. I cannot count the number of times that advocates for invading Iraq derided opponents for supposedly being unable to distinguish between good and evil or even for not recognizing the validity of such categories. On the contrary, I think opponents of the war were paying more attention to the line between the two, but what we objected to even more was the ready identification of a bad policy as an expression of Goodness and the idea that opposition to it was somehow morally corrupt.

Glenn Greenwald is correct that it is a bit mystifying that there have been as many complaints from the left about Obama’s appointments as there have been. Surely they understood, as I have come to understand, that he is an establishment-accommodating, consensus-oriented politician, so how can anyone be all that surprised or upset? That is how he won, and that is how he has ascended so quickly in politics. More idealistic Democratic politicians, such as Russ Feingold, probably never could have done what Obama has done, which seems to me to be an indictment of our system rather than evidence of the impracticality of Feingold’s refusal to compromise civil liberties or sign off on an unjust war, but the point stands. Then again, I am a bit surprised that there haven’t been more complaints. There are two distinct questions here. It seems to me that there should be fewer bewildered cries of betrayal, because there should have been no illusions about Obama, but there should be far more criticism of Obama’s selections and decisions when progressives find them dissatisfying for well-founded reasons. In other words, there ought to be even more criticism of the probable Brennan selection, but much less gasping in surprise and asking, “How could Obama do that?”

In Greenwald’s post, there is an excerpt from an email from Digby, and I thought this quote was the most telling:

Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn’t ask for anything.

This is what conservatives and progressives both seem to be reduced to in election after election: looking for cues that so-and-so is “one of us” and allowing that to make up for the rather uninspired, conventional policies the pol pursues. The problem with this is that the pols who seem to be most adept at giving these cues are also the ones most likely to take their core constituents for granted. Indeed, they are bound to take those constituents for granted, because they know that the cultural signifiers have bound the constituents to their politicians in such a way that they end up being the least likely to rebel against the pols. The response Digby describes here is much the same as what we have seen with conservatives and Bush and again with the conservative reaction to Palin.

Greenwald makes a fair point that progressives did not hold out for concessions or courting from Obama, but gravitated to him over the course of the primaries and now do not have much reason to expect that much from him. The conservative response to Bush in the 2000 primaries was somewhat similar, in that Bush became the rallying point for conservatives who were lured into thinking that Bush, previously considered a moderate, was now a “real conservative” alternative to McCain. Whatever progressives may have thought of Obama early on, perhaps the possibility of defeating Clinton was so tempting that they had no interest in holding out for more from Obama.

It is this, it seems to me, that is at the heart of what is wrong with most calls for “pragmatism.” At every stage, the “impractical” purist hears that he should not withhold his support from the marginally preferable candidate under any circumstances. He is urged to be realistic, and so he and those like him do not insist that the candidate make strong commitments on policy positions that are deemed by someone to be out of the mainstream. The candidate pays some minimal lip service to the purist’s “values,” and this is supposed to count for something. In the name of pragmatism, the purist decides that he has to support the candidate, because the candidate represents the best chance of advancing his views, but even before the election is held the purist has already given so much away in the name of pragmatism and realism that he and those like him have no leverage at all. Having yielded and given away their support in exchange for nothing more than lip service, the purists are scarcely in a much better position than before. They can take satisfaction in being on the winning side, but for the most part this means that they will bear the burden if the public turns against the candidate after he is elected and otherwise they will scarcely get much of anything. The purists-turned-pragmatists will receive the blame for enabling the administration in whatever it does, but they will receive no credit or acknowledgement that their support was important enough to merit meaningful concessions to their concens. Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.

Cathy Young replies today:

First of all, I have never claimed that all anti-Americanism is “an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society.”

Cathy Young wrote last week:

Russia’s post-cold war humiliation is real. But as the human rights activist Elena Bonner, widow of the great scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, told me recently: “Nobody humiliated Russia. Russia humiliated itself.”

In the post-Soviet era, many Russians are angry because their country has neither the stature nor the living standards that they believe it deserves. Polls shows that most Russians actually favor a Western way of life. Nearly two-thirds would rather live in a well-off country than in one that is poorer but more powerful and feared by others. Unfortunately, most also believe their country will not reach Western levels of well-being any time soon, if ever. As frustrations mount, it is often easier to blame an external force than the country’s own failings [bold mine-DL]. It doesn’t help that the 1990s, when pro-Western attitudes were at their peak, are remembered as a time of poverty and insecurity.

The result is an inferiority complex toward the West and, in particular, the United States, as the pre-eminent Western power and cold war rival. This widespread sentiment combines admiration, envy, grievance, resentment, and craving for respect and acceptance as an equal [bold mine-DL]. Most Russians viewed the recent conflict in Georgia as a victory over the Americans — a matter less of strategic self-interest than of psychological self-assertion.

In his Nov. 5 speech, President Medvedev asserted that “we have no inherent anti-Americanism.” True enough, but in recent years, anti-Americanism has been carefully cultivated by official and semi-official propaganda, especially on government-controlled television, which manipulates popular insecurities and easily slides into outright paranoia.

Of course, I did not say that Young blamed all anti-Americanism on these things, but that in her remarks on Russian anti-Americanism she used the same argument that we hear constantly from those who insist that Arabs and Muslims have anti-American views (i.e., views hostile to U.S. government policy): it is supposedly a product of envy, dissatisfaction at home and a feeling of inferiority. The foreign government is always the sole one responsible for “stoking” or encouraging these feelings–her argument is very close to Cagaptay’s complaint about AKP in Turkey. That must be what it is–it couldn’t be a response to the policy of other states. To be precise, I wrote:

One of the most dominant myths that prevails in America today is that anti-Americanism is merely an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society (Young recites all of this as you would expect) and has nothing or next to nothing to do with the substance of policy and the aggressive interference that the policy often represents.

Perhaps I could have been slightly more clear. Young was writing about Russian anti-Americanism, deploying the tired tropes of envy, failure and inferiority, so she recited all of this in the context of discussing Russia. She objects that she doesn’t assume this is true of all anti-Americanism. No one said that she did. However, in one breath, she says that Russians have no inherent anti-Americanism (whatever that might look like), and in the next insists that the government is manipulating Russians’ inferiority complex towards the U.S., which most conventional (and conventionally wrong) explanations identify as the cause of anti-Americanism. Clearly, with respect to Russia, Young was reciting the standard line that anti-American attitudes are a product of envy, failure and inferiority, and that was my point in that part of the post.

It was discouraging, Mr. Khan said, that the United States ignored the importance of the huge nonviolent protests by Muslims in Kashmir against Indian rule this summer. “Anywhere else [bold mine-DL], and they would have been hailed as an Orange Revolution,” he said, referring to the wave of protests that led to a change in the Ukrainian government in 2004. ~The New York Times

Not so! These things are hailed as “people power” revolutions in the West only if said revolution was against an Arab, pro-Russian or pro-Chinese regime. Otherwise, especially when they take place in Latin America, they are episodes in violent, anti-American mob rule. This can be a tricky distinction to keep in mind, but Washington has been nothing if not consistent in the way it anoints certain movements as democratic and denounces others as socialist tyranny.

On a more grim note, this article offers this troubling bit of news as well:

American military commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, have started to argue forcefully that the solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, where the American war effort looks increasingly uncertain, must involve a wide array of neighbors [bold mine-DL].

Mr. Obama has said much the same. Several times in his campaign, he laid out the crux of his thinking. Reducing tensions between Pakistan and India would allow Pakistan to focus on the real threat — the Qaeda and Taliban militants who are tearing at the very fabric of the country.

The article then cites Obama’s FA essay, where he first stated his interest in the Kashmir dispute. While the article focuses on the reasons, real and imagined, why Pakistanis are fearful and suspicious of U.S. intentions, these details about Petraeus and Obama make clear that Pakistan is the last one that has anything to fear from the new administration. A larger problem, as the article makes clear, is that Pakistani paranoia about and hostility to the U.S., which has undoubtedly been exacerabted by years of backing Musharraf and the latest rounds of cross-border strikes, are entirely out of control. I’m not sure how Washington can reassure Pakistanis that we are not bent on partitioning the country. If some of the theories floating out there are widely shared, even an effort to resolve the Kashmir dispute would probably be greeted with derision as another part of the conspiracy.

Michael Crowley quotes a pro-Obama Democratic foreign policy staffer:

With General Jim Jones looking a strong bet for National Security Advisor, Hillary Clinton slated for State, and Bob Gates staying on at DOD, it appears increasingly likely that the three senior foreign policy positions in the Obama Administration will be filled by people who were not active Obama supporters during the campaign. Moreover, these principals are likely to bring their own hanger-ons – Hillary alone is likely to absorb into State the foreign policy advisors from her primary campaign, not necessarily their Obama counterparts.

So how do you think that makes the “Gang of 300” who staffed Candidate Obama on foreign policy issues, wrote white papers, served as surrogates for him, etc. during the long campaign feel?

Well, they probably feel like chumps. What surprises me about the Jones pick is that it takes away a slot that seemed as if it would be the obvious job for Susan Rice, who was one of the earliest and most prominent of Obama’s advisors. An important thing to remember about most of those 300 is that a lot of them were lower-level people during the Clinton administration, and so in this sense were also holdovers from that era, but among them were not any of the high-profile people who were closely tied to the Clintons and who genuinely represented a more hawkish Old Guard. Now Clinton herself returns with her entire entourage, and the people who risked being shut out all together in the event that Hillary had won the nomination are not repaid with much of anything. It seems to me that at some point this pattern of forgetting about the people who helped get him where he is, which Obama has tended to do quite a few times over the years, will blow up in his face.

P.S. The greater significance of this is that it means that the conduct of foreign policy in the Obama administration at a high level will probably not include most of the people who advised Obama during the campaign. This was the time when he laid out the foreign policy differences with Clinton that his supporters hang so many hopes on, and these were the people who helped formulate and defend those differences, while their counterparts did their best to frame some of Obama’s main positions as reckless and naive.

No nation has ever benefitted from military defeat, and I draw a bright line between (a) the I-told-you-so recriminations of those who wisely opposed the invasion before it began, and (b) the dishonorable glee of those who don’t even bother to disguise their desire for American defeat. ~Robert Stacy McCain

All right. Now if McCain can just show us an American who doesn’t even bother to disguise his desire for American defeat and expresses such glee, we might be getting somewhere. Preferably, he could show us more than one, and ideally he would find people of some consequence who hold this view. At least then we might be able to judge whether he is simply defining opposition to the war as desire for defeat, or if he has a more specific sort of argument in mind. Otherwise, drawing this bright line is not very remarkable, since pretty much everyone stays on the right side of that line. Of course, if he is equating mere opposition with defeatism–and therefore with a kind of treachery–that would be an indefensible position.

This statement implies that there is some significant group of American war opponents who actually hold this view, and it also assumes that the only alternative to such recriminations is longing for the U.S. to be defeated. I don’t think either is true, and one of my frustrations with war supporters–particularly with war supporters who recognize the blunder for what it is but insist on persevering in the blunder anyway–is their tendency to argue against antiwar positions that do not exist. It would be interesting to hear what McCain thinks victory would look like. Whenever someone says something to the effect of, “Victory is our exit strategy,” I await the list of obtainable objectives that we have not yet reached that distinguish some rational pursuit of a definable victory from an open-ended commitment to keeping well over a hundred thousand American soldiers in a foreign country. I have been waiting for more than five years.

McCain continues:

America is too big, too rich and too powerful to safely disarm. We cannot assume the sort of inert, cowardly pacifism that dominated England in the 1920s and ’30s without inviting aggression. The alternative to American strength is not “world peace,” but rather the removal of any meaningful constraint on the imperial appetites of America’s enemies.

Too big to disarm? Is that the imperialist version of “too big to fail”? Ahem. Then again, who is talking about disarming? Disarmament would entail not simply ending foreign deployments or reducing the size of the armed forces, both of which are advisable and ought to be among our goals, but actually scrapping some huge part of the military. Again, if you can find someone arguing for this (and I’m not sure that even Kucinich would go this far), that would be worth knowing. Who said anything about pacifism? There simply aren’t that many pacifists, and there is hardly anyone alive in the West today making the case for actual pacifism. (For that matter, pacifism did not dominate interwar England, either, but why get caught up in detail?) McCain has erected here not just one strawman, but an entire gang of them.

Whose aggression will we be inviting? Where? Against whom? Unless McCain wants to defend the proposition that it is the business of the United States government to provide security for the entire globe, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Here’s a better question: who are our enemies, and what “imperial appetites” do they have? Arguably, Al Qaeda has the grandest objectives of all and also the fewest resources to reach them. Those states that have the means to pursue “imperial appetites” have shown little or no inclination to sate such appetites, assuming that they have them at all, and it is not a given that they are our enemies in any case. Of course, virtually no one who calls for ending foreign deployments, whether in Iraq, elsewhere in Asia or in Europe, assumes that an era of world peace is going to dawn. What we do expect, or at least what I expect, is that Americans will not be sent to fight in conflicts except when it is actually in our national interest to do, and we will have a much more constrained and sane understanding of what that national interest is. Our allies either already can defend themselves against their neighbors, or they will acquire the means to do so.

More bogus charges follow–war opponents apparently wish ill to their own nation, want to celebrate American defeat, and so on. I won’t dwell on the obvious point that it is the war that has done great harm to our nation, our military and the reputation of our country in the world. We have incurred losses that cannot be undone, and each day we remain there our security erodes, but I do not assume that war supporters actually wanted these things to happen. However, that is apparently what McCain thinks of the six out of ten Americans who oppose the war–that they wish harm to America. If that is not the case, some specific examples of these nation-harming, defeat-celebrating, failure-loving pacifists would be helpful.

Netroots progressives are understandably frustrated by the general lack of progressivesappointed to the Cabinet and other positions, the minimal punishment of Lieberman and the various Democratic capitulations to the Bush administration over the last two years on policy.

In a TAC article in June of ’07, when talk of the death of neoliberalism was in the air, I argued that this was likely how things would turn out:

Progressives should thus be extremely wary of their new burst of popularity within the Democratic Party since it is very likely that their brief empowerment will only serve as the means of electing a Democratic president in ’08 or ’12 who will once again marginalize, undermine, and betray their agenda—every bit as much as George W. Bush has done to the conservative agenda. If they are anything like some conservatives today, progressives will thank and love the president that
does this to them.

However, that last line may not hold up so well over time. For one thing, progressive activists do not seem to be deferring to party leaders nearly as much. We are already seeing much stronger and relatively more widespread criticism of Democrats in Congress and the incoming administration just a few weeks after the election than we saw from the right at a comparable point after the 2000 result was resolved. This may partly be a function of the closely-contested and controversial nature of Bush’s first election, which solidified the right behind him and gave to their support of him a greater intensity. While most conservatives came to identify more and more with Bush over the course of the 2000 election, capped off by the recount controversy, which also served to link conservatives and the relatively more moderate Bush in the minds of the public, Obama has had a strange one-way relationship with a lot of progressive activists. Conciliatory where they were combative, and running slightly to the right of Clinton, Edwards, et al., Obama annoyed many of them. He imitated their online and grassroots mobilization, but did not rely on them. Many of them grudgingly came around to supporting him, and his early summer flips and “refinements” created more causes for dissatisfaction. During the rest of the general election, these strains faded into the background, but they are now quickly re-emerging. The size of Obama’s victory has probably made the netroots more willing to criticize party leaders early on, just as it has made it easier for party leaders to ignore them.

Ironically, Democrats were in this respect too successful at the polls. As far as Lieberman’s mild punishment goes, it seems as if he would have lost more than his subcommittee chairmanship had the presidential election been closer and had the Democrats not picked up so many seats in the Senate. Lieberman’s boosting for McCain received a weak punishment because it clearly made no difference in the final outcome. Disloyal and ineffective–I believe that is the unofficial Lieberman motto. I imagine this is not an original observation, but it seems that as the Democrats have come closer to a filibuster-proof majority the more likely they were to let Lieberman off the hook. So they have gone from relying on Lieberman for their majority to depending on him for what might be (depending on the Minnesota recount and Georgia run-off outcomes) their 60th vote.

While it may be tempting for so-called “centrists” to make the argument, it is probably wrong to conclude from the last two years that the netroots and progressives in general are politically weak. The “broken glass” mentality (i.e., progressives would crawl across broken glass if necessary to defeat the GOP in the presidential election) had a lot to do with keeping a real rebellion from breaking out over any of the things Sirota cites as betrayals. In terms of the level of engagement and the size of the audience, taken as a whole the netroots reaches a significant portion of the Democratic Party’s most active supporters. Journalists and pundits may have the luxury of writing off these people and ignoring their concerns, but the Democratic leadership and Obama do not. The politicians nonetheless seem to be exhausting progressives’ patience far more rapidly than even George W. Bush did with conservatives. It is common for party leaders to take reliable supporters for granted, but usually not so early on and not so comprehensively as Democratic leaders seem to be doing now.

Update: Sirota comments on the NYT article linked above:

Please, don’t try to claim that because the Democratic Party is supposedly “the left,” that means its “center-right” is actually the “center” of American public opinion. Votes on Iraq, the bailout, FISA, deregulation, free trade, etc. etc. have shown us that the “center-right” of the Democratic Party is at least the “center-right” of America – if not the full-on right.

In terms of the New York Times story, at least we know the undeniable (if unsurprising) reality now, and can strategize around it and use the far more progressive election mandate as momentum – rather than simply pretending to live in an alternate reality.

Second Update: Chris Bowers and Chris Hayes are both frustrated as well.

There seems little doubt that the new administration will emphasize “democracy” in its relations with Russia and that these will suffer as a result. Presumably, this will include U.S. support for “democratic” opposition leader Garry Kasparov and his neo-fascist allies.

Unless the present Russian administration comes under serious internal threat—which still appears unlikely, though not impossible—this U.S. approach will be only an irritant. A much more serious threat to relations will be a continuation of the existing American policy of pushing for Ukrainian and Georgian NATO membership.

This is something which the Obama administration most emphatically should not do. As the events of August demonstrated, ill-considered U.S. meddling in this region can lead to actual wars, further destabilizing the world economy and imposing new financial burdens on the United States. Since Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing, simply to put the whole NATO issue on hold (without abandoning it formally at this stage) would lead to a significant improvement in relations. ~Anatol Lieven

Obviously, I agree entirely with Lieven’s recommendations on Russia policy, even though I am probably even more certain that the Obama administration will ignore these and many of the other he makes in his excellent article. At the end he writes:

How much of this is likely? Eight years in Washington left me with considerable pessimism about the capability of the U.S. policy elites—Democrat as well as Republican—to carry out radical changes in policy if these required real civic courage and challenges to powerful domestic constituencies or dominant national myths [bold mine-DL]. On the other hand, if the worst economic crisis for seventy years isn’t the right moment for radical new thought, then there never will be a right time.

As I suggested below, it is partly because of the crisis that we are not going to see radical change in foreign policy, and I would add that even if such a change were possible Obama is not the one to provide it. Why no radical change? Forget about interest groups and entrenched power for a moment, and just consider Lieven’s remark about dominant national myths. There is strong resistance, rooted in some of these myths, to the idea that U.S. policy is in any way responsible for the actions of foreign states. Republicans thrive on attacking those who supposedly “blame America first,” and Democratic leaders are by and large just as unwilling to acknowledge this responsibility or engage in this sort of self-criticism. There is something of a national consensus among the leaders in the political class that outdoes the nationalist’s “my country, right or wrong” by saying, “my government’s foreign policy is always basically right.” This is related to Bacevich’s point about the elite’s tendency to misinterpret reality and inflate threats: they cannot or do not want to see the consequences of their policies, and they treat the predictable–and predicted–responses of foreign actors to these policies as the irrational expressions of fundamentally diseased and corrupt cultures that want to destroy us and therefore must be opposed at every turn.

The main claim that Lieven and I and others make that, in his words, “Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing” is strongly disputed or simply ignored by a disturbingly large number of people in American government and media. To take one example, today Cathy Young bores us with yet another of her myopic columns disputing precisely this claim, the recognition of which is vital to correcting the errors of the last two decades. Inside government, it is more or less taken as a given that the Russians really have nothing to complain about. The administration maintains, however implausibly, that missile defense in Europe has nothing to do with Russia, NATO expansion has nothing to do with Russia, and on and on. These people are somehow unable or unwilling to comprehend that power projection and expansion of a military alliance to Russia’s doorstep will trigger and have triggered hostile reactions.

If Moscow cultivates or uses anti-American sentiment for its own purposes, which is actually beside the point, that sentiment exists and has been increased extraordinarily by what the U.S. government has done and what it proposes to do in post-Soviet space. One of the most dominant myths that prevails in America today is that anti-Americanism is merely an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society (Young recites all of this as you would expect) and has nothing or next to nothing to do with the substance of policy and the aggressive interference that the policy often represents. One of the biggest obstacles to radical change in our Russia policy is this inability or unwillingness to understand this, just as our government seems unable or unwilling to understand why anti-Americanism in Turkey of all places is at record highs. It is much more reassuring to hear that this is just something that results from the actions of a foreign government, which allows us to overlook our role in generating these resentments and reactions.

American presidential elections are often best read as verdicts on the administrations that precede them, and in that light, Barack Obama’s victory on November 5 marks the long-overdue death of neoconservatism. ~David Donadio

As our editor Scott McConnell would say, they only look dead, and strangely these days they don’t look very dead at all. Conor calls for sober assessments on the right concening foreign policy, so I am here to offer a sober reality check to the many people who probably think, or very much want to believe, that Mr. Donadio’s reading of the election results is correct. I want to be clear: few things would please me more than for this claim to be true, but we must look at how things are and not merely at how we would like them to be. Should neoconservatism, particularly with respect to foreign policy, be absolutely discredited, dead and buried? Certainly. In the last thirty to thirty-five years, scarcely any other American political persuasion, to use their preferred term, has been more wrong about more things in foreign policy debate. But the reality that something should be ruined does not mean that it is. The same might be said of any number of false understandings of man, society or international relations, yet these ideas live on long after their opponents assume that they simply had to vanish, partly because they continue to find patrons and institutional support and partly because any given ideology is designed to blind its adherents to the consequences of their ideas. Ideology serves to tell its adherents why it is always different this time, why the examples of the past do not reveal that they will fail, and why their cause, unlike all the other armed doctrines, will win…eventually.

There is a powerful belief that I think most people have that failure of a policy endorsed by certain ideologues ought to so undermine an ideology that it cannot survive, except perhaps as a shrinking remnant, but this forgets that ideology often is, as Prof. Bacevich put it so well, a highly elastic rationale for action. Its utility comes from its adaptability and its ability to endure setback after setback; it must present a worldview that is compelling enough that people wish to follow it long after its failures have become obvious, and it survives only so long as it keeps providing that rationale for action. Because ideology is abstract and necessarily unbalanced in its understanding of the world (ideology being at its core the excessive emphasis on one truth or half-truth to the point of absurdity), failures are inevitable. Successful ideologies are those that can incorporate and explain away those failures in terms of a long struggle for lofty ideals or imperfect execution by half-hearted followers. If the “ideology of national security” that Bacevich identifies in The Limits of Power is concerned primarily with legitimizing the exercise of executive power, neoconservatism is similar in that it seeks to legitimize the aggressive use of American power and, to the very large extent that this entails aggrandizing the executive, it dovetails with the “ideology of national security” that is much more broadly shared in the political class.

Bacevich makes an important point about the postwar U.S. “power elite” and foreign policy that helps us to understand why neoconservatism is not going to disappear:

Yet from the late 1940s to the present day, members of the power elite have shown an almost pathological tendency to misinterpret reality and inflate threats. The advisers to whom imperial presidents have turned for counsel have specialized not in cool judgment but in frenzied overreaction. Although the hawks have not always prevailed…more often than not the proponents of action, whether advocating direct intervention, relying on covert means, or working through proxies, have carried the day. The hawks may not always advocate immediate war per se, but they lean forward in the saddle, keeping sabers drawn and at the ready. The mantra of the hawks is the barely veiled threat: “All options remain on the table.”

The ideology of national security underwrites a bipartisan consensus that since World War II has lent to foreign policy a remarkable consistency. While it does not prevent criticism of particular policies or policy makers, it robs any debate over policy of real substance.

Clearly, neoconservatives, who are among the most forward-leaning of these forward-leaning members of the elite, are suited to thrive in this environment, because they specialize in threat-inflation, saber-rattling and calls to action, action, action. Another thing that ideology has going for it is its simplicity. The idea that America is essentially blameless, a force for good and must project its power to secure liberty for all is both emotionally powerful and readily digestible. The false, progressive nationalist historiography of the United States helps to make this message more resonant, which is one reason why neoconservatives remain so wedded to this view of American history. Precursorism, anachronism and cherry-picked evidence are their favorite instruments. In the official story, America expands, moves from strength to strength and its increase in power has meant an increase in freedom for all, which both justifies and demands continuing the pursuit of more power. Neoconservatives are not alone in being willing to oblige, but they are among the most eager.

There is an idea, which seems to have gained some currency in the country as a whole, that the financial crisis and our economic woes will force the government to scrap the empire and give up on hegemony. I am increasingly of the view that something much closer to the opposite will be true. The conventional, and typically wrongheaded, interpretation of the interwar period has been that global economic calamity not only helped to create totalitarian menaces, but they also undermined Western efforts to thwart them, and I fear this is going to be applied to the present to agitate for an even more interventionist and aggressive posture abroad.

We are not, God willing, entering into a period of similar dislocation and upheaval. Even so, you can guarantee that the alarmists who warned of new Hitlers every other week in the booming ’90s and were constantly warning against “existential threats” during the last decade will be, if it is humanly possible, even more inclined to declare emergencies and demand action–and I fear the public will be inclined to listen to them, because a people is never as susceptible to a message of national superiority and self-righteousness as it is when times are bad, and neoconservatism indulges both sentiments. The moment when reflection and renovation are needed is often the moment when men turn instead to ready-made ideas that flatter and reassure them. A time of crisis is often the least likely time for self-criticism and reform. We may have seen the end of preventive war for now, and aggressive democracy promotion may recede into the background for a while, but the basic conviction that American power should advance and defend American ideals–as I think neoconservatives would euphemistically describe their own vision of the American role in the world–is going to continue to motivate a large part of the right. This is why, perversely, even though the experience of the Bush Era should make conservatives more inclined to heed non-interventionist and realist counsel, I fear that most conservatives are going to oppose the Obama administration by adopting even more hawkish positions than he does and criticize him for his lack of resolve, and the neoconservatives will be there urging them on.

Ericka Andersen is unhappy:

Perhaps world leaders are taking a hint from an America who [sic] refuses to give any credit to the guy who has been our leader. It’s easy to blame everything that goes wrong on the President, here and abroad apparently. I wonder how quickly America will do that to the new guy.

That’s all very well, but his critics by and large don’t give him much credit because he has not been very successful on his own terms, and many of his preferred policies have been simply calamitous. War opponents don’t give him credit that his war is now not nearly as destructive and horrifying as it once was–he started the war! Critics of his NATO expansion policies don’t give him credit for that because it was a terrible idea that contributed to the outbreak of the war in the Caucasus. Critics of recognizing Kosovo independence don’t give him credit for that, either, because once again it was a terrible idea that also contributed to the outbreak of the war in the Caucasus. He does not get credit for the loose monetary policy that helped to create the present crisis, because that is not something to be praised. His deliberate efforts to increase homeownership in reckless ways are not praised because they were misguided and have come back to bite us. Which policies, exactly, merit appreciation and respect for Mr. Bush? The illegal use of wiretapping, or the use of torture, or perhaps the shredding of 4th Amendment protections (with a big assist from the Congress), or maybe declaring U.S. citizens and foreign nationals enemy combatants without real cause and then holding them without charge for years? If you are concerned about AIDS in Africa and homelessness, by most accounts Bush administration policies in these areas have been reasonably effective. In most other respects, his administration has been a disaster. It is difficult to see what it is we will be thanking him for in the years to come. Many of his critics don’t blame him for everything that has gone wrong–they hold him accountable for the things that he and his administration did wrong, including many things that take away any right to expect the respect that is properly accorded to his office. Mr. Bush frittered away that respect with the decisions he made, and in the process he diminished the respect shown to our country.