Neocons Poised to Join New Government by Phil Geraldi

 

Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.

 

To be sure, some neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having been fired by the president and written a book.

 

Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they have been maintaining relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.

 

 

 

It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini. The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to U.S. national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum are favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s recent resignation. Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC.

 

The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication The Weekly Standard virtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon support for an aggressive policy against Russia due to its involvement in Syria and has led to repeated calls for the U.S. to attack Iran and destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively sought “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective.

 

The neocons are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are funded by Jewish billionaires. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University. The neocon opposition has been sniping against Trump over the past four years but has been biding its time and building new alliances, waiting for what it has perceived to be an inevitable regime change in Washington.

 

That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland.

 

Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. His wife Victoria Nuland is perhaps better known. She was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

 

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

 

And, to be sure, beyond regime change in places like Ukraine, President Barack Obama was no slouch when it came to starting actual shooting wars in places like Libya and Syria while also killing people, including American citizens, using drones. Biden appears poised to inherit many former Obama White House senior officials, who would consider the eager-to-please neoconservatives a comfortable fit as fellow foot soldiers in the new administration. Foreign policy hawks expected to have senior positions in the Biden Administration include Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power and, most important of all the hawkish Michele Flournoy, who has been cited as a possible secretary of defense. And don’t count Hillary Clinton out. Biden is reportedly getting his briefings on the Middle East from Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who now lives in the Jewish state and is reportedly working for an Israeli government supported think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies.

 

Nowhere in Biden’s possible foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to a new cold war with major competitor powers like Russia and China. In fact, Biden himself appears to embrace an extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with both Moscow and Beijing “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language is unrelenting, so much so that it is Donald Trump who could plausibly be described as the peace candidate in the recently completed election, having said at the Republican National Convention in August “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended.”

Comments

[Polish Janitor]

To all,

If you have enough time, I highly recommend this article (link below) for those who want to understand the core ideas of neoconservatism as an intellectual movement. I would like to remind readers this important point that neoconservatism is NOT an exclusively jewish movement or cabal. There are many many highly influential Catholics who are known as part of the movement, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Bennett, Robert Nozick, John Neuhaus, Michael Lind (protestant, he also left the movement in the mid 90s), the great Bill Buckley, William Rusher, Peter Steinfels, and many others.

The key to understanding the movement is to view it as a new 'Nouveau riche' (literally!) and highly ideologically-driven (Trotskyite, communist, socialist, anti-Leninist left) immigrants-mostly Jewish- from east coast who gradually created a class of elites and joined the elite and influential Eastern Establishment later on, particularly after the end of World War II.

The neocons present themselves as the "vital center", who want to balance America between the faction of equality (Democratic Party) and the faction of freedom (Republican Party). The farther you go left (Bernie, AOC) or the right (Ron/Rand Paul, Trump) is considered dangerous to the 'Vital Center' and is taboo. They have people at both parties to ensure their grip on national power and politics, so the game is rigged against the Independents or any third-party individuals who dares to challenge the so-called Vital Center. Another central issue of the neocons is the preservation of Israel and they have managed to instill bi-partisan support for Israel (Republicans since the 70s, Dems since the mid 80s).

You have to understand that since the mid 70s (after Yom Kippur war in 1973) the American foreign policy in the ME has been shaped (at least to a great degree) in Israel and revolves around Israeli interests first, and then if lucky, American interests second or third. So in the neocon thinking, whatever is good for Israeli interests, is naturally going to be good for American interests as well, which of course is totally incorrect.

***

https://www.hoover.org/research/neoconservatisms-liberal-legacy

[JM Gavin]

lux,
Very interesting article. I particularly like these paragraphs:

"Two final notes about neocons. First, this is a movement with no single recognized leader or politburo. Yes, they work together quite closely and coordinate their messaging to create very effective echo chambers. But they also often have differences of opinion over tactics and sometimes over real substance. Some neocons, like Frank Gaffney (a top Ted Cruz adviser) and Daniel Pipes, actively promote Islamophobia, for example, while others, such as Kagan and Reuel Gerecht, disdain it. There are soft neocons like David Brooks of The New York Times and hard neocons like Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal. In other words, the movement is not monolithic, except in the core elements I outlined above.

Second, neocons have been admirably nimble in creating tactical alliances with very different political forces to achieve their ends. In the mid-1970s, they worked with aggressive nationalists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to derail Kissinger’s efforts at détente with Moscow. Under Jimmy Carter, they brought the Christian Right, despite the clear anti-Semitism of some of its leaders, into that coalition. (As Irving Kristol explained: “it’s their theology, but it’s our Israel.”) That broader coalition helped propel Reagan to victory in 1980."

This addresses one of the things that has puzzled me about neocons, which is that some very prominent folks considered neocons such as Samantha Power are stridently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. This is in marked contrast to most I what I had known about neocons in the past, as pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian positions seemed like a core view of neocons.

JMG

[Mark Logan]

JM Gavin,

I don't agree they work together closely. The Samantha Powers do not work closely with the Frank Gaffneys. IMO it appears they do because their agendas have converging points. The Ziocons exploit this with great skill, I might add.

A tangential point, but merely another of the many heads of the this beast: A key to their power is the perception that it will be easy. a two minute clip:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4529789/user-clip-benjamin-netanyahu-projects-benefits-war-iraq-2002

"With each victory you amass, the rest become easier and easier."

As the Save The Worlder Sam Powers' people also imagine.

[JM Gavin]

Mark Logan,
I don't think they work together, but their separate efforts are towards similar ends. I'm not sure it matters whether or not they are coordinating their actions. Time will tell if this changes, and they become more chummy. Keep watching for a confirmed sighting of Paul Wolfowitz and Samantha Power strolling hand-in-hand along The Mall.

It's hard to rebut Netanyahu's statements from 2002 with the events that occurred from 2002 until the present, as our own execution was deeply flawed. In Afghanistan, in particular, we had to work very hard to lose the war. Winning would have been quite simple. We just decided to stick around too long and see if we could foster an outbreak of Jeffersonian democracy.

One of my own "lessons learned" from 2001 until present is that the U.S.A. should never get involved in any overseas military action that can't be completed in three weeks.

JMG

[Ishmael Zechariah]

Posted by: lux | 14 November 2020 at 06:58 AM
re: "Perhaps, but that may only be the foreign blob angle. On other topics they are as American as apple pie."

Lux,
Is overlooking the murder of US servicemen/sailors on Liberty "as American as apple pie"
Ishmael Zechariah