Thursday, 27 March 2025

The neo-cons, who want the US to dominate every part of the world, have still not gone away.

From June 20, 2014, Stephen M. Walt, writing in Foreign Policy

"What, if anything, might reduce the neoconservative influence to its proper dimension (that is to say, almost nil)? I wish I knew, for if the past ten years haven’t discredited them, it’s not obvious what would. No doubt leaders in Moscow and Beijing derive great comfort from that fact: For what better way to ensure that the United States continues to lurch from crisis to crisis, and from quagmire to quagmire? Until our society gets better at listening to those who are consistently right instead of those who are reliably wrong, we will repeat the same mistakes and achieve the same dismal results. Not that the neoconservatives will care." 

The neo-cons  were discredited by the Iraq invasion but incredibly they won favour again. 

The world they made you see around you, including the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Ukraine. It remains to be seen whether the America First people, the hawks or the neo-cons will win in the new US administration. 

Here is Jeffrey Sachs on July 18 last year, 8 days before Old Man Biden was forced to retire:
Every President since [1992]—Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—has pursued the neocon agenda of U.S. hegemony, leading the U.S. into perpetual wars of choice, including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, as well as relentless eastward expansion of NATO, despite a clear U.S. and German promise in 1990 to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.

The core neocon idea is that the U.S. should have military, financial, economic, and political dominance over any potential rival in any part of the world. It is targeted especially at rival powers such as China and Russia, and therefore brings the U.S. into direct confrontation with them. The American hubris is stunning: most of the world does not want to be led by the U.S., much less led by a U.S. state clearly driven by militarism, elitism and greed.

The neocon plan for U.S. military dominance was spelled out in the Project for a New American Century. The plan includes relentless NATO expansion eastward, and the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance against a now-defunct Soviet Union to an offensive alliance used to promote U.S. hegemony. The U.S. arms industry is the major financial and political backer of the neocons. The arms industry spearheaded the lobbying for NATO's eastward enlargement starting in the 1990s. Joe Biden has been a staunch neocon from the start, first as Senator, then as Vice President, and now as President.

To achieve hegemony, the neocon plans rely on CIA regime-change operations; U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S. overseas military bases (now numbering around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries); the militarization of advanced technologies (biowarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.); and relentless use of information warfare.

The quest for U.S. hegemony has pushed the world to open warfare in Ukraine between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine was provoked by the relentless determination of the U.S. to expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s fervent opposition, as well as the U.S. participation in the violent Maidan coup (February 2014) that overthrew a neutral government, and the U.S. undermining of the Minsk II agreement that called for autonomy for the ethnically Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.

The NATO Declaration calls NATO a defensive alliance, but the facts say otherwise. NATO repeatedly engages in offensive operations, including regime-change operations. NATO led the bombing of Serbia in order to break that nation in two parts, with NATO placing a major military base in the breakaway region of Kosovo. NATO has played a major role in many U.S. wars of choice. NATO bombing of Libya was used to overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi.

2 comments:

  1. A definition of neo-conservative that takes in Richard Cheney is historically unsound and not particularly helpful. When the "neocons" first appeared about 45 years ago, they tended to be East Coast intellectuals who had moved to the right on foreign policy, in some cases I suppose convinced by Hannah Arendt that Stalinism was a bad thing. Generally they had been liberal (John Roche?) or somewhat left, even Trotskyist, whence the "neo" prefix.

    Richard Cheney spent his public career as a Republican, as congressional intern, congressman, cabinet member in the G.H.W. Bush administration, VP to G.W. Bush. Would you trust a work of British history that wrote of Salisbury or Balfour as a "neo-Tory"?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I completely agree - Cheney was not a neo-con. Norman Podhoretz was a leading early one. His son John editor of Commentary was also very influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Podhoretz
      The first neocons were usually American Jewish former Communists who came to identify the USA as the country that could liberate the world instead of the USSR. Paul Gottfried calls then pseudo-conservatives.

      Delete