What are the main tenets that inform Neo-conservatism? How influential has the movement been on US Foreign Policy?

This paper intends to present conservatism, as an ideology revisited. Its modest goal is to analyze the tenets that inform neo-conservatism and illustrate how influential this movement has been on US foreign policy. We need to mention that the widespread notion that today’s conservatism, at least as far as the Anglo-American version, commonly called neo-conservatism is concerned, is somehow different from earlier, more serene versions of neo-conservatism. Beginning with Margaret Thatcher in Britain and with Ronald Reagan in the US, conservatism has become a “fighting” faith. In other words, it has become what many of its adherents would have forcefully insisted it could and should never become; that is a full-fledged political ideology (meaning a distinctive, more or less coherent system of political beliefs with a view to informing political action).

Samuel Huntington’s article “Conservatism as an Ideology” (1957) differentiates its subject from other examples of the species by describing it as a kind of positional or situational belief-system, continuously responding to the challenges of the times, expressed in rival ideologies, but itself lacking substantive content, that is a permanent, idiosyncratic core of propositions. So, you might summarize Huntington’s argument in Conservatism as an Ideology this way: it really isn’t. Likewise, another thinker, Michael Oakeshott, most explicitly and unapologetically takes this latter position that conservatism is not an ideology; or perhaps more accurately: that, although you could be a conservative (and not just in politics, either), there really no such thing as conservatism (as an ideology), as those who adhere to an ideology are the exact opposite of a conservative (Oakeshott, 1991).

According to Anthony Quinton (1978), the well-known conservative arguments, following from this skepticism concerning the capabilities of human reason, against rationalistic plans of perfecting social institutions are rather powerful. They are also of an unmistakably negative nature. It is not too difficult to see how this alleged negativity renders conservatism somewhat helpless in the face of what conservatives perceive “the relentless onslaught of rationalistic plans of reform” (taking the forms of various ideologies) which for the best part of the last century have been the chief characteristic of the times. Some conservatives reacted to this constellation of events with a certain measure of resigned pessimism, believing that the future indeed belonged with the opposite side; “that at best a rearguard action could be fought; that conservatism’s role was to make concessions as slowly and with as good grace as possible.” On the other hand, others decided to take up arms against this sea of troubles and by opposing try to end them. This, they reasoned, could only be done by adopting an ideology of their own, to arm themselves with in the battle of ideas. Flashing a light on the origins of this feature of contemporary Anglo-American (neo)conservatism is what the exceedingly modest aim of this paper is.

Being conservative, according to Oakeshott, means, among other things, preferring:

“the familiar to the unknown, […] the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss” (1991:408).

In other words, it means exhibiting a certain kind of disposition in manners of thought and behavior. What is most emphatically does not mean is subscribing to a certain set of beliefs, or general principles, “a creed or a doctrine”- an ideology. Ideologies belong to a rationalist approach of politics, which takes as its starting point a system of theoretical, abstract ideas and intends to use it as a guide to political action. The problem with ideologies, according to Oakeshott, of course, is that only the technical, and not the practical, part of knowledge about politics is available to the rationalist mind, as it is the kind that is susceptible to formalization. So he considers political ideologies only a poor extract, a crude abridgement of political knowledge and the ideological manner of political conduct an impoverishment of politics. The fullness of political knowledge can only be found in the practice of a given political community, in tradition. Political action can take as its guide nothing else but “the intimations of tradition”.

However, Oakeshott claims that “governing is a specific and limited activity”. It is concerned only with the administration of general rules of human conduct, “which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration” (1991:424). As people tend to be engaged in a great variety of activities and entertain a multiplicity of opinions, collisions between them are inevitable. Hence the need for rules of conduct, the making and enforcement of which constitute the office of government. But to avoid imposing substantive activities or opinions on people, the rules have to be general and only a government that is “not concerned with moral right or wrong”, “indifferent to ‘truth’ and ‘error’ alike” on the part of its subjects, is well suited to the task (1991:428-430). Now, Oakeshott observes that some conservatives ma want to defend their view of the proper nature of government “by appealing to certain general ideas”. He on his part does not think that a disposition to be conservative in politics is “necessarily connected with any particular beliefs about the universe, about the world in general or about human conduct in general” (1991:423).

As we have seen, there were others who considered it “commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think.” But there were others who did not. Or, rather, rejected the label- all the while exposing many o the same ideas. In his famous essay, “Why I am not a Conservative”, Hayek gives his reasons not only for that, but voices his “increasing misgivings” with regards to describing himself as a “liberal” too. He writes that what he means by liberalism “has little to do with any political movement that goes under that name today”. Those political movements have “absorbed the crude and militant rationalism of the French revolution” and are led “more by a desire to impose upon the world a preconceived rational pattern than to provide opportunity for free growth.” Hayek’s kind of “true” liberalism, on the other hand, “shares with conservatism a distrust of reason” and recognizes its debt to conservative thinkers’ “loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions” (Hayek,1984). Indeed, Hayek builds his ideas on much the same epistemological ground as Oakeshott. His main enemy is also “rationalism”. The problem with rationalistic plans of reform is that they jeopardize the “spontaneous order” of “grown” (and not planned) social institutions, which rely on dispersed, practical knowledge for their proper functioning. As the rejection of rationalism is, as we have already noted, one of the basic tenets of conservatism, it is not surprisisng that Hayek felt the need to defend himself against charges of being conservative. Moreover, according to Hayek “conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change”, something not unlike Oakeshott’s conservative “disposition”. The problem for Hayek with this kind of conservatism is that:

“by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance….The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is a need for a ‘brake on the vehicle of progress’, I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake.” (1984:281-282)

Conservatism “by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved,…deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas.” As Hayek didn’t think it would be enough to “sit and think”, he set out to arm himself with an “ideology of freedom”.

The founding father of American neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, opens his 1995 essay, “America’s ‘Exceptional’ Conservatism”, recalling the day in 1956 when arriving at his office at the Encounter magazine in London he found on his desk an unsolicited manuscript from Michael Oakeshott. He proceeded to read the essay, called “On being Conservative”, with “pleasure and appreciation” and finally he rejected it. By way of explanation, Kristol proposes that while admiring the essay, he didn’t really like it. That is he disagreed with it. The reason was that he was “in the earliest stages of intellectual pregnancy with those attitudes and dispositions that later emerged as ‘neoconservatism’. And American neoconservatism is very different from the kind of ideal English conservatism that Oakeshott was celebrating so brilliantly” (Kristol, 1995:375-376). The reason why Kristol thinks “Oakeshott’s conservative disposition runs squarely against the American grain” is the kind of “ideological patriotism” inherent in the American character; a consequence of the widely noted fact that the United States is a “creedal nation”, united, as a nation of immigrants, by a “civic religion”.

By Kristol’s famous definition a neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality”. Like Hayek, neoconservatives (many of them one time liberals or radicals) were deeply unsatisfied with contemporary turns of American liberalism, so, like Hayek, they took to reclaiming “the traditional principles of liberalism from the leftists who had hijacked and corrupted it” (Podhoretz, 1996). But in fact, neoconservatives went further than the Hayekian project of resurrecting classical liberalism. Strauss, who had immigrated from Nazi Germany to America, had the greatest effect on Kristol’s intellectual formation. Strauss saw as the central problem of his time “the crisis of modernity”. This meant primarily the loss of faith on the part of the West in its own moral ideals, which loss manifests itself in a lack of political resolve and a consequent unreadiness to act in defense of those ideals. “Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them any more. We cannot wholeheartedly act upon them any more”, writes Strauss (1953:6).

In particular, Strauss thought that this crisis was encoded in the DNA of modernity and he traced it back to the liberalism of Hobbes and Locke and their break with the ancient tradition of political philosophy. By giving up on natural law, the moderns gave up on political philosophy (defined as the search for truth in matters of politics) as well, substituting it with a “value-neutral” social science built on the Weberian distinction between “fact” and “value”. This, according to Strauss, inexorably leads to nihilism, indeed “it is identical with nihilism” (1953:6). The only cure could be found in the writings of the “ancients”, Plato and Aristotle, and in their ideas about “classical natural right” (or, rather, natural law) and the proper place of political science in the life of the community. He believed that the perfect political order was “the perfect political order, as Aristotle and Plato sketched it”. However, he also agreed with the ancients on the chance realization of the best regime. So, in another place he wrote that “liberal or constitutional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any other alternative that is viable in our age.” (Deutsch and Soffer, 1987:8) In general, for Strauss and his followers, their aim really was (and is) the preservation of liberal democracy, as it is practiced in the United States. However, they have their reservations that liberal democracy, by its very nature, is vulnerable in a confrontation with despotism, lacking the moral basis for making the necessary sacrifices which are needed to persevere in such a confrontation. But, unlike Oakeshott and Hayek, they believe that the US government has everything to do with “natural law”; they support the liberty of the ancients (and not the liberty of the moderns), which meant the right to participate in the matters of the community, often bought by paying the price of personal sacrifice. Sometimes, in the face of tyranny, making war is what is called for.

Indeed, the great passion of neoconservatives in the 1970s was their implacable anti-communism. Norman Podhoretz writes that they did not love anything more than they loathed communism (Podhoretz, 1996). Correspondingly, it was in the realm of US foreign policy where neoconservatives made their most determined stand in the 1970s and 1980s, and where they have remained (or, rather, have reemerged as) the most influential. Neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals waged a two-front war against traditional conservative “realist” foreign policy –as personified by H. Kissinger and practiced by the Nixon and Ford administrations—on the one hand and the liberal “idealism” of the Carter precidency.

Neoconservatives were no fans of foreign policy liberal idealism. Perhaps the most prominent neoconservative foreign policy intellectual of the era, Reagan’s adviser J. Kirkpatrick, names the “rationalist perversion in modern politics” as the source of much that is wrong with the world (events in Iran and Nicaragua, among other things). The essence of rationalism, as Kirkpatrick understands it, is the “failure to distinguish between the domains of thought and experience,” that is between “ideas and institutions.” “Rationalism encourages us to believe that anything that can be conceived can be brought into being.” Rationalist theories “begin not from how things are but how they ought to be” and consist “in the determined effort to understand and shape people and societies on the basis of inadequate, oversimplified theories of human behavior.” It is “concerned more with the abstract than the concrete, with the possible than the probable” and less “with people as they are than as they might be” (1982:10-11). In other words, Kirkpatrick believes that “we have had enough rationalism in our foreign policy” and blames “the rationalistic spirit of the age” for taking no note of the fact that:

“institutions are patterned human behavior that exist and function through the people of society and that radically changing institutions means radically changing the lives of people who may not want their lives changed…When we forget, or willfully choose to ignore, the intractability of human behavior, the complexity of human institutions and the probability of unanticipated consequences, we do so at great risk, and often immense human cost.” (1982:17-18)

But neoconservatives were no fans of foreign policy realism in the Kissingerian mould, either. There main problem with realism was its ideological indifference. According to this school of thought, in foreign policy there is no place for morality. The only think that counts is the geopolitical balance of powers. Injecting notions about the moral superiority of one of the participants in the international system only brings instability. They long argued that when confronting the Soviet Union, ideology is paramount. It is so on the part of the Soviets, who probably don’t consider themselves representatives of a “normal” nation state, “seeking its place under the sun.” But it is still more important on the part of the United States. As Kirkpatrick wrote, “the notion that foreign policy should be oriented toward balance of power politics, or realpolitik, is totally foreign to the American tradition.” Governments must act from an ideal of their societies, especially in democracies, where moral legitimacy is a persistent question in politics. Kristol, similarly, insisted on the fact that “pure amoral Realpolitik is no part of the American political tradition,” and warned against the nation sacrificing its moral foundations and thus “casting a pall of illegitimacy” over its ideals. Podhoretz said that realism “robbed the Soviet-American conflict of the moral and political dimensions”, thus jeopardizing Americans’ will to make the necessary sacrifices to pursue the Cold War effectively (Hoeveler, 1991:152-171).

In a speech entitled “The Reagan Reassertion of Western Values”, Kirkpatrick warned that:

“it is not only conceivable that an affluent and technologically advanced democratic civilization may succumb to one that is distinctly inferior in the wealth and well-being of its people. This has occurred more than once in history. The decisive factor in the rise and fall of nations is what Machiavelli called virtu, meaning vitality and capacity for collective action. In the battle with totalitarianism, a free society has enormous advantages of which we are all well aware. But without the political will not merely to survive but to prevail, these advantages count for nought.” (1983:31)

And in another, “The Reagan Phenomenon and the Liberal Tradition”, she noted that the presence of intellectuals at relatively high policy-making positions in the Reagan administration signals that “there is something ideologically self-conscious going on” in American politics and then she stated that “the president and many of his principal advisers see themselves as purveyors and defenders of the classical liberal tradition.” (1983:7)

The successes of the Reagan years however –especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “evil empire”— gave way in the 1990s to what the neoconservatives saw as the complacency of the first Bush, the Clinton presidencies and Bush junior. In 1996, William Kristol and Robert Kagan –representatives of the new generation of neoconservatives—find the US foreign policy climate of the times reminiscent of the mid-1970s (the period of the first great conservative awakening). Conservatives are, once again, “adrift”, leaning uncertainly “on some version of the conservative ‘realism’ of Henry Kissinger and his disciples.” Meanwhile, the American public is “indifferent, if not hostile, to foreign policy and commitments abroad, more interested in balancing the budget than in leading the world.”

What one might call the Tocquevillean disease of modern democratic societies –turning away from public affairs in favor of the pursuit of one’s and one’s families’ happiness, that is material well-being—is ready to reassert itself. Americans “have never had it so good”, the authors observe (mentioning as proof, among other things, the security of Americans not only to live within their own borders but to travel and do business safely almost anywhere in the world.”). The lack of visible threats “has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based.” As Kristol and Kagan see it, the post-Cold War question of “where the threat is” is misconceived. “In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness.”

So, what America needs, once again, is a “neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence”, which would actively engage in promoting American principles of governance –democracy, free markets, respect for liberty—abroad and also pursuing policies intending to bring about “change of regime” (in Irak, Iran, Cuba or China, for example). This “more elevated vision” of America’s international role would consist in a “benevolent global hegemony” resting on the “strategic and ideological predominance” of the United States. Kristol and Kagan even challenge the famous admonition of John Quincy Adams against America going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy” with the words: “But why not?”

The last but one part of Kristol and Kagan’s article (Kristol and Kagan, 1996) bears the subtitle: “From NSC-68 to 1996.” As the authors inform us, NSC-68 was a national security planning document drafted in 1950, which called for an all-out effort to meet the Soviet challenge, and called for a full scale ideological confrontation and massive increases in defense spending. Now, what is eminently interesting from the authors’ point of view regarding NSC-68 is that at first, against a backdrop of an American public enjoying peace and prosperity, it languished. Then the North Korean invasion of South Korea changed that. The moral of the story, according to the authors, is that “as troubles arise and the need to act becomes clear, those who have laid the foundations for a necessary shift in policy have a chance to lead Americans onto a new course.”

On the other hand, Oakeshott calls the approach in which “arrangements of a society are made to appear, not as manners of behavior, but as pieces of machinery to be transported about the world indiscriminately”, “one of the most insidious current misunderstandings of political activity.” (1991:30)
In his book, “Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order”, Robert Kagan declares that “on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” And he goes on saying that “they agree on little and understand one another less and less." First published as a journal article in June 2002, before the Iraq crisis came to dominate trans-Atlantic relations, Kagan's formulation has proven ever more influential as the U.S.-Europe divide over Iraq has grown. On the book’s opening page, he offers this succinct distillation of his bold, and controversial, argument:
“On the all-important question of power –the efficacy of power, the morality of power and the desirability of power –American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and international negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant's ‘perpetual peace’. Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.” (Kagan, 2003)
It is also of great interest to mention that Paul Wolfowitz, an academic and deputy secretary of defense for policy, supervised the drafting of a 1992 policy statement on America's mission in the post-Cold War era. Called the “Defense Planning Guidance”, it is an internal set of military guidelines that typically is prepared every few years by the Defense Department. This policy guidance is distributed to military leaders and civilian Defense Department heads to provide them with a geopolitical framework for assessing their force level and bugetary needs. The 46-page classified document circulated for several weeks at senior levels in the Pentagon. But controversy erupted after it was leaked to The New York Times and The Washington Post and the White House ordered the Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to rewrite it. According to these ideas, the three key points of US foreign policy (…and neoconservatism) are: 1. “The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.”2. “Another major U.S. objective should be to safeguard U.S. interests and promote American values.”3. “If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action.”
Now, in the aftermath of Sept 11 and with G.W.Bush as a President for the second time, Wolfowitz's ideas have become policy. According to Will Hutton, Europe and America share a great liberal tradition that runs much deeper than the temporary phenomenon engendered by the occupation of the White House by an Administration whose foreign policy has been hijacked by the Neoconservatives. Hutton's thesis is that the current rift between the Bush Administration and its European allies over the war in Iraq is really a sharp split between this consensus of US/European foreign policy liberalism and the presently prevailing Neoconservatism of the Bush administration. He quickly gets to the points that America has to give up its hyper-individualistic creed in favour of the recognition that people within nations are interdependent. (Hutton, 2003)
However, what we should question here is whether the “Neoconservative hijacking of US foreign policy” will prove to be as temporary as Hutton evidently hopes. My personal opinion is that foreign policy in the Bush Administration will prove to be even more driven by Neoconservative ideology and even more disconnected from realities on the ground. Neoconservatives determined that one of the ways to achieve power and put their ideology into practice was to have the American Religious Right hijack the Republican Party. The influential Neoconservatives are not religious at all; they are disproportionately secular Jews or secular “nominal” Christians and they are unlikely, in either case, to allow the tenets of the faith (some of them admit to professing) to get in the way of their political ideology. But the problem is that having decided to use religious extremism as a means towards achieving power, the Neoconservatives have unleashed one of the most elemental and pernicious forces known to mankind. History is littered with examples of rulers who have sought to “use” the power of religious extremism to their ends and have ended up being overwhelmed by the force they set in motion. Finally, we should also take into account that the USA has steadily become a state where corporate power and the state are melding into one. The policies of government are now built in alliance with the corporations and directed to their objectives. That is a well-known phenomenon which goes by a very ugly word: fascism…


References

Deutsch K. L. and Sofer W., 1987. The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Hayek F. A., 1984. Why I am not a Conservative. In Nishiyama and Leube, 1984:281-298.
Hoeveler J. D., Jr., 1991. Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagon Era. The University of Wisconsin Press.
Huntington S. P., 1957. Conservatism as an Ideology. American Political Science Review, 51:454-473.
Hutton W., 2003. A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America should join the World. London: W. W. Norton and Company.
Kirkpatrick J. J., 1982. Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics. American Enterprise Institute.
Kirkpatrick J. J., 1983. The Reagan Phenomenon and Other Speeches on Foreign Policy. American Enterprise Institute.
Kagan R., 2003. Paradise and Power: America, Europe and the New World Order. Atlantic Books.
Kristol I., 1995. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press.
Kristol W. and Kagan R., 1996. Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy. Foreign Affairs, 75(4):18-32.
Oakeshott M., 1991. Rationalism in Politics and other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Press.
Podhoretz N., 1996. Neoconservatism: A Eulogy. Commentary, 101(3):19-28.
Quinton A., 1978. The Politics of Imperfection. London: Faber and Faber.
Strauss L., 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.