Trump Is Making Me Miss the Neocons

We are far from the justification (if you prefer, the posturing) that sent our troops to Iraq. “We must strengthen our ties with our democratic allies and challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values. » said the 1997 manifesto of the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative group that guided Dubya’s strategy in Iraq. That word “challenge” ended up doing a lot more work than perhaps even the signatories anticipated. But it was hard to argue with the general sentiment. “Last peace is achieved as justice and democracy advance,” Dubya said in November 2003. “We will bring about an ideal of democracy in all regions of the world. » Wouldn’t it be nice to hear an American president say that now?

I don’t want to push this argument too far. As Peter Steinfels pointed out in his classic 1979 book, The neoconservativesneoconservative idealism about promoting democracy abroad has been accompanied by a certain distrust of it at home. Responding to Al Smith’s assertion that “the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy,” Samuel Huntington wrote in 1976 that “applying this remedy at the present time may well add fuel to the fire.” As for Bush, Trump’s election strategy of disenfranchisement through false claims of voter fraud originated in the Bush White House. The Bush doctrine, which sang the praises of democracy, less attractively rejected multilateralism (more Trumpism avant la lettre) and rationalized preemptive military attacks.

But Trump does not even pretend to care about democratic values: he flamboyantly abjures them. As TNRIt is Michael Tomasky observed earlier this week that Trump was adamantly against “the idea that American military power must be linked to a positive-sum objective that positions the United States as a force promoting global security and Western democracy.… War is good, provided it is about what everything, for him, really is: raw power in the service of plunder and conquest. Even if Trump takes the legalistic tone that this intervention was just a police action to arrest an indicted drug criminal, consider that when President George HW Bush claimed the same thing in Panama about Manuel Noriega, he ensured that Guillermo Endara, whose accession to the presidency Noriega had blocked, was sworn in on the day of the invasion. Poppy Bush’s invasion defied national and international law just as much as Trump’s, but Panama has been a democracy ever since. Venezuela will remain a dictatorship.