Trump Is Making Me Miss the Neocons

We’re a long way from the justification (if you prefer, posturing) that shipped our troops to Iraq. “We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values,” said the 1997 manifesto for the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative group that guided Dubya’s Iraq strategy. That word “challenge” ended up doing a lot more work than perhaps even the signatories anticipated. But the overall sentiment was hard to argue with. “Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance,” Dubya said in November 2003. “We will raise up an ideal of democracy in every part of the world.” Wouldn’t it be nice to hear an American president say that now?

I don’t want to take this argument too far. As Peter Steinfels pointed out in his classic 1979 book, The Neoconservatives, the neocons’ idealism about promoting democracy abroad accompanied a certain wariness of it at home. Answering Al Smith’s dictum that “the only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy,” Samuel Huntington wrote in 1976 that “applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.” As for Bush, Trump’s electoral strategy of disenfranchisement through bogus voter-fraud claims was born in Bush’s White House. The Bush Doctrine that sang the praises of democracy less attractively rejected multilateralism (more Trumpism avant la lettre) and rationalized pre-emptive military attacks.

But Trump doesn’t even pretend to care about democratic values—he flamboyantly abjures them. As TNR ’sMichael Tomasky observed earlier this week, Trump is affirmatively against “the idea that America’s military might needs to be tethered to some positive-sum goal that positions the United States as a force that fosters global security and Western democracy.… War is fine, provided it’s just about what everything is, to him, really all about: raw power in the service of plunder and conquest.” Even when Trump takes the legalistic high ground that this intervention was merely a police action to arrest an indicted drug criminal, consider that when President George H.W. Bush claimed the same thing in Panama about Manuel Noriega he made sure that Guillermo Endara, whose ascent to the presidency Noriega had blocked, got sworn in on the day of the invasion. Poppy Bush’s invasion defied domestic and international law just as much as Trump’s, but Panama has been a democracy ever since. Venezuela will remain a dictatorship.