Neoconservatism: The Blueprint of the US Security State
20 december 2024 | Victor Falkner
When the United States invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003, the extent of the influence of neoconservatives in the US government became clear. This group of thinkers, writers, diplomats and activists gained a foothold in no time and have since become an integral part of US foreign policy. Although the name suggests that these are classical liberals, liberal conservatives or supporters of traditional American values, in reality neo-conservatism is global revolutionary liberalism. It seeks to make the US into a unipolar power based on a liberal-democratic world community, in which Americans, as representatives of the ‘good’, see all those who oppose their interests and principles as enemies to be fought. Think of ‘the axis of evil’ (Iran, Iraq, North Korea), a phrase President George W. Bush used in a speech on 29 January 2002, coined by his neoconservative editorial writer, David Frum. Although neoconservatism is often associated with the 1990s and early 2000s, it remains the guiding ideology of US foreign policy today, as evidenced by Ukraine policy and regime change operations in the Middle East. Neoconservatism is far from spontaneous, however, as a little dip into history reveals.
The founder of neoconservatism is the Jewish-American journalist, Irving Kristol. He was born in New York in 1920 and studied at City College. Kristol was a staunch communist; while a student he joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth movement of the Socialist Party of America. Although Kristol was active in the communist movement, he turned away from the Stalinist Soviet Union and followed its main opponent, Leon Trotsky. The early Soviet Union gave much hope to international communists and anarchists like Kristol and Emma Goldman. However, they became disillusioned with the impact of the revolution and specifically the cruel politics of Joseph Stalin, who was often seen as a ‘traitor’ to the revolution. Kristol joined a group called the ‘New York Intellectuals’, a club of Jewish thinkers and writers who broadly belonged to the ‘anti-Stalinist left’. That is, they had an affinity for socialism and communism, but no longer identified with the Stalinist Soviet Union. Other well-known Trotskyists within this grouping include Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazar, Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler.
While the United States and the other Allies worked with the Soviet Union to dismantle the Third Reich, the US-British axis was working on the next step - containing the Soviet Union and even a follow-up war. The British were always suspicious of the Soviet Union, given their good ties with Pilsudski's Second Polish Republic, which was invaded in 1940. Domestic communist parties were also seen as extensions of the Soviet Union (like the CPUSA in America). Although Operation Unthinkable, declaring war on the Soviet Union just after World War II, was never carried out, containment of the Soviet Union as a superpower, and communism as its political ideology, were the strategies employed. A key example is the Truman Doctrine, which stated that Americans would work to ‘protect democracies from authoritarian threats’ - in other words, to fight the growth of the Soviet Union and its power bloc, a double-edged sword through the intertwining of political ideology and geopolitical interests.
Here we see an interesting phenomenon, namely that political ideology became intrinsically linked to a power bloc and its interests - the liberal democracies to the US, the communist people's republics to Russian ones. There are widely accepted arguments for this, such as the liberal peace theory which holds that liberal democracies pose no (military) threat to each other (ergo; the more liberal democracies, the more peaceful the world). Liberal-democratic sentiments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc were closely monitored for this reason and nipped in the bud if they harmed the interests of the power bloc. The main example is the Czechoslovak liberalisation during the Prague Spring of 1968, in which Secretary Dubček was brutally pushed aside by a Warsaw Pact military invasion. On the other hand, a major thrust emerged in the Western bloc to monitor communist movements and adjust them where possible. The anti-Stalinist left formed a very important pivot in this, being an enemy-affiliated political ideology disconnected from it. If this movement could be redirected further, a ‘safe’ form of socialism separate from the Soviet Union could emerge.
The New York Intellectuals were an ideal breeding ground for this. After World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). This explicitly anti-communist organisation aimed to weed out pro-Soviet sentiment from the wider Western intellectual space. In 1950, the CCF began with a conference in West Berlin, attended by several prominent liberal and socialist writers and thinkers, including Raymond Aron, Arthur Schlesinger, Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers and James Burnham (known for his book The Managerial Revolution). Also of note were Sidney Hook and Norman Podhoretz, members of the New York Intellectuals and key pivots in the development of neoconservatism. Like Kristol, Hook was a communist until World War II; he then turned away from it. More on Podhoretz later.
One of the magazines set up and funded by the CCF (i.e. by the CIA), together with British intelligence agency MI6, was a magazine called Encounter, whose founders were Irving Kristol and British journalist Stephen Spender. Like Kristol, Spender was a communist in his youth: he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. So although it was run by two (former) communists, Encounter was hardly critical of US foreign policy. Its aim was to bring out a magazine that was ‘left-of-centre’, which would at the same time argue against neutrality in the Cold War - in other words, to rally the anti-Stalinist left behind the Western bloc in the Cold War. CIA agent Michael Josselson, born into a Jewish family in Estonia in 1908, was appointed coordinator through the CCF to ensure that Kristol and Spender stayed within the permitted ideological margins. From the start, Josselson on the one hand and Kristol and Spender on the other argued with each other over the magazine's direction and the editorial freedom the latter would have.
What remains unclear, however, is to what extent Kristol and Spender knew that the CCF was actually a CIA front. When it was announced in the New York Times in 1966 that the CIA was behind the CCF and played a major role in the creation of Encounter, both claimed to know nothing about it. Kristol had left by 1958 and Spender left Encounter after the CIA's role in the whole thing was revealed. Besides Encounter, Kristol worked for the magazine The Public Interest, the think tank American Enterprise Institute and the magazine Commentary of which Norman Podhoretz was editor-in-chief. Podhoretz is a key figure within neoconservatism and was acquainted with Kristol. About Commentary, Benjamin Balint, formerly assistant editor of this magazine, wrote that it played a key role in transforming the ‘Jewish left’ into the ‘neoconservative right’.
Commentary was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) with the original aim of providing an intellectual Jewish perspective on matters of culture, politics and society. Initially, the magazine was liberal and progressive, with a strong focus on anti-fascism and anti-Stalinist communism. Under Podhoretz, Commentary shifted to the right in the 1970s, in response to the (New Left) protests against the Vietnam War and the entry of radical politics within the Democratic Party (including Saul Alinsky and Weather Underground frontman, Bill Ayers). This is when the transformation described by Balint took place. Commentary went from the anti-Stalinist left to the neo-conservative right, with an even greater focus on US military power and hard-line pro-Israeli politics. In Commentary's wake, neoconservatism grew as a (geo)political ideology in the United States.
Kristol, along with Gertrude Himmelfarb, had their son William (Bill). Kristol Jr. co-found the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), with Robert Kagan in 1997. This think tank advocated a ‘new century’ based on American principles and interests. In their Statement of Principles, they advocated making the most of the unipolar moment created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, making the United States the only remaining superpower on the world stage. By lavishly increasing defence spending, promoting political and economic liberalism abroad and challenging what they saw as hostile regimes, the end of history would be confirmed. Many of the PNAC signatories held prominent positions in the Bush administration, including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle. Other signatories included Norman Podhoretz, Frank Gaffney, Paula Dobriansky, Gary Bauer, Francis Fukuyama, Steve Forbes and John Bolton. Under the Bush administration, America invaded Iraq, something Kristol and Kagan had advocated since 1998. For instance, after the 9/11 attacks, they wrote a letter to George W. Bush saying that Saddam Hussein should be removed, regardless of whether evidence could be found that Iraq was involved in those attacks. In addition, several bilateral treaties, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (2002) with Russia, were abandoned under the neoconservative line of the Bush administration. This gradually strengthened the US’ unique position outside the international rule of law.
Neoconservatism evolved from a movement of former anti-Stalinist left-wing intellectuals to a dominant force in US foreign policy. Led by figures such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, this ideology has undergone a transformation which is deeply embedded in the US security state. With its roots in the Cold War and the struggle against communism, neoconservatism has developed a vision that positions the United States as a unipolar power, charged with the mission of promoting a liberal-democratic world order. This ideology and interests behind it not only influenced the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overall restructuring of the Middle East, but also remains visible today in US policy towards Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Neoconservatism, with its emphasis on military power, proactive intervention and the promotion of liberal democracy, became the ideology of the US security state. What was once revolutionary politics is now the centrepiece of US geopolitical strategy.
Sources:
(1) https://www.jstor.org/stable/24475599
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/robert-fulford-when-the-cia-had-a-magazine
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/origins-congress-cultural-freedom.pdf
