What the Neocons Do—and Don’t—Explain About Trump

“Once they were new. Now, Trump’s foreign policy is chosen” America first “, read a New York Times the address It was published one week after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris last November. The report focused on three national security security candidates Trump: actor Michael Waltz for the National Security Adviser, Senator Marco Rubio to the Foreign Minister, and the Higseth House of the Defense Secretary. All of them, as the article claimed, appears to have moved away from the neo -conservatives, who Times It is characterized as “ideology” that enhances “foreign interventions or the prospects for changing the system. This was the ideology that prompted the George W. Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003 in the wake of the September 11 attacks, but for each TimesIn the Trump era, giving way to focus on “deals”. Regarding the issues ranging from Ukraine to Afghanistan to China, the elites of the foreign policy have become less inclined towards the military crusader to reshape the world according to the American proverb and more than that towards cold and pragmatic policies that are in line with narrow American interests – at least, this is the story that They want to tell them about it.

What type of foreign policy will have already followed by Trump in his second administration is still an open issue, and the registry provides from his first administration contradictory evidence. As a president, Trump often spoke sympathy with Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticized NATO, but he is also Extensive weapons sales To Ukraine. Trump Three times the pace of bombing In Afghanistan, but also I negotiated the withdrawal of quick forces; Despite him Pasture Against China, it is to praise President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian tendencies. for him The last gestures Towards the expansion within the Western hemisphere – creating regional allegations from Canada to Greenland to Panama – he greatly suggests Dofish instincts, but it is difficult to know how Trump literally says. He took advice in the past from characters Times It will be called “America first” in addition to the numbers it calls “new bars” – and will most likely do it again.

The story of the new conservatives has a lot to learn us about the current political moment, but the “new feeding” as a reduction in the strict foreign policy – despite its spread since the Iraq war – is far from what the “modern archives” mean when it came for the first time to that common use during the seventies . At that time, it was the term Opprobrium among leftist intellectuals such as Michael Harrington, who was aimed at a group of their peers who, in response to the new violations of the new back during the previous decade, had worshiped for a reactionary defense of the liberal war of the Cold War.

Some of the described characters, such as Daniel Bell or Daniel Patrick Mounehan, rejected the poster even when they expressed loudly their copies of the new left, while others came, most notably Irving Christol and Norman Boduritz, to embrace him. In the 1976 article in NewsweekChristol tried to determine the “new pigs” and reached a list of five wide tendencies, the first of which is (rejecting the great luxury of society, but not the new deal; support for policy reforms directed to the market; sanctification in favor of Western high culture. On foreign policy, specifically on Kristol wrote:

Modern archives believe that American democracy is unlikely to continue for a long time in a world that is largely hostile to American values, if it is only because our transactions (economic and diplomatic) with other countries must have a profound impact in the end of us on home and politics Our system. So the new conservatives criticize isolation after Vietnam is now very common in Congress, and many of them question “Détente” as well. However, the consensus on the new consensus on foreign policy issues.

Only on the foregoing, it will be the extended to save any logic-or update the desire-Saddam Hussein’s regime and sent hundreds of thousands of American forces to occupy Iraq in an attempt to stabilize democracy in the Western style. However, the modern archives in Christol are a capacity enough to practically include every person working in the republican foreign policy today, regardless of the differences – except for what indicates more respect for American democracy and “American values” that have been mysteriously showed more than Trump or In its orbit. I will not tell here the long and complex story about how the second generation generation of neo -conservatives, including Ibn Christol, will not tell here to defend a specific group of foreign policies that peak in the Iraq war. Suffice it to say that since then, neo -conservatives usually mean something closer to Times“A definition of what Christol suggested half a century ago.

But there is some value in mind that the oldest definition-the definition that had less relationship to foreign policy than what a group of intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century considers a crisis in liberalism itself. The founding generation of the new foreign policy – most of them in the context of confronting the Soviet Union strongly during a period that looked unimaginable – but they have given more attention to what they saw as a collapse in the local social system. Most of them grew up before the Second World War in an immigrant environment of the working class and Judaism, and are often soaked in Marxist ideological discussions. But as they advanced the age of adults after the war, they found themselves benefiting from the very liberal institutions that they attacked from the left. By the mid-sixties of the last century, they became a leading national figure in the intellectual fields ranging from sociology to literary criticism-at the appropriate time to see all these fields are subjected to direct attack from a younger generation of relatively distinguished left-wing activists who, such as, such as, such , Like, such as, such as the new saw it, and he saw it in a heinous way and without the blessings of American civilization at its height.

This tumultuous new left, and the first new conservatives confirmed the emergence of a new category of white collars who have threatened the alleged vulgarity to raise American life, and who will quickly solve the Blue -collar workers who formed the social base of democracy the new deal of the party. Whether such a development should be afraid or welcome at the time of this evaluation, it is difficult to deny it.

American foreign policy has passed through many stages since then: Domino theory of Vietnam has given way to Kissinger Dietnte; Ronald Reagan prevails and then ends unexpectedly in the Cold War; American neoliberal domination was stopped by September 11; Recently, the disappointment of the war on terrorism, which is either to the new limit or a return to facing great energy. Among the elite foreign policy society, doctrines and individuals have been constantly turned in response to certain events and challenges – and not always accurately compatible with local political opinions. Meanwhile, the crisis of the liberal institutions that led to the interaction of the indigenous conservatives remained almost constantly during the same period, or at least showed a tendency to repetition and rhyme.

The 1968 campus uprising at the University of Colombia, which was paid by the departments of generations on civil rights and Vietnam, was a training moment for the new memorizers, and the students’ uprising last year on the same campus on American support for the Israeli war on Gaza on an unforgettable resonance. Perhaps these problems at stake changed over 56 years, but the general scene was rich in resonance: Ivy League, an administration that is in line with the current non -fair political situation, extremist students who control academic buildings, brutal police, and brutal police preparations, A group older than the faculty and graduates are more dismay than the behavior of students than the injustice abroad. In both cases, the campus revolution was a vow to national policy: in 1968-as in 2024-the current deformed democratic president chose not to run for his re-election, and his vice president ran instead and lost, and a right-wing domagog is despised by the liberals and the left alike, he won over the majority Great voters. Then, as is the case now, the intellectuals are divided into those who blame them and what liberalism means to move forward, as some people eventually reject completely.

This is the first edition of a new monthly column for Nation In which I plan to track the response of our culture to the pressures of the right of today and the oath of pride, as well as on the growing left and the house. Each institution has one day worked as an elite liberal blossom – universities, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, arts, legal profession, entertainment industry and government bureaucracies at all levels – in a bad way, for reasons preceded by a long time before Trump’s victory. Each of them is divided between the old applicant who is trying to protect his due position and a young regiment that is often an extremist trying to secure a foothold – even as each institution declines in public influence. Huge new fortunes in the Silicon Valley eventually benefited from a small group of extremist monuments that suffer from anti -hostility to the cultural and political power of the new class. With Trump’s return to the White House, these technical few now have direct control of the administrative state, and there is every indication that they will practice it against the actual electoral districts that constitute both the cultural establishment and the Democratic Coalition.

This will have extensive effects, including, without a doubt, for us for foreign policy. But the jurisdiction of this column will be the full range of cultural contradictions that move the first generation of neo -conservatives that are still without a solution. Currently, you can feel that an entire era is close to its end, and like Trump represents a final decision at the end of the world for the dialectical forces that divided the Americans since the 1960s. It remains to see what – if anything – will leave stand.