Confusing Axes
By Winfield Myers & Brent Tantillo (08/02/04)
Prognosticating is a tricky game, particularly when one's conclusions rest less on historically-informed reasoning than on disaffection and alienation. Toss in a political axe to grind and a propensity to distort the present to fit an ideology, and you've got a toxic brew that's heady enough to inebriate but too thin to support a winning argument. That’s particularly true if after coining a clever line, in this case “axis of confusion,” and describing it as a “new institutional syndrome in Washington,” you proceed to claim in your conclusion that this malady is as old as the Republic. Yet that’s what Stephan Halper and Jonathan Clarke do in their article, “Neoconservatism and the American Future,” which appeared recently at Opendemocracy.net.
Halper, of Cambridge University, and Clarke, a former British diplomat now at the Cato Institute, often present themselves as mainstream conservatives, although their article in question reveals a curious type of conservatism. Whatever one calls them, they consider whether “neoconservatism” is a perennial feature of the American political landscape, or whether a Bush defeat would spell its demise. Taking a page from Richard Hofstadter’s parodic "The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays" (1965), Halper and Clarke ponder the future in their opening sentence: “The stealth transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis on 28 June 2004 raises an intriguing question of whether a parallel transition will also take place at some future midnight in Washington - specifically whether the neo-conservative influence that did so much to instigate the Iraq war will also be bundled unceremoniously into retirement.” This, in turn, leads to another question: Do Halper and Clarke object to current policies, or to the fundamental character of American democracy? Call it a case of confusing axes.
Five paragraphs into the work, administration critics may still hope for an affirmative answer to this question. “What is happening may be described as a new [emphasis added] institutional syndrome in Washington – the ‘axis of disorder’. It represents a lethal combination of underperformance in the executive, on Capitol Hill and within the opinion-leading elite.” If it’s a new problem wrought by this president and his neoconservative handlers, then surely on some moonless night the ax will fall on the necks of those responsible for our current malaise.
Hop to the concluding paragraph, however, and you’ll learn that these creatures of darkness are not, alas, so easily dispatched: “[A]s comets return, so will the neo-conservatives’ themes - especially the preference for unilateral military power as the option of first resort. Neo-conservatism offers a recurrently powerful ideological booster-rocket in support of America’s military pre-eminence. If another ‘perfect storm’ on the 9/11 model recurs, where fear and confusion suspend the political process, the American response is likely to be predominantly military rather than political, diplomatic or economic - irrespective of the party affiliation of the White House incumbent.”
Setting aside what Andrew Sullivan might call a “metaphor alert,” this contradictory view – is the syndrome new or recurrent, and if it’s the normal state of things can it be a syndrome? – evaluates the history of U.S. military action overseas against an isolationist/realpolitik ideal that has not been reached in the past and is neither desirable nor achievable in the future. It assumes failure abroad in Iraq and across the globe when evidence supports at least an inconclusive or (more plausibly) contrary evaluation. Comparing America’s current preeminence to that enjoyed in the 1950s, when leading neocons came of age, the authors see repeated institutional failures by the executive and legislative branches of government, the media, and the networks supporting the intelligentsia as evidence of a “systemic weakness – one that creates an ever-present danger of a neo-conservative special interest group turning a manageable, controllable challenge (as, in principle, was Iraq) into a major crisis.”
Their charge that the Iraq war has pushed other crises into the background (they cite Afghanistan, North Korea, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia) fails on several fronts. The postponement of elections in Afghanistan signals not negligence but reality in a land that, whatever its problems, is in immeasurably better shape today than it was only two years ago. North Korea remains a flashpoint and was the subject of Sino-U.S. talks this month, an event that also reveals the importance America still places on its relations with China. The Iranian regime is weaker and more terrified of its own peoples’ aspirations to be free than at any time since the revolution – surely a turn of events most analysts would deem positive. And Saudi Arabia, threatened with invasion by Iraq only a little over a decade ago, is endangered by America’s actions only to the degree that the royal family’s corrupt rule measures up poorly against the potential government of a stable, more liberal Iraq.
Bullet-point characterizations of neoconservatives offered to explain the “neoconservative core” both misrepresent and affirm the convictions of that group. Take, for example, their assertion that neoconservatives “emphasise the unipolar nature of American power and are prepared to exercise the military option as the first rather than last policy choice; they repudiate the received ‘lessons of Vietnam’, believing they undermine American willingness to use force - and rather embrace the lessons of Munich, believing they establish the virtues of pre-emptive military action.”
Since when was a 70-nation coalition against terrorism, and a 30-nation coalition against Iraq, “unipolar?” And didn’t the U.S. and its allies seek to work within the framework of the corrupt U.N. Security Council, as if that body’s imprimatur was needed in the face of threats to national sovereignty? What of the twelve-year effort to contain Saddam? Force was hardly the first option of this or any previous administration. As for the lessons of Vietnam vs. the lessons of Munich, here we see the crux of Halper and Clarke’s argument, which mirrors that of the far left. To wit: America is a malevolent force in the world that, left to its own devices, will endanger world peace; it must therefore be constrained by multilateral bodies and other foreign powers. One assumes this means “peace in our time,” or peace in every time, absent a force to counter the appeasement of aggressive powers, whether those powers are projected by the armies of nation states or amorphous bands of terrorists based within nation states. As an apologia for the forces of appeasement, this fails the test of recent history.
Similarly, Halper and Clarke cite approvingly the thesis put forward by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, who argues persuasively that the Bush Doctrine of preemption has a long pedigree in the annals of American foreign policy. When it was published, Gaddis’s thesis was heralded by administration supporters because it refuted charges that Bush’s actions marked a radical departure from historical U.S. policy. But Halper and Clarke employ Gaddis’s thesis for opposite ends: Preemption’s long history doesn’t justify its use today; it merely condemns America as an enterprise that was imperialist from the start.
In their use of this thesis, the authors resemble garden variety radicals who paint the whole of American history as a series of aggressive acts against a defenseless world: “The implication of two 2004 studies broadly sympathetic to neo-conservatism – "Surprise, Security and the American Experience" by John Lewis Gaddis and "Power, Terror, Peace and War" by Walter Russell Mead – is that the unilateral exercise of American power draws on certain social and cultural themes, centring on an insular and aggressive nativism, that have animated America’s interaction with the world from the earliest days of the republic. The implication is that, far from being an aberration, neo-conservatism is part of an established historical tradition.”
Surely this is an exceptionally strong – if unintentional – affirmation of neoconservatism. Our “new institutional syndrome” turns out to be a commonplace in American history, and in any event the “axis of confusion” is no syndrome at all, since even in pop-psyche usage a syndrome must imply something abnormal or out of the ordinary. If its roots are all Halper and Clarke claim they’re cracked up to be, neoconservatism is but a modern manifestation of the pieties and virtues that have made America a beacon of freedom and opportunity around the world. One would have to find modern America a dismal place indeed to wish that this story had a different ending.
Seen in this light, the authors’ principal disagreement with the response to September 11 is less that it marked a departure from precedent than that it didn’t. As for confusion, does that lie in the behavior of the United States over the past 228 years, or in the arguments of Halper and Clarke?
That the article ends on a fatalistic note seems almost perverse given that the cause for this hopelessness is nothing less than the character and behavior of the American republic from the Revolution until today. But perhaps the real hopelessness lies in trying to make sense of such a convoluted theory. Introduced as a critique of neoconservatism, it is in fact a condemnation of America’s remarkable development from a group of isolated colonies hugging the Atlantic coast into the world’s preeminent economic and military power. Confused in its terminology, despairing of American exceptionalism, and blind to its own contradictions, the essay is further proof that fortune-telling is best left to boardwalk astrologers. And you won’t even need a big axe to chop it down to size.
Winfield Myers is Chief Executive Officer of Democracy Project, Inc. (www.democracy-project.com). Brent Tantillo is a research fellow at Hudson Institute.
(Printer friendly version) 
