J Peter Scoblic: US vs Them

J Peter Scoblic: US vs Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Underminded America's Security (2008, Viking Books)

Scoblic's basic argument is that the disastrous will to empire that the neoconservatives brought to Washington was nothing new: it was standard conservatism, at least going back to the early days of the Cold War. Take William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater for examples, and throw in their interlocutor L. Brent Bozell (Buckley's brother-in-law, the ghost writer of Goldwater's bestseller).

(p. xiv-xv):

But George W. Bush was not playing dice with U.S. foreign policy. Thee was no "revolution." The mystery was not intractable. His foreign policy was simply conservative.

If describing Bush's foreign policy as "conservative" seems self-evident and explaining it that way seems tautological, that is only because conservative heritage is poorly understood. "Conservative," used in its historical sense, has a far richer meaning than "hawkish" or "hard-line." For decades, it was by no means equivalent to "Republican." And although the term is used today by a variety of people to describe a variety of attitudes and positions -- from libertarianism to authoritarianism -- the fact is that conservatism has a distinct lineage in American intellectual history, albeit one with a bewildering number of offspring and a trinity of great-uncles rather than a single forefather.

Most observers looking to explain the administration's behavior in terms of an ideology that accounts for unilateralist, militarist, propagandist behavior have turned to neoconservativism. Neoconservatives originally comprised a group of fervently anti-Soviet liberals who in the 1970s grew increasingly uncomfortable with the Democratic Party and ultimately abandoned it for President Ronald Reagan. After the Cold War, these neoconservatives became obsessed with a sort of American messianism involving the proactive spread of democracy. There are, or were, many neoconservatives in the Bush administration, and clearly they had an impact, particularly on the decision to invade Iraq, an action they hoped would help liberalize the Middle East. But their policies alone cannot fully account for its behavior. Most Bush officials, including many who are often labeled neoconservative -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton, for example -- have little connection to neoconservatism. They are simply standard-issue conservatives, whose ideological genealogy can be traced to the mid-1950s, when economic libertarians, religious traditionalists, and militant anticommunists united to oppose a bipartisan coalition that supported New Deal policies at home and containment of the Soviet Union abroad.

In foreign policy, "conservative" describes a distinct attitude in which the world is conceived in terms of "us versus them" or "good versus evil," with the United States assuming the role of a righteous protagonist facing a monolithic enemy. It is often an explicitly religious vision, with frequent allusions not only to good and evil, but also to God, Satan, and Armageddon. If virtually all American officials during the Cold War were anticommunist, this religious worldview made conservative anticommunism particularly potent and uncompromising. Characterizing the Soviet Union as an earthly manifestation of evil, rather than simply as an antagonistic nation-state, convinced conservatives that Moscow could not be reasoned with. The forces of good could not -- and should not want to -- coexist with the forces of evil. Conservative anticommunists rejected the bipartisan policy of containment, dismissed negotiation with the Soviet Union as appeasement, and even insisted that a nuclear war was winnable. George W. Bush is the direct descendant -- indeed, the ultimate product -- of this movement.

(pp. 18-19):

Anticommunism therefore served a practical as well as an existential function for the conservative movement, uniting libertarians and traditionalists in a common cause. It also served to distinguish postwar conservatism from prewar conservatism, as the Cold War forced conservatives to permanently give up their insistence on isolation from Europe. Many conservatives still felt that American involvement in World War II had been a mistake -- had not our intervention empowered the communists, just as men like Taft had warned? -- but in the face of communism's viral spread across Europe and Asia, the neutralism of the past was no longer an option. The Cold War was not simply another instance of Europeans fighting among themselves for control of Western civilization; rather it was a fight for the existence of Western civilization itself. As one National Review contributor put it, "To advocate isolationism today, therefore, is to aid, albeit unconsciously, the Communist grand design of world domination."

(p. 23):

By the beginning of the Cold War, Kennan was one of the U.S. government's top Soviet experts. In February 1946, while temporarily in charge of the American embassy in Moscow, he received a State Department cable asking why Soviet leaders persisted in making anti-American statements. Kennan responded with a five-thousand-word telegram which argued that Russia had long been motivated by national insecurity -- an insecurity it traditionally redressed through the destruction of its enemies. Marxism, which called for global revolution, had become the "perfect vehicle" for rationalizing this antagonistic relationship with the outside world. His conclusion was dire: "[W]e have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken if Soviet power is to be secure." The following year, he wrote, under the pseudonym "X," a widely read article for the journal Foreign Affairs that seemed to propose a global war on communism: "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence."

On the surface, this sounded little different from the conservative analysis, and indeed, when Truman adopted Kennan's principle of "containment," he used absolutist language to support it. In March 1947, the president asked Congress for four hundred million dollars to help Greece and Turkey fight communist insurgencies. His speech painted a Manichaean picture in which "totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States." In what would become known as the Truman Doctrine, the president declared that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Subsequently, the administration pledged to fund the reconstruction of Europe via the Marshall Plan and to defend it militarily through NATO. In 1950, Truman commissioned a review of defense planning, known as NSC-68, which concluded that the Soviet Union is "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world."

(p. 25):

NSC-68 was similarly exaggerated. Acheson later explained that the goal of the document had been "to bludgeon the mass mind of 'top government' so that not only could the president make a decision, but that the decision could be carried out." The document that resulted was just as stark in its portrayal of a perilous global landscape as the Truman Doctrine speech had been. It made statements like: "The implacable purpose of the slave state is to eliminate the challenge of freedom." Seeing a draft of NSC-68, Bohlen again complained about the language, but Acheson dismissed his concerns. If the document's tone was apocalyptic, so be it; the important thing was to provoke action.

There was enormous risk in overselling the anticommunist cause. As the mass mind of top government was bludgeoned, it was damaged, losing whatever modest ability it had had to distinguish rhetoric from reality. Taken at face value, the notions that America was obligated to help free peoples everywhere resist subjugation (as per the Truman Doctrine) and that containment should be a chiefly military enterprise (as per NSC-68) meant that the United States would commit itself to deploying troops to any country that threatened to go communist, whether or not the United States had any vital interest there. In the 1960s, that absolutism led two Democratic presidents to involve the United States in Vietnam. But containment as a policy was intended to be nuanced, not absolutist. It was not meant to be applied universally, and the Truman administration did not use it in that fashion.

But the conservatives took it in that fashion, and used it repeatedly to bludgeon anyone with the least sense of realism. It was all ultimately based on the assumed superiority of American power and the assumption that such superiority could be projected anywhere, any time.

(pp. 30-31):

Instead of containment, Burnham proposed liberation. He believed that, if the United States had just set itself to the task after World War II, even a "mild initiative" could have prevented the Soviets from maintaining control of Eastern Europe (an optimistic view, given the millions of Red Army troops stationed there as of May 1945). Now, he insisted, we must not simply contain communism; we must roll it back. We must aim to secure "freedom for all the peoples and nations now under communist domination, including the Russian people." Where containment was defensive, liberation would be offensive. It would be not just an economic or military effort, though it would be those, but a political effort: one that would include supporting exile governments, outlawing communism domestically, and fomenting unrest and harassing communists in Eastern Europe. There would be no compromise, no negotiation, no attempt to achieve a modus vivendi with the Soviets. The aim was regime change -- not just in Eastern Europe, but in the Soviet Union itself.

William Buckley loved Burnham's work, and in the summer of 1950 while his bride, Pat, basked in the Hawaiian sun, he had spent his honeymoon reading Burnham's latest book. So when he was assembling a masthead for National Review, Buckley went to recruit Burnham at his pre-Revolutionary War house in Kent, Connecticut. Burnham readily agreed to write a column, which he called "The Third World War" -- emphasizing the totality of the conflict and the need for victory.

(p. 32):

In 1952, Dulles was asked to write the GOP's foreign policy platform. Robert Taft thought that because Dulles was a moralist advising the moderate Eisenhower, he would be able to identify areas of agreement between the conservative and pragmatic wings of the party. The result, however, was a lot of moralism and very little moderation. Eschewing the bipartisan approach to foreign policy that had marked the Republican platform during the 1944 and 1948 Dewey races -- and, indeed, his own career to date -- Dulles targeted all the Democratic weak spots softened by conservative attack. The final document declared that Republicans would "repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as Yalta which aid communist enslavement." It, too, advocated a strategy of liberation: "[W]e shall again make liberty into a beacon light of hope that will penetrate the dark places. . . . It will mark the end of the negative, futile and immoral policy of 'containment' which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism."

(pp. 33-34):

Worse, following a scare in which the United States nearly went to war with China over a few tiny islands, Eisenhower agreed to meet with Kruschchev. In July 1955, the two leaders convened in Switzerland for the first U.S.-Soviet summit since the Potsdam Conference in 1945. From the summit emerged the "spirit of Geneva," a hope that peaceful coexistence could be achieved. Burnham, however, insisted that the Soviets interpreted Eisenhower's willingness to meet as evidence of "imperialist disintegration" and that they were merely making a "tactical move . . . designed to disarm" the United States. Summits, according to Burnham, were a "barbarous practice" that served only to legitimate communist rulers. "Any gangster's rule is strengthened if he can get his picture taken along with the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and the Parson," he wrote. (Meyer put the very term "summit meeting" in scare quotes.) Yet Eisenhower persisted in his policies, meeting with Krushchev several more times. By 1959, when Krushchev actually came to the United States itself, conservatives had had enough -- and William F. Buckley, Jr., took to Carnegie Hall.

(p. 41):

The reason that the United States was not winning this war -- the reason America had "lost" China, abandoned Hungary, and accepted stalemate in Korea -- was that it had not grasped the true nature of the threat. Just as it was to William F. Buckley, Jr., and his colleagues at National Review, the status quo was unacceptable to Goldwater, and therefore so was the strategy of containment. Victory was the only acceptable goal in any conflict, and he was flabbergasted that anyone would think otherwise with respect to a struggle as epochal as the Cold War. "I doubt if any United States Senator or government official -- ever before in the history of our Republic -- has been called upon to make a case for victory in a conflict where everything that the United States stands for today -- or ever stood for in the past -- is at stake." In 1962, Goldwater wrote a book in response to a George Kennan-like defense of containment made by Senator J. William Fulbright, fitting titled Why Not Victory?

(p. 65):

By the summer of 1971, conservatives had lost faith in Nixon. The hard-line anticommunist they had elected president seemed to have been replaced with a liberal doppelgänger. In July, twelve leading lights of the conservative movement, including Tom Winter and Allan Ryskind of the right-wing magazine Human Events, Randal Teague of Young Americans for Freedom, and John Jones and Jeff Bell of the American Conservative Union, met in William F. Buckley's townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and announced their "suspension of support" for Nixon. Their disillusionment only grew when Nixon promoted the Family Assistance Plan, which included a guaranteed income, and announced wage and price freezes, the kind of government meddling that rankled conservatives. With the presidential visit to China, the conservatives had had enough, and that December, the "Manhattan Twelve" decided they would oppose Nixon in the 1972 Republican presidential primaries. Although they knew they had little chance of unseating him, they wanted to send a message, and their chosen messenger was an Ohio congressman named John Ashbrook.

Ashbrook had little recognition outside conservative circles -- Time magazine called him an "unknown" -- but his ideological credentials were sterling. Along with Cliff White, a public relations consultant, and William Rusher, the publisher of National Review, Ashbrook had helped launch the Draft Goldwater movement in 1961. He was a founder of the American Conservative Union and a leader of the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China (to the United Nations). He considered détente an illusion and Nixon's openness to communists an "apostasy," and he denounced the president's summit meetings in Beijing and Moscow.

(p. 67):

Donald Brennan, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute, took aim at that orthodoxy in an article for National Review that gave the Cold War one of its most iconic terms. Placing "mutual" before McNamara's "assured destruction," Brennan wrote, "The concept of mutual assured destruction provides one of the few instances in which the obvious acronym for something yields at once the appropriate description for it; that is, a Mutual Assured Destruction posture as a goal is, almost literally, mad. MAD." Brennan was as scholar, and his arguments against the ABM Treaty and the Interim Agreement were considerably more sophisticated than Ashbrook's. But like other conservatives, he foundered on the misimpression that MAD was a "philosophy," a "sophomoric ideology and fashion" that McNamara had imposed on the Pentagon. Even though he acknowledge that "victory" in a nuclear war would be "altogether Pyrrhic," Brennan simply refused to accept mutual assured destruction.

(p. 72):

The four-day event was the brainchild of an organization called the American Security Council. Founded in the 1950s with the McCarthyite goal of ferreting out communists in the business community, the ASC had, by the 1970s, broadened its focus to a more general assault on détente and arms control. In 1978, it formed the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, an alliance of 148 members of Congress, led by Senator Robert Dole, who opposed Carter's foreign policy and insisted that the United States maintain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union -- repudiating the notion of the stable nuclear balance that Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger had advocated and that SALT II was supposed to reinforce. The coalition touched a nerve in the military and political establishment, and within a year it had signed up another 43 U.S. senators and representatives and 2,400 retired or reserve generals and admirals, all of whom opposed the treaty on the grounds that it was a "symbol of phased surrender" to the Soviet Union.

(p. 86):

The Republican Party, however, did not offer obvious sanctuary. Realist of the Nixon-Kissinger stripe did not care about the character of the Soviet regime; indeed, their philosophy of international politics denied that such things mattered. So after Nixon defeated McGovern in 1972, neoconservatives formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) to rescue the Democratic Party from the antiwar, radical Left and pull it back toward a militant anticommunism. Its members -- intellectuals such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Midge Decter, Eugene Rostow, Richard Pipes, and others -- saw themselves as the heirs of Truman. They didn't seem to realize, however, that Truman's anticommunism, while moral, was not moralist -- that is, while it confronted the Soviet Union, it never reduced that fight to black and white terms. The neocons did -- and, as a result, came to the same conclusions that conservatives had.

(pp. 103-104):

The [Panama] canal controversy did demonstrate, however, that the New Right could be mobilized for foreign policy battles; and as Jerry Sanders writes in Peddlers of Crisis, in the confirmation battle over Paul Warnke, the New Right joined National Review conservatives, as well as their new fellow travelers, the hawks and the neoconservatives.

That battle was vicious. At Warnke's confirmation hearings, Nitze, in an unestablishment display of emotion, dismissed Warnke's ideas as "absolutely asinine" as well as "screwball, arbitrary, and fictitious." Danial Patrick Moyniham -- the most prominent neoconservative politician, after Scoop Jackson -- devoted his first speech on the floor of the United States Senate to savaging the Warnke nomination. One conservative congressman accused Warnke of being in collusion with "the World Peace Council, a Moscow-directed movement which advocates the disarmament of the West as well as support for terrorist groups." Meanwhile, the New Right provided populist muscle. Paul Weyrich, who had founded the Heritage Foundation, was also on the Emergency Coalition's steering committee. Using mailing lists provided by Viguerie -- who said his idols were "the two Macs" (that is, Senator Joseph McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur) and who would go on to become a direct-mail baron with a fifteen-million-name database of conservatives by 1980 -- Weyrich sent out six hundred thousand letters urging voters to tell their senators to oppose Warnke.

Warnke was confirmed, but the fight set up the defeat of the SALT II treaty he negotiated.

(p. 104):

The attack on Warnke was but a warm-up for the eventual assault on SALT II two years later, by which time conservatives had solidified their alliance with the hawks and neocons, perfected the tactic of gross intellectual distortion, and more effectively harnessed the muscle of the New Right. Jimmy Carter, who came to Washington a less militant anticommunist than any of his postwar predecessors, didn't stand a chance. Speaking at Notre Dame's graduation in May 1977, Carter bemoaned the "intellectual and moral poverty" of the Vietnam War. For years, Carter said, "We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water." But now that we were "free of that inordinate fear of communism," things could change. Interdependence, not Manichaeanism or nationalism, would be the foundation of his foreign policy.

(pp. 107-108):

The Right's faith in the efficacy of Soviet civil defenses was remarkably credulous of Soviet propaganda, especially given America's own civil defense efforts, which only demonstrated just how difficult it would be to protect any part of the population. Even assuming that the Soviets were able to evacuate their cities, an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency study found that U.S. retaliation would still kill twenty-five million Russians -- and the Soviet Union would cease to be an urban society because there would be no cities left. If the United States was concerned that even that did not constitute "unacceptable damage," it could set the weapons to detonate on the ground (instead of in the air), maximizing the radioactive fallout from the blast, thereby killing forty to fifty million Soviets. Or it could simply target the evacuated populations directly and kill seventy to eighty-five million Soviets. Millions more would die from starvation, disease, and the lack of organized medical care. If we were not confident that even these options would kill enough people, we could always target the cities when the evacuation began -- evacuating millions of people takes a while, after all.

(pp. 113-114):

It was not surprising that Reagan epitomized the libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism that had fused in the 1950s to create the modern conservative movement, for he had learned his conservatism from National Review, which he called his "favorite magazine." During his presidency, he would award Russell Kirk the Presidential Citizens Medal, the second-highest honor a president can bestow on a civilian, and would give James Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Reagan was close to Bill Buckley, and Bill's brother James joined Reagan's State Department as undersecretary for security affairs. Reagan was close to neoconservative intellectuals as well. Norman Podhoretz liked to brag that most top officials in the Reagan administration were Commentary readers and that several of them, including UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, were Commentary writers. (Indeed, It was Kirkpatrick's famous Commentary essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" that first brought her to Reagan's attention.) When Scoop Jackson died in 1983, President Reagan awarded his friend the Medal of Freedom, declaring how proud he was that a number of the senator's followers had "found a home" in his White House. Hawks and neoconservatives from the Committee on the Present Danger, including Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, and Eugene Rostow, joined his administration.

Reagan also capitalized on the Right's grassroots nationalism, matching its fear of Soviet evil with an idealized view of American good. Here he tapped the rich tradition of American exceptionalism that stretched back to the seventeenth century, when Dutch and English Protestant settlers sought to establish a "new Israel," far removed from the sins of the Old World, in which they would struggle for redemption and salvation. Reagan never tired of reminding Americans, à la John Winthrop, that their country was a "shining city on a hill," that it had a "rendezvous with destiny." Such missionary rhetoric was a welcome tonic for Americans after the malaise of Vietnam and the Carter years. It resonated particularly with the nationalists on the right, many of whom were former isolationists and had long distrusted foreign entanglements and international institutions. Reagan was able to leaven their inherent pessimism -- their nightmares of Reds and the decline of Western civilization -- with the optimism inherent in the idea of America as God's chosen nation.

(p. 126):

Alas, many Reagan officials were not such subtle thinkers. When Senator Claiborne Pell asked Eugene Rostow during his confirmation hearings if he thought the United States could survive a nuclear onslaught, Rostow optimistically noted that Japan "not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack." Pressed as to whether we could survive a full nuclear strike -- one involving thousands of nuclear warheads, instead of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- Rostow observed: "The human race is very resilient. . . . Depending upon certain assumptions, some estimates predict that there would be ten million casualties on one side and one hundred million on another. but that is not the whole of the population." Amusingly -- or perhaps not -- that was the assessment George C. Scott's character, General Buck Turgidson, gave of a nuclear war in Stanley Kubrick's satire Dr. Strangelove: "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say, no more than ten to twenty million killed, top, depending on the breaks."

(pp. 129-130):

The day after Reagan's SDI speech, Goldwater sent him a one-sentence letter: "That was the best statement I have ever heard from any President." Reagan's question, "Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?," was a seductive one, but it was also naive and dangerous. Remember, MAD was not a policy choice; it was a condition. Reagan genuinely believed he could replace it with a perfect defense, but no such thing was possible. A perfect defense had never existed in the history of warfare, and there was ample evidence to show that the Soviets could penetrate any missile defense by using metal chaff, decoys, or just a larger number of warheads. SDI would be useful, however, in dampening a retaliatory counterforce strike. Although the Soviets would still be able to inflict enough damage that a first strike by the United States would be suicidal, it would be "less suicidal" to the extent that such a concept made sense, which some Reagan officials believed it did. In short, SDI was a better adjunct to a first strike than it was a standalone defense. That made it critically destabilizing, which is why missile defenses had been outlawed by the ABM Treaty in the first place.

(pp. 137-138):

If few people heard what Reagan was saying, it was because to believe that he was sincere mean one had to accept that he was also profoundly ignorant of nuclear strategy. But, in fact, Reagan was profoundly ignorant of many of the details of America's nuclear armaments. He once told a group of congressmen, for example, that bombers and submarines did not carry nuclear weapons; on another occasion, he said that submarine-launched ballistic missiles could be recalled once in flight. He told Brent Scowcroft that he had not realized that the principal threat from the Soviet Union was that its gigantic ICBMs might destroy ours in a preemptive strike. Indeed, Reagan did not seem to understand that the concept of the "window of vulnerability" referred specifically to that threat, even though it had been the signature issue of the Committee on the Present Danger (of which Reagan was a member) and one of the principal themes of his 1980 campaign. In October 1981, when a journalist asked Reagan when the window of vulnerability would open, he responded with a non sequitur, saying that the Soviet navy was already superior to that of the United States (which wasn't even true). Reagan's initial plan for rectifying our supposed ICBM vulnerability involved putting the MX missile in Minuteman silos, and, when journalists asked why they would be any less vulnerable than the Minutemen, he confessed that he didn't know.

Reagan's ignorance of nuclear matters was matched only by his blindness to how his actions might be perceived by the Soviets. It had apparently not even occurred to him that adopting a war-fighting strategy, beginning a widespread civil defense program, researching a missile shield while increasing the military budget by 35 percent, starting a new bomber program, deploying a new ICBM, and deploying missiles in Europe could be construed as threatening. Like Barry Goldwater and John Ashbrook, Reagan could not believe that anyone could perceive the United States as anything but righteous. It took the events of 1983 to make him realize, as he wrote in his memoirs, that "many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans" and that "many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike."

Reagan himself was responsible for much of the tone of proposals such as SDI, but as Lou Cannon has written, "Reagan did not know enough about nuclear weapons systems to formulate a policy to accomplish his objectives. He was susceptible to manipulation by advisers who shared his militant anti-communism but not his distaste for nuclear deterrence and who wanted neither arms reduction nor arms control."

(pp. 142-143):

By the end of his second term, Reagan's foreign policy had become the antithesis of everything conservatives believed. Both the means (negotiation) and the ends (coexistence and disarmament) the president was pursuing were in complete conflict with the means (confrontation) and the ends (victory over evil) dictated by the conservative worldview. As Reagan turned toward accommodation with Gorbachev, conservatives found their voice within the administration reduced to a whisper, and they resorted to increasingly desperate attempts to sabotage the arms control process.

(pp. 159-160):

In November 2000, [John] Bolton -- who had spent many of the Clinton years as a vice president at the american Enterprise Institute -- got a call from Baker asking him to go to Florida, where George W. Bush and Al Gore were locked in a battle for the state's electoral votes. Baker needed Bolton, an election law expert, to help run the GOP's legal team, a task that brought him a degree of conservative celebrity when he burst into a library in Tallahassee where workers were examining ballots for hanging chads and said, "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count." In a speech not long afterward, Dick Cheney joked that when he as asked what job Bolton should get in the administration, he answer was "anything he wants."

Bush appointed Bolton the nation's top arms control official, a decision every bit as perverse as making him ambassador to the United Nations, and a position in which he was able to do significantly more damage. "He is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon," Jesse Helms declared at Bolton's confirmation hearing -- simultaneously a perfect choice of words, given the men's Manichaeanism, and an exceptionally poor one, given the job's nuclear responsibilities. As he settled into his office on the sixth floor of the State Department in the spring of 2001, Bolton placed on his coffee table a memento from his days in the conservative revolution: a hand grenade mounted on a small wooden base with a plaque that read "Truest Reaganaut." He quickly went to work dismantling the structure of international arms control, beginning with the ABM treaty.

(p. 160):

After September 11, 2001, a myth developed -- encouraged by the Bush administration -- that "everything had changed." It was a useful myth, one that allowed for the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, and, of course, a foreign policy that emphasized military action while eschewing diplomacy. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002, in which he dubbed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and their supposed terrorist allies an "axis of evil"; his commencement address at West Point in June 2002, in which he said that America would maintain "military strengths beyond challenge" and suggested that "pre-emptive" action might be needed to prevent rogue states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction; and the White House's National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, which laid out a policy of military dominance, all combined to form what would be known as the Bush Doctrine, a doctrine that abandoned deterrence and containment in favor of preventive war. Suddenly, analysts were atwitter about a "revolution" in U.S. foreign policy.

The revolution, however, had been under way for quite some time. George W. Bush and many of his aides were conservatives, and by the time they came to office, conservatism was an established fixture of American political life. True, following the end of Soviet communism, the movement did suffer from what one diplomat called "enemy deprivation syndrome." Because so much of conservatism had revolved around an apocalyptic battle against the satanic Soviet Union, what were conservatives supposed to do if there was no evil? Bush himself identified the dilemma plainly during the 2000 campaign: "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world. And we knew exactly who the 'they' were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who 'them' was. Today we're not so sure who they 'they' are, but we know they're there." Nevertheless, the operating precept remained the same as it had been during the Cold War: The United States stood in opposition to a hostile world, even if now the nature of that hostility was not fully understood.

(pp. 164-165):

Most second-generation neoconservatives, however, embraced democratization as the logical ideological successor to anticommunism. A number of prominent neocons -- such as Penn Kemble and Joshua Muravchik, who as young men had led the assault on Carter's arms control policies -- accordingly voted for Clinton in 1992, believing him more likely to confront tyranny than the coldly realist Bush, who had left Saddam in power ("coitus interruptus," in Norman Podhoretz's description), consorted with the butchers of Tiananmen Square, and saw little need to involve the United States in Bosnia. Among neoconservatives, in other words, even though the evil empire had been vanquished, there remained a fixation on regime, a continued insistence on seeing the world in terms of good and evil. By contrast, conservatives of a more traditional Buckley/Goldwater stripe retreated somewhat to a less moralistic and therefore less virulent oppositionalism, focused more narrowly on the defense of American interests than on the promotion of American values. Still, both schools of thought rallied around the idea of cementing America's post-Cold War dominance by seizing the opportunity created by the Soviet collapse to prevent the rise of any evil strong enough to compromise the security or moral integrity of the United States -- to ensure, in other words, that victory was made permanent.

(pp. 166-167):

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, conservatives of all stripes retreated from government to the world of think tanks and op-ed pages, where the differences between neoconservatives and their more cramped brethren soon became more pronounced. In 1996, William Kristol (Irving Kristol's son) and Robert Kagan published a widely read article in Foreign Affairs called "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," which advocated a posture of "military supremacy and moral confidence." American foreign policy after the Cold War should be one of "benevolent hegemony," they argued, in which America should enshrine its military lead and actively promote democracy abroad. Whereas Buchanan parroted John Quincy Adams's nineteenth-century admonition against going "abroad in search of monsters to destroy," Kristol and Kagan retorted, "Why not? The alternative is to leave monsters on the loose, raving and pillaging to their hearts' content."

(pp. 187-188):

Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was already well on its way to enacting a conservative agenda that not only sought to render our Cold War victory permanent through military dominance -- thus obviating the need to ever again deal with dictators -- but also by freeing us from any constraints, regardless of whether they helped or harmed our national security, in the process freeing us from the need to deal with friends an dallies as well. After September 11, the administration would justify such boldness -- and other drastic measures -- by claiming that the terrorist attacks had changed everything. But they had really begun claiming that "everything had changed" immediately upon taking office. As Condoleezza Rice said of the post-Cold War world in July 2001, "This is a big shift to wrap one's mind around, but we cannot cling to the old order like medieval scholars clinging to a Ptolemaic system even after the Copernican revolution. We must realize that the strategic world we grew up in has been turned upside down." In truth, however, whether the Bush administration was presented with old problems, such as the Russian nuclear arsenal, or new problems, such as global warming, it simply chose old solutions. Conservatives were fixated on a nineteenth-century view of a twenty-first-century world.

(p. 226-7):

Militarily, North Korea and Iran defied easy solutions. North Korea could respond to any attack by raining three hundred thousand shells and rockets per hour down on Seoul, South Korea's capital and one of the world's largest cities. Those shells and rockets might well be armed with chemical weapons (including VX, sarin, and mustard gas) or biological weapons (including anthrax, botulism, cholera, hemorrhagic fever, plague, smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever). Pentagon officials estimate that the ensuing conflict across the entire peninsula would produce at least three hundred thousand American and South Korean military casualties -- to say nothing of civilian deaths and injuries. Ultimately, we would win, but the collapse of the North Korean regime would unleash a flow of refugees that would destabilize China and South Korea, which would also have to absorb the economic cost of reunification.

Military options for Iran were similarly limited. Iran's nuclear facilities are numerous, dispersed, and in some cases located in major population centers or deep underground. As Natanz and Arak have shown, Iran is capable of hiding nuclear facilities -- even large ones. Although a strike would certainly delay Iran's nuclear program, it would probably not stop it, just as Israel's strike on the Osiraq reactor in 1981 did not stop Iraq's. In fact, air strikes would probably radicalize the Iranian public, shore up support for the regime, and reinforce the desire for nuclear weapons. And in response to the strike, Iran would attempt to raise oil prices; attack our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; retaliate via terrorists against Israel, U.S. bases and embassies worldwide, and perhaps even the continental United States; and stir up Islamist and Shiite violence against our allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

(p. 232):

But when Kim Dae-jung began to explain to Bush the necessity of engaging Pyongyang, the president -- sitting, ironically, in the Treaty Room of the White House -- departed from the script. Turning to Pritchard, he cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and said, "Who is this guy? I can't believe how naive he is!"

(p. 235):

All of which meant that midway through Bush's second term, North Korea was reprocessing plutonium; Iran was enriching uranium; India was eagerly awaiting an infusion of nuclear technology that could spur proliferation in South Asia; and A. Q. Khan was resting quietly under house arrest far from inconvenient questions. Which is not to say the Bush administration had no successes in halting proliferation. It did. Its successes just happened to come on those rare occasions when it abandoned everything conservatives believed in.

(p.244):

Hill nevertheless made progress -- but only by evading the administration's mandate against bilateral engagement. Rice was well aware that the North Koreans wanted to sit down individually with the Americans but was adamant that bilateral talks take place only as a quid pro quo for some sort of North Korean concession. Perversely, the Bush administration was offering negotiations in exchange for changed behavior, rather than using negotiations to change behavior; they had reversed the standard cause and effect of diplomacy. Hill, however, managed to get the North Koreans to come back to the six-party talks by arranging a dinner in Beijing between him and his counterpart, hosted by the Chinese. When the Chinese hosts mysteriously failed to show up, Hill went ahead with the dinner, and the North Koreans, satisfied with this de facto bilateral sit-down, announced that they would return to negotiations. But as Hill extended his negotiating authority to its limit, nearing a deal with the North, conservatives were again plotting to scuttle negotiations.

(p. 254):

But several factors belie the contention that Libya suddenly capitulated with no negotiations or assurances. For one thing, Libya had been trying to work its way back into the international community's good graces for some time -- hence its eager participation in the negotiations over the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, Libya had even offered to put its chemical weapons program on the table in the 1990s, but the Clinton team had demurred, deciding to save weapons issues for a later stage in the negotiations. In 1999, Qaddafi had also expelled Abu Nidal's terrorist group from Libya and pledged his support for Clinton's efforts in the Israel-Palestinian peace process - a dramatic shift from his stance in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, back-and-forth negotiation had clearly been involved. According to Flynt Leverett, who worked on Bush's Libya policy, there was an "explicit quid pro quo" providing that, if Libya accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid off the families, UN sanctions would be lifted. That sort of reciprocity underlay the weapons negotiations as well; according to Leverett the quid pro quo in this instance was that U.S. sanctions would be dropped in exchange for Libya's disarmament. Qaddafi's son Saif has said that the United States and Britain also promised his father they would not try to oust him.

(p. 271):

Conservatism, in other words, although it has a clear intellectual pedigree, operates on a deep psychological level as well. The psychological dynamic that these studies establish helps explain behavior that is empirically irrational. Whether Saddam Hussein posed the greatest threat to the United States at the time of the Iraq invasion was far less important than the destruction of an identifiable evil. Focusing on the technocratic work of securing Russia's loose nuclear material was less of a psychological priority because it did not fit into a Beckerite worldview of America engaged in a grand struggle for liberty and against evil. Negotiation with states like Iran and North Korea, however practical for preventing proliferation, became far less urgent than taking a strong stand. Denouncing those nations as evil, even if it did nothing to allay the actual threat they presented, alleviated anxiety. For some, conservatism doesn't necessarily need to make sense. Walter Russell Mead has written of the emotional attachment to an us-versus-them, good-versus-evil worldview among a group of Americans he calls Jacksonians, after the Indian-fighting frontier president: "Jacksonian realism is based on the very sharp distinction in popular feeling between the inside of the folk community and the dark world without. Jacksonian patriotism is an emotion, like love of one's family, not a doctrine."

(p. 282-3):

Many experts doubt nuclear power will ever be cheap enough to spark such a spontaneous renaissance -- the cost of building new plants is substantial -- but the IAEA does consider that "the civilian nuclear industry appears to be poised for worldwide expansions." And countries need only believe there may be a renaissance for the dangers of such an expansion to accrue: They may develop the technology to enrich uranium or to reprocess spent uranium fuel to extract plutonium, speculating that such a capability will enable them to be suppliers, rather than consumers, of energy. The resulting spread of nuclear know-how -- specifically, the enrichment and reprocessing technology that can be used to fuel weapons as well as power reactors -- would be an unmitigated security disaster. Already, several countries -- including Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia -- have announced their intention to pursue commercial uranium enrichment.

(p. 285):

This proposal echoes one presented at the dawn of the nuclear age. In 1946, drawing on recommendations prepared by physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who had led America's wartime effort to develop the atomic bomb, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, presented President Truman with a plan to internationalize much of the nuclear fuel cycle. Oppenheimer had immediately recognized the impossibility of separating the atom's peaceful uses from its military ones, so he proposed placing control of all uranium enrichment and reprocessing under an Atomic Development Authority. It was a grand plan that appealed not only to idealists, but also to pragmatists who understood the breadth of the challenges posed by the atomic age. Acheson, for one, called the final report a "brilliant and profound document." Indeed, the horrors of the bomb had convinced many that greater international cooperation, through bodies like the UN, was essential if mankind was to survive; and some, including Oppenheimer, even spoke of subordinating national sovereignty to the laws of a world government. The Acheson-Lilienthal report certainly did not propose that, but as Oppenheimer explained, "It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. . . . That in this field there be international Law."

posted 2008-08-08