Are Neocons Really Back In The Trump Administration?
There may be neoconservatives cheering that drone strike, as neoconservatives are wont to do, but it is unlikely that they are the ones driving policy.
By Sumantra Maitra
January 28, 2020
Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a provocative new essay in which he claimed that neoconservatism, “the discredited foreign policy of the last two decades,†has somehow managed to crawl back in the least likely of all places: a Donald Trump presidency.
Heilbrunn, the editor of The National Interest, is no ordinary political commentator. He has written a book on the rise of neoconservatism, from its origins in Marxist-Trotskyist internationalism of the 1930s, to disillusioned defection, to a Wilsonian liberal-internationalism in the 1960s, to the George W. Bush administration’s ill-fated attempt at re-shaping the culture of the most semi-feudal region on the planet, to the Never-Trump movement. Notice how the internationalism didn’t change, even when the ideology morphed.
Heilbrunn cites veteran neocon Mike Ledeen from the Bush era, “Creative destruction is our middle name. … We tear down the old order every day.†Nothing about that was “conservative,†but a radical restructuring. One can argue that included tearing down the old order at home.
Naturally, some of the strongest opponents of a non-interventionist and paleo-conservative right, and the rise of the Trump phenomenon, were the neoconservatives, from Bill Kristol to Max Boot to The Bulwark. In fact, some, like Peter Hitchens, have argued that a few neoconservatives (like his brother Christopher) never really gave up on their internal Trotskyism and internationalism, but hijacked actual conservatism from within.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/28/are-neocons-really-back-in-the-trump-administration/
