ABSTRACT
“Global unilateralism” has been presented by Irving Kristol, the reputed “godfather” and “standard-bearer” of the new creed, as the neoconservative alternative to “liberal internationalism”. The world according to Kristol is a world in the grip of a “conflict of ideologies”. There is now, in Kristol’s opinion, only “a tentative, fumbling search” for a new American ideology. How an ideology can be “messianic,” if no one within the Soviet Union believes in it anymore, and it is carried abroad solely with guns, is a mystery that Kristol never clears up. Kristol seems to need a Soviet messianism in order to convert the United States to a corresponding capitalist messianism. Kristol and cohorts have something more in mind. Their version of ideological conflict shades into a real, ordinary, bloodletting war —anything up to nuclear devastation, which is the only concession Kristol makes to stopping short of mutual catastrophe.
