ABSTRACT
In the annals of international relations, it remains rare for an abstract school of grand strategy to feature in popular music. Yet the Rolling Stones’ 2005 album entitled – perhaps appropriately enough – A Bigger Bang accorded neo-conservatism the full Jagger and Richards treatment. Two years after the US-led Iraq invasion, ‘Sweet NeoCon’ echoed the sentiments of many in castigating US foreign policy: ‘You call yourself a Christian/I think that you’re a hypocrite/You say you are a patriot/I think that you’re a crock of shit … It’s liberty for all/Democracy’s our style/Unless you are against us/ Then it’s prison without trial.’ If its geo-political insights were neither especially elegant, precise nor profound, the track nonetheless added yet another indictment against the supposed philosophical underpinnings of the ‘Bush Doctrine’. No term has become more ubiquitous during the George W. Bush years than neo-
conservatism and no group more politically controversial than neo-conservatives: ‘hard-line’, ‘new fundamentalists’ (Ikenberry 2004: 7, 9), ‘deceitful’, ‘scare-mongering’ and ‘war-mongering’ (Scheuer 2008: 122, 165, 208). The most common depiction suggests that a distinctly minority strand within the Republican Party and American conservatism, one markedly Jewish in composition, hijacked US foreign policy after 11 September 2001 in the interests of the state of Israel. This hawkish cabal exploited widespread public fear to lure a gullible nation into an unnecessary ‘war of choice’ in Iraq in a futile and utopian bid to transform the Middle East. The unintended but catastrophic consequence was not only an Iraqi quagmire, a weakened US and an emboldened Iran but also a more vulnerable Israel and a region more ripe for regional war than democratic peace. More generally, the neo-conservatives’ self-consciously imperial project saw crucial US alliances frayed, state and sub-state enemies empowered, the United Nations weakened and American interests retarded on a global basis. Rarely has so much malign international influence been attributed by so many to so
few. This is ironic in three respects. First, the vast majority of those decision-makers most intimately involved in the formulation and implementation of Bush’s foreign policy were anything but neo-conservatives. Moreover, many critics appeared confused as to what, and who, could be accurately labelled ‘neo-con’. Almost one month into the Iraq War, for example, Alastair Campbell (Campbell and Stott 2008: 687), press secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, asked Bush aide Dan Bartlett what ‘neo-con’ meant as Blair lamented the growing obsession with neo-conservatism as ‘crazy’. (When Bartlett described ‘neo-con’ as ‘the belief that government had a moral purpose’, Campbell enquired if moral purpose could only be ‘right-wing’.) One of the
most oft-touted examples of neo-conservatives, former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, does not even include the term in his memoirs (Bolton 2007). Who qualifies as a neo-conservative therefore often appears more a matter of art than science. Second, the very ubiquity of the terms as shorthand for ‘right-wing’, ‘hawkish’,
‘Jewish’, and ‘pro-war’ has rendered them more pejorative epithets than analytically revealing categories. ‘Neo-conservative’ and ‘neo-conservatism’ have become so widespread in the popular usage since 2001 as to lose any critical precision or coherent meaning. As David Brooks (2004: 42) observed, ‘If you ever read a sentence that starts “Neo-cons believe”, there is a 99.44 per cent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.’ Nor are ‘experts’ free of such carelessness. In two recent accounts, even Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was described as an ‘Iranian neo-con’ (Ehteshami and Zweiri 2007) while certain assertive Chinese foreign policy wonks were pithily labelled ‘neo-comms’ (Leonard 2008: 133). Such difficulties are exacerbated, third, by the contested legacy of the Bush years for
neo-conservatism. In particular, rival prognoses of neo-conservatism’s relative health differ sharply in the light of its purported influence on foreign policy under the fortythird president. Some see neo-conservatism as a thankfully spent force. For Ikenberry (2004: 8):
the intellectual high-water mark of the new fundamentalism was probably the October 2002 National Security Strategy report. Its political high tide was probably the moment President George W. Bush landed in a flight suit on the USS Abraham Lincoln to pronounce the ‘end’ of major hostilities in Iraq.
