Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution

For 14 years, from the 1973 Jackson-Vanik amendment until the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a group of intellectuals known as neoconservatives shaped, and sometimes dominated, American foreign policy. They wrote for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, and later The National Interest. They acted through organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee for the Free World. They held important positions in the AFL?CIO leadership and in the office of Senator Henry M. Jackson, then the most powerful Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And during Ronald Reagan's first term, they occupied influential posts in the State and Defense Departments.

George Washington University historian John Ehrman has recounted how these intellectuals' views on foreign policy developed and, once they were ascendant, changed. His book is well written, and, while some of his choices of people are eccentric, many of his comments about particular neoconservatives are insightful. Ehrman's overall history, however, is skewed.

Ehrman describes neoconservatism as the fourth phase in the development of liberal foreign policy. The first was Cold War liberalism, which he identifies with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center, Reinhold Niebuhr's essays, and the Truman administration's hawkish National Security Council report, nsc?68, drafted in 1950 under the supervision of Paul Nitze. The second was the left?wing revisionism of the 1960s, which he identifies chiefly with historian William Appleman Williams and disciples like Richard Barnet. The third was the neoliberal synthesis by political scientists Stanley Hoffmann and Zbigniew Brzezinski, which stressed world order and interdependence over containment and polarization. Neoconservatism arose as a reaction to both left?wing revisionism and neoliberalism and as a reaffirmation of Cold War liberalism. The neoconservatives, writes Ehrman, stood for "continued adherence to the vital center idea of an activist anticommunist foreign policy." They were Cold War liberals who searched for a Truman in the 1970s and found Reagan.

Ehrman's history recalls that of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz in his 1980 book, The Present Danger. But Podhoretz and other neoconservatives who took this view had an ulterior motive. Just as conservative economists of the time were trying to portray the Kemp?Roth tax cuts as a reprise of the Kennedy administration's tax cuts, Podhoretz and the neoconservatives were trying to attract discontented Democrats to the Republican side by portraying their own doctrine as the true heir of Truman liberalism. Ehrman takes these arguments at face value. This version of neoconservative history mistakes a part, and a small part at that, for a more complex whole.

Some neoconservatives, like former Hubert Humphrey speechwriter Ben Wattenberg, could indeed be called unreconstructed Cold War liberals. But most followed different trajectories. The dominant strain of neoconservatism in the 1970s was a mixture of the geopolitical militarism of Nitze's nsc?68 and a kind of inverted Trotskyism or socialist internationalism. It owed little to Schlesinger's Vital Center or to memories of the Truman doctrine. A less dominant strain could be traced back to Niebuhr's realism, but it also bore little resemblance to Schlesinger's liberalism. It was centrist only in the sense that the center of American politics had shifted markedly to the right.

HEATING THE COLD WAR

One must begin by pulling apart the different strands of Cold War liberalism that Ehrman weaves into one. Niebuhr, Schlesinger, and Nitze were all anticommunists and Truman supporters in 1948, but they had very different views of the Cold War. Niebuhr warned against the "soft utopianism" of liberals like Schlesinger who believed that through a long?term struggle of ideas, communism would crumble, and a kind of democratic world government would emerge. Niebuhr was wary of foreign policy becoming a quasi?religious crusade--whether for freedom or communism. He was a balance?of?power, national?interest realist in the same tradition as Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau, and George F. Kennan. Although Schlesinger and Nitze both embraced the struggle with communism, they interpreted it quite differently. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger, with a view toward the independent Yugoslavian communist leader Marshal Tito, portrayed world communism as beginning to fragment, even hinting at a future Sino?Soviet split; in nsc?68, Nitze portrays communism as a Soviet?led monolith. Schlesinger was optimistic about American prospects of eventually toppling communism without another world war; Nitze described the United States as being in "mortal danger" and "the deepest peril" from a Soviet Union that was on the verge (even in 1950) of becoming militarily superior. Schlesinger saw the United States engaged in a worldwide political struggle against communism; Nitze saw the Cold War as a real war. He argued that if the United States permitted communist expansion anywhere else, it "would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin could be assembled." Schlesinger's logic led to the Alliance for Progress; Nitze's led to American intervention in Vietnam and to periodic hysteria about missile gaps and windows of vulnerability.