Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution

Nitze's vision in nsc?68 was also fundamentally different from Niebuhr's realism. nsc?68 did not envisage spheres of influence or a balance of power. It committed the United States to a crusade against communism everywhere. Where Niebuhr's realism led to his own opposition to the Vietnam War and informed the attempt by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to achieve détente with the Soviet Union, Nitze's outlook in nsc?68 underlay neoconservative opposition to détente. In the 1970s, Nitze himself was an important neoconservative who, along with legal scholar Eugene V. Rostow, founded the Committee on the Present Danger. Like other neoconservatives, he was a harsh critic of Jimmy Carter and supported Reagan in 1980, later joining his administration. It was his rather than Schlesinger's or Niebuhr's outlook that became the dominant strain in neoconservatism. It could be seen in the rejection of détente and the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (salt ii), the conception of the Cold War as a real war, the claim that the United States was on the verge of being or had already been bypassed by the Soviet Union in military might, which would lead to what the neoconservatives called the "Finlandization" of Western Europe.

The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism--a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism but that eludes Ehrman. Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.

What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. In 1939, as a result of the Nazi?Soviet pact, the Trotskyist movement split, with one faction under James Burnham and Max Schachtman declaring itself opposed equally to German Nazism and Soviet communism. Under the influence of an Italian Trotskyist, Bruno Rizzi, Burnham and Schachtman envisaged the Nazi and Soviet bureaucrats and American managers as part of a new class. While Burnham broke with the left and became an editor at National Review, Schachtman remained.

The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector--based new class.

The neoconservatives also got their conception of intellectual and political work from their socialist past. They did not draw the kind of rigid distinction between theory and practice that many academics and politicians do. Instead they saw theory as a form of political combat and politics as an endeavor that should be informed by theory. They saw themselves as a cadre in a cause rather than as strictly independent intellectuals. And they were willing to use theory as a partisan weapon.

Together, the legacy of nsc?68 and Trotskyism contributed to a kind of apocalyptic thinking. The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left. Even the sober historian Walter Laqueur predicted in 1974 the imminence of a "major international upheaval such as the world has not experienced since World War II." In 1979 Eugene Rostow (who was named after socialist Eugene Debs) predicted that if salt ii were ratified, "We will be taking not a step toward peace but a leap toward the day when a president of the United States will have to choose between the surrender of vital interests and nuclear holocaust."

THE KILLING OF DÉTENTE

What is the contribution of neoconservatism to American foreign policy? In the early 1970s, it was clearly a corrective to the illusions about the Soviet Union and Third World revolution that the new left had promulgated and that some liberals had accepted. (As a former member of Students for a Democratic Society, I can personally attest to this point.) But neoconservative foreign policy rested on illusions of its own--about the imminent Soviet threat and the window of vulnerability that would open if the United States did not rapidly accelerate its strategic weapons development. Neoconservatives may also have played a role in postponing rather than accelerating the end of the Cold War, which is not to be confused with the end of the Soviet Union itself.