The Washington Post’s Max Boot wants to “retire the ‘neocon’ label” because he believes it unfairly tarnishes the hawkish political elite who got America into the Iraq War and who have literally pushed for every war since. Boot claims national security adviser John Bolton doesn’t deserve to be called a neocon. Neither does former Vice President Dick Cheney. Nor does he.
Boot says “Neoconservatism” once had a real meaning — “back in the 1970s” when it was applied to ex-liberals who had drifted right but claims “the label has now become meaningless.”
He does have a point about important distinctions between hawkish figures like Bolton, Cheney, and others often being glossed over in the broader press, and that might even preclude some of them from being labeled “neoconservatives” in the most formal sense.
But who can give a damn when Boot and every other neocon call anyone who disagrees with them “isolationist?”
Far more than “neocon,” “isolationist” might be the most misused and abused foreign policy buzzword this century. It has been unfairly and constantly applied to virtually anyone who is remotely resistant to Washington’s next desired military intervention.
Max Boot did this very thing in December, writing, “For decades, elites in the United States had a consensus on foreign policy: They believed that championing a liberal world order was in our interest.”
I’ll leave it to the reader to determine what the U.S. “championing a liberal world order” might mean to someone who didn’t figure out until 2018 the Iraq War was one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in American history.
“Now, we are seeing a new left-right axis emerge around protectionism and isolationism,” Boot warned in his next sentence (emphasis mine).
The “isolationism” he’s referring to means Democrats who might want to bring troops home from Afghanistan, similar to President Trump. “Trump, too, wants to scale back foreign interventions,” Boot worries.
Who else might belong to this dangerous and irrational isolationist plot to undermine U.S. foreign policy? In October, a YouGov poll found 61 percent of Americans also wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Perhaps more interestingly, 69 percent of current and formed military members supported coming home.
Turns out America’s military members might be the most “isolationist” of us all!
Similar to Boot’s 1970s definition of “neocon,” labeling anyone who questions or opposes U.S. military intervention an “isolationist” today symbolically puts them in league with Americans who wanted to stay out of World War II. Given its scale and impact on Europe, not to mention the sacrifice of that generation and the indelible mark WWII left on our national psyche, it is fair to say the U.S. has not had a war like that since. It would be intellectually dishonest to believe otherwise.
Therefore, it is not remotely fair to compare Americans who thought invading Iraq in 2003 was a mistake, or that bombing Libya in 2011 could have negative consequences, or that arming rebels in Syria could embolden terrorists, or that leaving now Afghanistan is a good idea — it is not fair to compare anyone who has had these concerns to people who didn’t want to fight the Nazis. Any attempt to make such a connection is certainly more offensive than any misapplication of the word “neocon” to John Bolton or Dick Cheney.
And yet, neoconservatives have constantly made this comparison (and that’s an understatement).
Who else is an “isolationist?”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is not, but I defy you to find a single neoconservative who doesn’t consider him such. Paul leads the libertarian faction within the Republican Party that seeks a more realist or restrained foreign policy, so of course people who want to go to war all the time aren’t going to like him. Paul in recent years has smartly turned the tables on his neoconservative critics, calling them “isolationist” for opposing his diplomatic efforts with Russia and his support for open trade with Cuba.
Of course, Boot and his neocon friends think President Trump is an isolationist (except when he’s not). They smeared Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as one for questioning the U.S.’ presence in the Middle East during the 2016 election. Hawks even once tried to paint President Barack Obama as an isolationist for not going to war enough.
There’s really no limit to who neoconservatives will use this ridiculously clumsy label against.
But there are no true isolationists in mainstream society today. The usually hawkish Jonah Goldberg made this point before the 2012 presidential election when some were warning of an “isolationist tide” due to general war weariness and how some of the Republican candidates were picking up on and reflecting that public sentiment in their rhetoric.
“None of the GOP contenders are isolationist. The growing popular dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan and the skepticism toward the Libyan adventure have very, very little to do with anything that can seriously be understood as isolationism,” Goldberg wrote. “The idea that wanting to pull out of Libya (not my own position by the way) is a mark of isolationism is to suggest that basically any engagement the president enters into must be carried out indefinitely lest we give in to isolationism.”
Exactly. Merely reconsidering U.S. military action is all it takes to be labeled an “isolationist” in the current political environment. Unlike Goldberg, some uber-hawks will continue to hurl this barb more than others.
There’s a word for them.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
