Conservative journalist and author Jonathan writes in The Bulwark that neoconservatism had a good run, but now it’s dead, courtesy of President Donald Trump.
“Neoconservatism was messy and often contradictory,” said Last. “It supported democratic movements in some places, but was friendly to anti-Soviet strongmen in others. … But even once you take all of this into account, I propose that, net-net, neoconservatism was a force for good.”
In the 1990s, Last said the U.S. contained the Yugoslav wars, helped end and prevent genocide, and it ensured that the breakup of Yugoslavia didn’t destabilize the whole of Europe. Democracy promotion failed in Afghanistan, despite the U.S. spending $8 trillion on George W. Bush’s War on Terror, but Iraq fared much better, with current — and very quiet — prime minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani in office since 2022. Al-Sudani was democratically elected, like his predecessors, since the removal of Saddam Hussein. It has “a functional legislature and court system and it no longer stages public forced confessions or tortures its Olympic athletes,” said Last.
“Now let me explain how Donald Trump killed [neoconservatism] dead.”
Trump is not about spreading democracy in places like Venezuela, having claimed that America is now “in charge” of that nation, and admitting that he invaded to get a piece of Venezuela’s petroleum industry. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Stephen Miller claims that America sets “the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So for them to do commerce, they need our permission.”
Miller also claims the nation’s right to seize Greenland from Denmark if we so choose.
“For decades, the divide in American foreign policy was along gradients of interventionism aimed at promoting American interests through the expansion of democracy,” said Last. “Trump just junked the entire arrangement by going for a maximalist view of intervention — that the United States is allowed to kidnap arrest foreign leaders at will and take over entire countries — but marrying it to an explicitly expansionist, colonialist, and un-democratic program.
By breaking American foreign policy from democracy promotion and turning it toward domination Trump ruined the argument that American democracy promotion was “premised on a win-win view of foreign policy.” That liberal democracies are stable, and “a stable, rules-based world order gave America systemic advantages at every turn.”
But “Trump’s policy of domination is a zero-sum view of foreign affairs,” said Last. “It proposes that at all times there are strong actors and weak actors, and that the strong are free to take what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
The Trump view trades neoconservatism’s systemic advantages for localized spoils.
“Instead of, say, having the entire global financial system organized around our preferences — as we had under the ancien régime — under domination theory, the POTUS will have tributes paid to him by supplicant nations,” said Last, adding that Trump’s treatment of Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado as showing that America “has no interest in helping her liberate Venezuela.”
“America does not want partners,” said Last. “We want vassals who will do what we want and marks we can shake down.
Read the Bulwark report at this link.
