I am reminded that this blog used to be called NeoNeocon, and I used to read it as eagerly then as I do now – and I believed to my bones something approximately the opposite of the paragraph above: I believed that if the troublemaker nations in the Middle East just experienced a taste of Western life and freedom, they’d love it, want it, and change their ways to get it. I was not all that young, but certainly foolish.

The lesson I take from all this is that the effects – even fairly short-term, such as the “12 years to climate disaster” claims – of large and complex problems are more or less impossible to predict with any confidence. And therefore, when considering solutions, we MUST be conservative, like rock-ribbed conservative, or risk bringing about new horrible problems in our attempts to solve the one we see as most important at the time.

When I changed the name of this blog to “the new neo” it was because my use of the “neocon” moniker had been misunderstood from the start. My original reason for calling the blog “neo-neocon” was that I was newly conservative – really really newly conservative. Of course, I was no longer newly conservative after a few years.

But as far as my neoconnish foreign policy beliefs went, I had always felt that spreading liberty and democracy by military conquest would be difficult and to have any chance at success it would require an occupation of that country as well as a lengthy time commitment. Fairly quickly it became apparent that the US was unwilling to do either and certainly not both. Plus, democracy without something like the Bill of Rights – and a population educated in why this was important to defend – was often just another road to tyranny.

The larger question was and is: do people really want liberty? Some certainly do, but whether it’s a majority I can’t say for sure and rather doubt – and have come to doubt even more. That’s why I’ve quoted Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage so many times on this blog, even long ago when it was “neo-neocon.” Let’s have another go-round with that quote.

In this passage the Grand Inquisitor is addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Although the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is freedom. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it.

I’ve divided it into paragraphs that are not there in the original, the better to clarify what’s being said:

Command that these stones be made bread – and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone – was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee …

Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee – a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel …

… It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread? … In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them – so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!

The Brothers Karamazov first appeared in 1880, and Dostoevsky died just a few months later. That sounds like a long time ago, but it’s really not that long in the scheme of things (for example, three of my four grandparents were born before then).

I first encountered “The Grand Inquisitor” in the 60s, when we read it in high school. I didn’t fully understand it at the time (not that I fully understand it even now), but it gripped me with a memorable power, and I understood it well enough to be frightened by it, to get the gist of it, and to consider it important.

A lot of years have passed since then, and it only seems more important. Nevertheless, in the US and Western Europe, hunger is not what drives people towards the left. What does? The left has been labeled as virtue, and people wish to feel good about themselves. Being on the left also gives people the sense that they can control others and make a better world, and many people love the idea of the power to dictate to others. They may want freedom for themselves, but not for others.

And maybe it’s time to repeat another favorite passage of mine, this time from Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

… [H]uman beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

The post Neo-neocon versus The new neo appeared first on The New Neo.

But I didn’t expect him to. I’ve long pondered what happened to Kristol, and haven’t really come up with an answer either. Yes, the facile answer is “Trump happened,” but to me that’s no answer at all. Why did Trump’s advent on the scene cause previously sane and thoughtful people to go over to the dark side – that is, supporting the left, which is what Kristol now does? It’s also easy to say that he was always shallow and only in it for notoriety or whatever downputting explanation you can devise, but as Judge writes:

I wrote for the Weekly Standard for the first couple years of its existence in the mid-1990s, and in those days Kristol was a serious yet kind man who saw that the threat of political correctness and academic Marxism was real. One of the first pieces I did for him was about the radicalism that had taken over Georgetown University. That radicalism has now metastasized into wokeness, which has destroyed lives and crushed free speech.

On his Twitter feed recently, Kristol posted a video of Ron DeSantis condemning this neo-Marxism. Kristol’s comment? “This is the way the American conservative movement ends—not with a bang but a whimper.”

I have my own experience with Kristol, too. I met him a couple of times, once at a medium-sized gathering where he gave a talk and then there was a dinner where I happened to sit at the same table of around eight people. We have a mutual friend who had known him for decades and thought highly of him, and this person now can’t explain his change either. I wrote a number of articles for the online Weekly Standard (you can find them here at the Washington Examiner, which seems to have taken over the Weekly Standard’s archives) and he was always kind and smart and seemed quite principled. So I am deeply puzzled by his behavior.

Why do I even care? I care because it is a case of political change, which is a special interest of mine, but also because it surprised me that it was such an extreme change after all those years, as well as change of the more rare right-to-left variety. You can say, “Oh, he never was really a conservative because he was a neocon,” but Kristol certainly appeared to hew to conservative principles in most things except foreign policy for most or perhaps all of his life. Was he also one of the world’s best actors? I don’t think so. And he had plenty of fame and I doubt he was ever hurting for money.

Others say that Kristol and others made their change in order to keep on going to the parties with the in-crowd. But that just seems like weak tea to me, if a person seems to be guided by principle in the first place. And his repudiation of the right was far more global than merely a rejection of Trump himself, which would be more understandable. For Kristol, it has involved a fairly full-fledged embrace of the left at a time when the left has become even more pernicious, dangerous, and powerful.

I think Judge comes closest to an answer when he writes this:

Lacking the experience of life change—Kristol inherited punditry from his dad…

I have long thought it’s incorrect to call Kristol a “neocon.” The claim is based on his truculent and interventionist foreign policy stances, but the reason it doesn’t seem quite right to me is that the original definition of the term (and the one I prefer) is someone who had a political change from left to right. Kristol never had that change; as Judge writes, he inherited his politics – and even his profession – from his father Irving Kristol. And his father was a bona fide neocon, a leftist turned conservative who was described by The Daily Telegraph after his death as “perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the [twentieth] century.” Those are big shoes to fill, to say the least. Irving Kristol died in 2009, before Trump became a large political figure, so we don’t know how he would have felt about him. But Bill always stood in his shadow and perhaps never quite freed himself from his influence. Perhaps this recent anti-Trump pro-left position is the son’s adolescent rebellion, long-delayed.

I admit I have no idea if that’s the case or not. But simple Trump-hatred really doesn’t explain how far Kristol has gone.

The post Mark Judge ponders what happened to Bill Kristol – and so do I appeared first on The New Neo.

I also recalled that Norman Podhoretz was one of the so-called “neocons” who thought Donald Trump was a good president, and I wanted to check that out, too. Sure enough, he was. I think he’s worth quoting on the subject:

Podhoretz, who initially supported Marco Rubio in the 2016 Republican primaries, remarked about the primary campaign:

“I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative… They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards—and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on.”

Podhoretz says his views however, have caused him to lose ex-friends who were anti-Trump, saying: “Well some of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether.” Of Trump, he argues: “he fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left… His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America.”

Those remarks have stood the test of time. Norman Podhoretz’s statement about his “new set of ex-friends” is a witty reference to a book he’d written earlier (2000) entitled Ex Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. It described a process with which many of us are familiar: ostracism from the left when someone leaves the fold, steps out of the circle dance. Podhoretz had done that on a much larger and more public scale than most of us.

This is from a review highlighted at Amazon:

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hanna Arendt, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman – among the other things these writers and intellectuals all had in common is Norman Podhoretz. With them Podhoretz was part of “The Family,” as the core group of New York intellectuals of the 50s and 60s came to be known. And in Ex-Friends, he has written the intellectual equivalent of a family history – a sparkling chronicle of affection and jealousy, generosity and betrayal, breakdowns and reconciliations, and ultimately of dysfunctions impossible to cure. Ex-Friends is filled with brilliant portraits of some of the cultural icons who defined our time. Yet anyone who has followed Norman Podhoretz’s career as a writer and editor and above all one of the leading controversialists of our time will expect more than just another fond memoir of literary alliances and quarrels, brilliant talk and bruised egos. Indeed, while Ex-Friends has some of the elements of a personal diary, it is also a journal de combat describing the intellectual and social turbulence of the 60s and 70s and showing how the literary living room was transformed into a political battleground where the meaning of America was fought night by night. Against this backdrop, Podhoretz tells how he left The Family and undertook a trailblazing journey from radical to conservative, a journey that helped redefine America’s intellectual landscape in the last quarter of the 20th century and caused his old friends to become ex-friends.

That takes intellectual and social courage, which Norman Podhoretz most definitely had. By supporting Trump he lost some of his newer supposedly conservative friends such as Bill Kristol, who indeed appears to be one of those who have “lost their minds altogether.” I’ve not read the book, but perhaps I should.

Norman Podhoretz wrote another book I’ve never read but that sounds interesting, entitled Why Are Jews Liberals? (2010). Many commenters here have asked that question and speculated on the answer. Podhoretz has an answer, but I guess you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is.

The post Norman Podhoretz on Donald Trump and ex-friends appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s what’s going on there:

Nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.

Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend’s freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.

Apparently there’s no back-up system to cover such an occurrence, and 23% of Texas power is ordinarily generated by wind.

The post Texas: gone with the wind power appeared first on The New Neo.

Yesterday I mentioned that “at some point I may change my apple photo, too.”

A number of people responded with some version of “No!” “Don’t ditch the apple!” “It’s your brand!”

But I said I may change the apple photo. In other words, I may change the photo but it will remain an apple photo. I’m not planning to change the apple photo into a non-apple photo.

I know it’s my brand. I just thought I’d update it.

Sort of like the change of blog name. When I first announced that I was changing the URL and site of the blog, I explained my reasons, which basically boil down to two. The first is that the design of the old blog was outdated. It wasn’t good on smartphones; no one was reading blogs on phones yet when I had set up neoneocon. It had a design so Byzantine and cloaked that I could not change anything on it, and so it was practically frozen in time in terms of its basic structure and even many of its details. The theme (that’s the basic design) had long been abandoned by its creator, who seemed to have gone incommunicado. I feared that at any moment the blog could stop functioning, and I wanted to make a change before that happened.

The second reason was that the URL didn’t really fit anymore. I originally chose “neoneocon” (in 2004) because it was sort of catchy and sort of funny, and I didn’t expect to be a serious long-term blogger anyway. My political change was quite new, and I was using the term “neocon” mostly in its original sense of “a new conservative.” I was a really new new conservative—thus, a neo-neocon.

That was nearly a decade and a half ago.

I also chose the term “neocon” to mean I favored the spread of liberal democracy with protection of human rights.” Not “one vote, one person, one time” democracy. Not by military means, unless there was a compelling other defensive reason to go to war. I explained all of this in post after post (in the category “neocons” on the right sidebar), but people continued to misunderstand, and as the years went on “neocon” became more and more entrenched as a word for “whatever we hate” on both sides.

So the combination of all of that, but mostly the fact that I was now an old conservative (without being a paleocon) rather than a new conservative, made me think I really needed to make a switch. I wanted to keep the “neo,” because that’s how I’m known. I tried to buy “neoneo.com” and “neosquared.com” and a host of other URLs that seemed good to me, but they were not available, and so I settled on this one, and I think it makes sense because I am the new neo and this is the new neo site.

So why change the photo? Well, it’s really outdated, too. That picture that was up in the right corner, and down below if you were looking at a cellphone, was taken in September of 2006. It’s a selfie (although that word didn’t exist then, as far as I know) taken with a crummy camera that I had set on a shelf, and with a timer. It was blurry to begin with, and then I zoomed in on it to get the closeup and the blurriness became even more apparent. But it was the best I had and I rather liked it.

To be blunt about it, I was also a lot younger then. You do the math; it’s easy. As time went by it started to bug me that it was such an ancient photo and just didn’t seem to express where I’m at right now anymore than “neoneocon” expressed it. About two years ago, for example, I had stopped dyeing my hair its original near-black. Now it’s silver—hey, they say that’s very trendy, you know. I actually rather like it, but it sure doesn’t look the same as the blog photo, nor do I.

And cameras are hi-def now, just in time to keep up with the aging process.

So I set out to recreate the pose of the photo with the apple. Did you ever try to copy the angle at which you held something in an old photo, the expression on your face (in a closeup yet, after the passage of twelve years), the sweater you were wearing?

The post About changing that apple photo and the blog URL appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s what Alan Dershowitz had to say:

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz says this story is “much, much worse” than the media has presented it.

On “Fox & Friends” this morning, he said that the author of the article [that Plame had recommended as “thoughtful”], Philip Giraldi, is a “well-known anti-Semite.”

“In this article, he says that Jews like me or Bill Kristol, when we appear on television, should have on the bottom of the screen identification saying we’re Jews. And he says it’s ‘like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison. Ingest at your own peril,'” Dershowitz said.

Much more on the story here.

And the MSM is playing the role you’d expect:

Imagine, if you will, a conservative tweeting that Jews in America are causing the country’s wars. That person would rightly be denounced by his fellow conservatives and pilloried in the media. But if you’re a progressive media darling, you get a hand-waving pass. This brings us to the way the media covered former CIA analyst Valerie Plame and her long history of anti-Semitic tweets…

The media’s coverage of this story was an epic journo-fail.

The post The return of Valerie Plame Wilson appeared first on The New Neo.

Now Pipes has written another piece entitled “Why I rooted for the Turkish coup attempt.” Well, I was certainly rooting for it, too (although I saw it as doomed almost from the start). And even though I don’t tweet, I pretty much agree with Pipes in his first paragraphs here:

Every major government condemned the coup attempt in Turkey, as did all four of the parties with representatives in the Turkish parliament. So did even Fethullah Gé¼len, the religious figure accused of being behind the would-be take over.

All of which leaves me feeling a little lonely, having tweeted out on Friday, just after the revolt began, “#ErdoÄŸan stole the most recent election in #Turkey and rules despotically. He deserves to be ousted by a military coup. I hope it succeeds.”

Pipes goes on to explain further:

ErdoÄŸan stole the election. ErdoÄŸan is an Islamist who initially made his mark, both as mayor of Istanbul and as prime minister of Turkey, by playing within the rules. As time wore on, however, he grew disdainful of those rules, specifically the electoral ones. He monopolized state media, tacitly encouraged physical attacks on opposition-party members, and stole votes…

ErdoÄŸan rules despotically. ErdoÄŸan has taken control of one institution after another, even in the two years since he became president, a constitutionally and historically non-political position. The result? An ever-growing portion of Turks are working directly under his control or that of his minions: the prime minister, the cabinet, the judges, the police, the educators, the bankers, the media owners, and other business leaders. The military leadership has acquiesced to ErdoÄŸan but, as the coup attempt confirmed, the officer corps has remained the one institution still outside his direct control.

ErdoÄŸan uses his despotic powers for malign purposes, waging what amounts to a civil war against the Kurds of southeastern Turkey, helping ISIS, aggressing against neighbors, and promoting Sunni Islamism.

Military intervention has previously worked in Turkey. Turkey is the country where military coups d’état have had the most positive effect. In all four of the modern coups (1960, 1971, 1980, 1997), the general staff has shown a disciplined understanding of its role — to right the ship of state and then get out of its way. Their ruling interludes lasted, respectively, five years, two and a half years, three years, and zero years.

Pipes goes on to say that he thinks Erdogan’s days are numbered, and that his downfall will be to overplay his hand in the international arena. I’m not as expert on this as Pipes is (to say the least), but I think he’s being too optimistic. I think that the moves Erdogan is making to solidify his power will indeed solidify his power, much like what happened after the 1979 revolution in Iran. That regime is still in place, although some of the players are gone.

I think it’s also of note that Pipes has long been lumped with the neoconservatives:

Pipes had previously considered himself to be a Democrat, but after anti-war George McGovern gained the 1972 Democratic nomination for President, he switched to the Republican Party. Pipes used to accept being described as a “neoconservative”, once saying that “others see me that way, and, you know, maybe I am one of them.” However, he explicitly rejected the label in April 2009 due to differences with the neoconservative positions on democracy and Iraq, now considering himself a “plain conservative”.

My change experience was complete by around 2003, and thirteen years isn’t so “neo” anymore (although it’s shorter than the amount of time for Pipes, who left the liberal camp in 1972). I also have thought from the beginning that there’s no magic about “democracy” itself without guarantees of liberty and the rule of a law that protects individual liberty. When a dictatorial tyrant is elected, and that person dismantles the structures that protect people’s rights, to defend that person in the name of “democracy” is an absurdity and an outrage.

Articles by Pipes such as this one from 2012 may explain the sort of thinking that led him to differentiate himself from some neocons. I agree with him on the problem with supporting democracy so matter what it looks like; many of my posts about democracy (see this, for example, as well as this) contain such caveats. For example, the following is from that latter post (written nine years ago):

In the many posts I’ve written attempting to explain the basic neocon attitude towards the spread of democracy-(see this and this) I’ve tried to be careful to use the term “liberal democracy” to describe what is advocated. Why? Because democracy alone is not enough.

Democracy can devolve into tyranny almost as easily as a powerful central government can…

History teaches that the Bill of Rights was adopted with an eye to limiting the power of both the executive and the legislative branches, as well as to make clear that all powers not specifically listed in the Constitution as belonging to the federal government were retained by the states and the people. But what would prevent the people from voting away any of those rights? History also teaches us that crowds are strange and fickle things, subject to persuasive demagoguery as well as coercive threats, and that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor wasn’t lying when he said that humankind is often willing to lay down the burden of freedom for easy answers and the promise of protection from its responsibilities…

Without these guarantees, democracy can mean “one person, one vote, one time.” The Ayatollah Khomeini was given dictatorial powers in a process that began, after the fall of the Shah and the Ayatollah’s triumphant return, with a nationwide referendum that was passed with an extraordinary 92.8% percent of the vote. This established the theocratic dictatorship that exists to this day, with the constitution of Iran being totally rewritten shortly afterwards.

Hitler came to power without ever winning a majority vote for his party, but the German government had another weakness””under its constitution, it was relatively easy to suspend civil liberties and establish a dictatorship. This did not even require the vote of its people, merely a two-thirds majority of its legislature. Therefore it was done by republican means; the Reichstag obligingly voted to abolish itself, although not without the “persuasion” of Hitler’s storm troopers surrounding the building with cries of ““Full powers””or else! We want the bill””or fire and murder!”

And recent less dramatic, but similar and still worrisome, events by which Venezuelan dictator Chavez has seized power with the full cooperation of the Venezuelan legislature””which, as in Germany of old, can amend the constitution by a mere 2/3 vote””demonstrate once again that there are not only “democratic” ways to seize power, but “republican” ones as well (and please note the small “d” and the small “r”)…

How does this apply to the attempts to spread democracy to a country such as Iraq? It makes it clear that democracy itself is a highly flawed “solution” without the guarantees inherent in a liberal democracy, and that none of it is of much use if the constitution of a country is too easily amended or suspended.

It is unsettling to see how many people—on left, right, and in the middle—do not see the truth of this.

The post More on the Turkish coup attempt—“democracy” at any price? appeared first on The New Neo.

Despite the opinion of elites on either extreme ”“ whether motivated by humanitarian or democracy project aims ”“ the fact is that, 13 years after 9/11, it’s remarkable how coherent and consistent the views of Americans really are. It’s the Obama view that is incoherent, bouncing between the sentiments of elites and uncomfortable in a position of leadership. Americans, for most of the 20th and 21st centuries, have been remarkably consistent in their views.

The American people are innately Jacksonian. They rejected the elite pushes on Syria and Libya for the same reason they now want to destroy ISIS ”“ because they believe the purpose of the American military shouldn’t be to nation build or police countries, but to kill and destroy evildoers who threaten us and our interests. That’s why the humanitarian agenda and the democracy agenda couldn’t take hold in Syria ”“ Assad was smart enough not to chop heads off Americans (that doesn’t make for good Vogue profile material, after all).

One of the problems with looking at it this way is that it takes an awful lot to wake the sleeping Jacksonian giant. An ounce or two of prevention of ISIS would have done a great deal a year ago, but not only was Obama not even remotely ready to do it, but were the American people ready to support bombing back then? I have my doubts. If groups such as ISIS have to metastasize in order to get our attention, and even then all we’re willing to support is air strikes, how Jacksonian is that?

Just to clarify: my “neocon” moniker does not mean I’m for war merely in order to effect regime change. I’ve explained what I mean by “neocon” in many previous articles, but the summary version is this:

(a) a newly-hatched conservative; and

(b) one who believes that liberal (in the classic sense) democracies, with protection of liberties and human rights, are the best form of government and should be promoted whenever possible and whenever the ground for them seems ripe for them. However, that promotion should only take the form of military action when our own security or that of our allies is profoundly threatened.

That last sentence makes me a Jacksonian.

The post Jacksonian Americans appeared first on The New Neo.

Unfortunately, it seems to have the ring of truth:

As was the case in 2011, the voices of liberal democracy in Egypt are so few and far between that they have no chance whatsoever of gaining power, today or for the foreseeable future. At this point it is hard to know what the balance of power is between the Islamists who won 74 percent of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary elections and their opponents. But it is clear that their opponents are not liberal democrats. They are a mix of neo-Nasserist fascists, communists and other not particularly palatable groups.

None of them share Western conceptions of freedom and limited government. None of them are particularly pro-American. None of them like Jews. And none of them support maintaining Egypt’s cold peace with Israel…

There are only three things that are knowable about the future of Egypt. First it will be poor. Egypt is a failed state. It cannot feed its people. It has failed to educate its people. It has no private sector to speak of. It has no foreign investment.

Second, Egypt will be politically unstable.

Mubarak was able to maintain power for 29 years because he ran a police state that the people feared. That fear was dissipated in 2011. This absence of fear will bring Egyptians to the street to topple any government they feel is failing to deliver on its promises – as they did this week.

Given Egypt’s dire economic plight, it is impossible to see how any government will be able to deliver on any promises – large or small – that its politicians will make during electoral campaigns.

And so government after government will share the fates of Mubarak and Morsi.

Beyond economic deprivation, today tens of millions of Egyptians feel they were unlawfully and unjustly ousted from power on Wednesday.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists won big in elections hailed as free by the West. They have millions of supporters who are just as fanatical today as they were last week. They will not go gently into that good night.

Finally, given the utter irrelevance of liberal democratic forces in Egypt today, it is clear enough that whoever is able to rise to power in the coming years will be anti-American, anti- Israel and anti-democratic, (in the liberal democratic sense of the word). They might be nicer to the Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood has been. But they won’t be more pro-Western.

It is difficult to argue with any of that, so I won’t even try. Of course, miracles do happen, and I would applaud the sudden emergence of a force in Egypt for liberal democracy that’s more than a few people deep, but nothing has led me to believe it likely or even possible at this point, or at any easily foreseeable point.

You may ask: how can you, a neocon, say that? Isn’t that against the neocon philosophy?

My reply is to suggest that you read my previous posts on neocons. But if you don’t want to spend time doing that, I’ll just summarize and say that (a) I chose the name “neo-neocon” primarily to indicate the fact that I was a new (“neo”) conservative at the time I started this blog, and (b) the neoconism I support neither advocates overthrowing governments by force nor believes any movement towards liberal democracy in the Middle East would be the least bit easy or quick.

I refer you, for example, to this essay of mine for a summary written many years ago. To that I will add that Egypt is most definitely not a good candidate for becoming a liberal democracy, to say the least. Nor was Mubarak a tyrant on the order of Saddam Hussein, or in defiance of UN sanctions or mandatory weapons inspections like Hussein was. Mubarak’s regime was bad, but what replaces him has every likelihood of being just as bad or worse.

When we invaded Iraq in order to depose a tyrant who was defying UN sanctions and whom we thought had WMDs, we were left with the task of what to do afterward, an undertaking far more difficult than the initial war. We have all seen how hard it was to sustain our strength of will and commitment there, and no one is advocating a repeat performance in Egypt or any other country at the moment. Egypt, as I said, presents a completely different picture anyway, and lacks almost all of the ingredients that motivated our invasion of Iraq.

But if you stop to think about it—despite the serious problems Iraq continues to face—considering Iraq’s previous state, and the state of practically all the other nations in the region except Israel, Iraq isn’t doing so bad. It’s a cliche to regard the Iraq war as having been a disaster, but the real question is: compared to what?

The post The options in Egypt appeared first on The New Neo.

The pattern is familiar enough: an established autocracy with a record of friendship with the U.S. is attacked by insurgents…Violence spreads and American officials wonder aloud about the viability of a regime that “lacks the support of its own people.” The absence of an opposition party is deplored and civil-rights violations are reviewed. Liberal columnists question the morality of continuing aid to a “rightist dictatorship” and provide assurances concerning the essential moderation of some insurgent leaders who “hope” for some sign that the U.S. will remember its own revolutionary origins. Requests for help from the beleaguered autocrat go unheeded, and the argument is increasingly voiced that ties should be established with rebel leaders “before it is too late.”…

[There is] a growing clamor for American disengagement on grounds that continued involvement confirms our status as an agent of imperialism, racism, and reaction; is inconsistent with support for human rights; alienates us from the “forces of democracy”; and threatens to put the U.S. once more on the side of history’s “losers.” This chorus is supplemented daily by interviews with returning missionaries and “reasonable” rebels.

As the situation worsens, the President assures the world that the U.S. desires only that the “people choose their own form of government”…

[T]he U.S. will have been led by its own misunderstanding of the situation to assist actively in deposing an erstwhile friend and ally and installing a government hostile to American interests and policies in the world…And everywhere our friends will have noted that the U.S. cannot be counted on in times of difficulty and our enemies will have observed that American support provides no security against the forward march of history.

Does that passage seem to describe Obama and Egypt pretty well? Actually, it’s from an article by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick that appeared in Commentary in 1979 (hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain), over thirty years ago, during Jimmy’s Carter’s administration.

Kirkpatrick was a neocon of sorts, although not the sort of neocon people often seem to be referring to today, when the word is so commonly misused to mean “warmonger who wants to wage war on dictatorships and naively thinks they will then magically turn into democracies.” Kirkpatrick was a neocon in the sense that she was a political changer, having once been a socialist and then a Democrat but ultimately becoming a conservative (in part out of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter’s policies as president) and serving as Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, the first woman to hold that position. She was also a neocon in that she [emphasis mine]:

…advocated U.S. support of anticommunist governments around the world, including authoritarian dictatorships, if they went along with Washington’s aims””believing they could be led into democracy by example. She wrote, “Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.”

That Commentary article was actually what originally brought Kirkpatrick to Reagan’s attention. In it, she had the following to say about the development of democracies, which she believed ordinarily occurred at a sedate pace:

In the relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation during which leaders have reluctantly grown accustomed to tolerating dissent and opposition, opponents have accepted the notion that they may defeat but not destroy incumbents, and people have become aware of government’s effects on their lives and of their own possible effects on government. Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits…

Although there is no instance of a revolutionary “socialist” or Communist society being democratized, right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies”“given time, propitious economic, social, and political circumstances, talented leaders, and a strong indigenous demand for representative government…But it seems clear that the architects of contemporary American foreign policy have little idea of how to go about encouraging the liberalization of an autocracy…

The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policymakers and journalists accustomed to public institutions based on universalistic norms rather than particularistic relations.

The failure to understand these relations is one source of the failure of U.S. policy in this and previous administrations. There are others. In Iran and Nicaragua (as previously in Vietnam, Cuba, and China) Washington overestimated the political diversity of the opposition”“especially the strength of “moderates” and “democrats” in the opposition movement; underestimated the strength and intransigence of radicals in the movement; and misestimated the nature and extent of American influence on both the government and the opposition.

Kirkpatrick was writing in a Cold War context in 1979 (I omitted some of the USSR references in the article), so the re-democratization of countries such as Russia had not yet occurred. But the way it has happened after the fall of the Soviets, and the restrictive form “democracy” has taken there, only serves to underscore how difficult it is to develop a so-called liberal (as in “classical liberal”) democracy, with its guarantees of human rights and liberties.

Did the Bush administration ignore warnings such as Kirkpatrick’s when it embarked on the Iraq War? Yes and no. I think it underestimated how difficult the reconstruction would be and overestimated the stomach Americans would have for such an undertaking. But if you recall the reasons we went into Iraq, many had less to do with nation-building or democracy and more to do with weapons inspections and UN resolutions and Hussein’s continual defiance of them (here’s a post of mine that discusses this). Saddam Hussein was most definitely not the sort of autocrat Kirkpatrick describes, one who would have been interested in a slow progression of moves towards greater democracy; au contraire. So the alternative she advocates didn’t exist with him in charge.

The Shah of Iran was probably the prototype of what she was talking about—an autocrat who was essentially pro-US (unlike Saddam) but who was dealing with forces in his country that would have destroyed him and his reforms if he didn’t clamp down on them, hard. After Carter abandoned him, he was replaced by a regime far worse than his had been in human rights, and exceedingly hostile to the US as well.

Good move, Jimmy.

The dilemma faced by all US presidents in these situations is hardly a simple one, however. Support the old dictator and you’re called an enemy of the people. Help topple him (active or passively) and you often pave the way for something worse. Try to guide the reconstruction that will follow and you’re accused of being an occupying power—if you’re a Republican, that is (perhaps Obama could get away with it, but he’s never going to try).

[NOTE: I learned from Kirkpatrick’s Wiki page that one of her three sons is a Buddhist lama. Don’t know what to make of that, but I pass the information on to you.]

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