Was Irving Kristol a Neocon?
Nathan Glazer has an article about Irvin Kristol in TNR that, on its second page, makes the interesting argument that Kristol, despite being the “grandfather of neoconservatism,” didn’t actually hold the beliefs about national security policy that we now identify with that term:
Irving found the limitation of The Public Interest to domestic affairs confining and founded The National Interest, recruiting the wonderful Owen Harries from Australia to edit it and hoping it would provide a platform for a more realistic (I think that is the term he favored) approach to foreign policy. Oddly enough, such an approach was in contradiction with what came be known as “neoconservative” foreign policy: Irving was skeptical early on about imposing or promoting democracy in South Korea or Vietnam (he was wrong about South Korea), and, undoubtedly, he would have been equally skeptical about its prospects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The term “neoconservatism” was hijacked. In its early application, in the 1970s, it referred to the growing caution and skepticism among a group of liberals about the effects of social programs. It was later applied to a vigorous and expansionist democracy-promoting military and foreign policy, especially in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There was some reason to the hijacking–after all, a second generation of “neoconservatives,” some of it literally second-generation, was promoting this policy. But some of us who were labeled early as neoconservatives, a characterization not of our choosing, such as Daniel P. Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and myself, found it astonishing and unsettling.
Justin Vaïsse takes a more scholarly approach and reaches a similar conclusion in an FP article written about a month ago. I think this conclusion is pretty hard to square with the final five grafs of Kristol’s article on the “neoconservative persuasion” in the August 2003 Weekly Standard.
I think the way you put this together is with the observation that even though the high-level theoretical content of the realpolitiker 70s version of neoconservatism and the Wilsonian 2000s version of neoconservatism seem very different, the operational content is extremely similar. You have support for higher defense budgets, a tendency toward threat-inflation and hysteria, a belief in an aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, hostility to negotiations, and hostility to international law both in theory and in practice. This was initially presented to the world as a “realistic” alternative to lefty critiques of US support for anti-communist dictators and more recently appeared as an “idealistic” critique of lefty reluctance to launch wars, but the continuity between the views is enormous.
22 Responses to “Was Irving Kristol a Neocon?”
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October 23rd, 2009 at 8:34 am
What’s with the picture of John Howard in a post about Irving Kristol?
October 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
Pretty good, Yglesias. I’d been wondering about the seeming discontinuity.
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:02 am
Continuity is very hard to measure when the facts on the ground change so dramatically. The core of neo-conservatism in the late 70s and early 80s concerned how best to confront the Soviet Union in the world, and how seriously to take the military threat of the USSR.
Trying to apply the same ideology in a world without a real military competitor though is a completely different thing. It’s one thing to suggest we need a massive military budget to confront the Soviet’s massive military budget, it’s quite another to suggest we need mass weaponry to fight a bunch of guys hiding in a cave.
The current crop of neo-conservatives are taking ideas designed for one world situation and trying to apply them to situations that bear no resemblance at all to the original. I’m not sure whether to call that continuity or not.
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:21 am
While he may have opposed democracy promotion in those countries, I don’t think he would have opposed invading them.
I think the real convergence of the neoconservatives and Wilsonians is that the neoconservatives discovered that aggressive wars of selfish national interst are more marketable if packaged as democracy promotion.
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 am
In the 1950s, Kristol was hostile to the use of ‘carrots’ – foreign aid, etc – in the US competition w/ the USSR over influence in the Third World. He was cool toward Eisenhower’s engagement w/ the Arab states, & was certainly appalled by his response to Suez. He was hostile to decolonization. Where the developing world was concerned, he had little use for the sort of cultural influence operations (like the Congress for Cultural Freedom & Encounter) that he himself helped implement in Europe. He was never any kind of liberal in foreign policy.
You don’t have to be a smart boy to see the thread of continuity underlying the apparent differences between the 1950s Kristol & the neoconservatives of half a century later. He was the same person over the whole period. The post-1982 global-democracy line was always a tactical shift, & neoconservativsm would survive even if it dropped it.
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 am
I’m with Peter – from memory, Howard won an Irving Kristol award (though it was barely reported in the Australian media) , but surely that doesn’t warrant a photograph of such prominence? Colour me confused.
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:09 am
Colour me confused.
I think Kristol’s just off-scene but still part of the picture, which was is an homage to Warhol’s Blowjob.
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:13 am
The continuity? No. However, the distinctions, I think, are illuminating. I think MattY’s post-script about the continuities is just a reminder to keep our feet on the ground. After all we wouldn’t want to get any false impressions about the nature of Mr. Kristol’s supposed “realism”. Good post!
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
Do a GIS for “Irving Kristol” and two of the top three hits are pics of John Howard.
Way to go, Matt!
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:55 am
Matt, this is really embarrassing. I try to defend you when colleagues of mine call you an “amateur” or an “idiot.” But when you post a picture of John Howard in a post on Irving Kristol, I mean, there’s just no excuse for that.
GET. AN. EDITOR.
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:28 am
Using a picture of former Prime Minister John Howard of Australia to illustrate a missive on Irving Kristol is another example of the fine attention facts and reality get on this blog.
SOMEONE IS GOING TO THE RUSSIAN FRONT FOR THIS!
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:30 am
wow, an aging neoconservative writing about another now-deceased neoconservative in the pages of The New Racist.this reminds me of the good times in the 1970s, when hard core leftists like Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke were playing the roles Peter Beinart and Isaac Chotiner now play over there at The New Racist.
the more things change…
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:34 pm
[...] Yglesias identifies a puzzle, comparing Cold War/Irving Kristol neoconservatism to today’s Weekly Standard Wilsonianism: [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:39 pm
This may be another stroke of accidental genius from Yglesias.
If you want to illustrate an article about a neoconservative who didn’t have the courage of his stated convictions and mostly considered democracy promotion to be empty rhetoric that provides useful cover for blindly supporting the American defense policy establishment regardless of whoever the hell they’ve decided to bomb… you could do worse than a picture of John Howard.
October 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I’m reading Norman Podhoretz’s new book “Why Are Jews Liberals?” and in it Podhoretz argues for neoconservatism 100% in terms of “Is it good for the Jews?”
October 23rd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
IMHO, the funniest thing about Irving Kristol is that he famously said “The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them”, and he was the godfather of a political movement that sought to bring Jews into bed with (politically speaking) Christians.
So is neo-conservatism really all that good for the Jews?
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
LaFollette Progressive – that’s hardly a fair characterisation of Howard’s views. I never voted for him, but he was one of the more principled conservatives. He supported democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan just as he’d supported democracy in East Timor against the predations of the Indonesian military and the pro-Indonesian militia (and remember, Indonesia was and is an important Australian ally). The man was no pawn of the “American defense policy establishment” (whatever that means) and he certainly DID have the courage the courage of his stated convictions.
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Howard ‘… was one of the more principled conservatives. He supported democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan just as he’d supported democracy in East Timor against the predations of the Indonesian military and the pro-Indonesian militia …’
I’m sorry – I’m an Australian who supported the war in Iraq but this statement is utter crap. Howard had exactly the same attitude towards East Timor as other Australian politicians – he was happy for Indonesia to do as it pleased. He was wrong footed by the Indonesian President and subject to huge domestic political pressure to change his stance. The Australian peace-keeping force only arrived in Timor after the worst militia violence was over. The Howard myth machine in Australia started calling him the ‘liberator’ of Timor. One the biggest myths is that Howard was ‘conviction’ politician about anything except crushing trade unions. That the neo-cons gave him an award speaks volumes about their convictions.
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I think this wrong-pic thing illustrates the limits of Matt’s production. He’s very smart and therefore a good analyst. But he’s very young and the product of a point-click culture, so he doesn’t actually know a lot, his obvious intellectual curiosity notwithstanding. So these things happen, not to mention some errors of more consequence. But smart and not full of accurate detail is better than dumb and full of…it.
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I think this is a Straussian use of imagery. Kristol is there, interwoven with Howard, for the coven of elect to see. If you can’t, well, you probably shouldn’t. Prole.
October 25th, 2009 at 9:29 am
This, of course, was also the “operational content” of National Socialism …. small world, huh?
October 25th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Here I was, as an avid Australian follower of your blog, getting all excited about a photo of John Howard… only to find that the post seems to have had nothing to do with the great man.