Yesterday's Men, and Tomorrow's

The Economist
16 September 2004

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Is the neo-conservative moment over?

One of the canonical texts of the American conservative movement is Richard M. Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences" (1948). Four years ago, few people expected that ideas would have any consequences for the new Bush administration - particularly neo-conservative ideas. George Bush came across as a genial cowboy with more interest in ranching than reading. And the neo-cons - many of whom are secular Jewish intellectuals - looked like fish out of water in a party dominated by evangelical Christians and hard-headed business people.

Yet today there is little doubt that neo-conservative ideas have had profound consequences. It is an exaggeration to say that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy has been hijacked by a neo-con cabal: Donald Rumsfeld is hardly one of them. But the brains at the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard have certainly made the running. They started making the case for regime-change in Iraq as early as the mid-1990s. And after September 11th they linked the case for removing Saddam to the wider case for democratising the Middle East.

The invasion of Iraq has a reasonable claim to be regarded as the neo-conservative moment in American foreign policy. But is that moment now over? Are the neo-conservatives destined to be sidelined even if Mr. Bush is re-elected in November?

The neo-cons have had all manner of problems recently - not least the travails of Conrad Black, one of their leading sponsors. But their main problem is obvious: the war in Iraq has blown holes in their credibility. Whatever happened to those weapons of mass destruction? Or the garlands of flowers awaiting American troops? Iraq looks less like a beachhead for democracy than a failed state in the making, and the war less like a brave idea than a brainwave of think-tankers without military experience.

The Iraq debacle has inevitably attracted fierce criticism from both the Michael Moore left and the Pat Buchanan right. Now it is getting closer to home. In the current issue of the National Interest, Francis Fukuyama (a star in the neo-con firmament ever since he proclaimed "The End of History"in 1989) blasts the war wing of the neo-con movement - particularly Charles Krauthammer - for ignoring their movement's traditions. The neo-conservative movement, points out Mr. Fukuyama, was founded on scepticism about social engineering - the conviction that grand schemes like LBJ's Great Society programme produce unintended, uncontrollable consequences. But when it comes to implanting democracy in Iraq, the neo-cons have swapped conservative scepticism for Wilsonian naivety. Mr. Fukuyama points to America's sorry record of nation-building, to the absence of democratic traditions in the Middle East and the neo-cons' failure to take the question of American legitimacy seriously.

Mr. Krauthammer has reportedly written a withering rebuttal of Mr. Fukuyama in the forthcoming edition of the National Interest. That might have been expected. But, in many ways, the amazing thing about the neo-cons is how uncontrite they are. Most intellectual movements would have been humbled by the neo-cons' confrontation with reality. But they seem as feisty as ever. The Weekly Standard blames the failures in Iraq on the Pentagon's miscalculations. Young Turks such as Max Boot urge America to find new dragons to slay in Iran.

The neo-cons have three things going for them. The most important is Mr. Bush's unwavering support for the war. The Republican convention had one over-arching message: that the war in Iraq was part of the wider war on terror. John McCain argued that the sanctions regime in Iraq had been failing. Dick Cheney asserted that war against Iraq had persuaded Libya to abandon its nuclear-weapons programme. And Mr. Bush reiterated the idealistic case for spreading democracy in the Middle East. Such idealism hardly seems to be justified by the daily news from Iraq, but so far John Kerry has made a hash of both criticising the policy and advancing an alternative strategy of his own.

The neo-cons also remain rich in intellectual creativity. At home, they have taken the lead in everything from designing "big-government conservatism" to opposing unbridled biotechnological research: witness the rather eloquent report from the President's Council on Bioethics, "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Happiness". An aspiring Republican is still likely to get ideas out of the Weekly Standard, as opposed to merely discovering that abortion is a bad thing yet again in the National Review.

Intellectual Fuel
Lastly, when it comes to conservative influence-peddling, the neo-cons still have no rivals. The paleo-conservative dream of the world's only superpower retreating within its own borders has not won over Mr. Bush. Libertarians are anathema to the religious right. Old-fashioned Rockefeller Republicans are losing their political base in the north-east. Most other pressure groups focus on a narrow range of issues, such as reducing taxes or protecting gun rights.

This is not to say that everything in the neo-con garden is rosy. The neo-cons will get the blame if Mr. Bush is defeated in November. If he wins, they could be in even bigger trouble should either Iraq or big-government conservatism implode.

Yet, in its own strange way, even Mr. Fukuyama's spat with Mr. Krauthammer points to yet another neo-con advantage: their extraordinary capacity to reinvent themselves. The neo-cons have changed shape dramatically since the 1960s; now Mr. Fukuyama and other neo-con dissidents may change them once again. The lesson of the past four years is not just that ideas have consequences. It is that even the Republican Party, once ridiculed as the stupid party, needs intellectual fuel to keep it going. So far, for all their mistakes, the neo-cons still have no real rivals when it comes to supplying that fuel.

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