The Trotskyist Roots of Neoconservatism

Source : geopolitika.ru – 18 juillet 2024 – Filip Martens

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/trotskyist-roots-neoconservatism

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The neoconservative ideology gained increasing influence in world politics from the early 1980s onwards. Despite the misleading name, neoconservatism is not conservative at all. Rather it is a left-wing ideology that hijacked American conservatism. Although neoconservatism cannot be traced back to one particular thinker, the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and the sociologist Irving Kristol (1920-2009) are generally regarded as its founders.

The founders of Neoconservatism

Leo Strauss was born into a Jewish family in the German province of Nassau. He was an active Zionist during his student years in post-World War I Germany. In 1934, Strauss emigrated to Great Britain and in 1937 to the US, where he was initially appointed to Columbia University in New York. In 1938-1948 he was professor of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and in 1949-1968 at the University of Chicago.

At the University of Chicago, Strauss taught his students that American secularism was its own destruction: individualism, selfishness and materialism undermined all values ​​and morals and led to enormous chaos and riots in the US in the 1960s. He saw the creation and cultivation of religious and patriotic myths as a solution. Strauss argued that white lies are permitted to keep society together and direct it. Consequently, according to him, unproven myths posited by politicians were necessary to give the masses a purpose, which would lead to a stable society. Statesmen therefore had to create strong inspiring myths, which did not necessarily had to correspond to the truth. Strauss was one of the inspirations behind the neoconservatism that emerged in American politics in the 1970s, although he never participated in active politics himself and always remained an academic.

Irving Kristol was the son of Ukrainian Jews who emigrated to Brooklyn, New York in the 1890s. In the first half of the 1940s, he was a member of the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the Jewish Bolshevik leader expelled from the USSR by Stalin, who fought Stalin with this rival communist movement. Many leading American Jewish intellectuals joined the Fourth International.

Kristol was also a member of the influential New York Intellectuals, an equally anti-Stalinist and anti-USSR collective of Trotskyist Jewish writers and literary critics from New York. In addition to Kristol, this included Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Marshall Berman, Nathan Glazer, Clement Greenberg, Richard Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahy, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag, Harvey Swados, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, Michael Walzer, Albert Wohlstetter and Robert Warshow. Many of them had attended the City College of New York, New York University, and Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s. They also lived primarily in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx. During the Second World War, these Trotskyists realized that the US could be useful in combating the USSR, which they hated. Some of them, such as Glazer, Hook, Kristol and Podhoretz, later developed neoconservatism, which retained Trotskyist universalism and Zionism.

Kristol started out as a convinced Marxist in the Democratic Party. He was a student of Strauss in the 1960s. Their neoconservatism continued to believe in the Marxist malleability of the world: the US had to take active action internationally to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism. That is why Kristol was a fierce supporter of the American war in Vietnam. Strauss and Kristol also rejected the liberal separation of Church and State, since secular society led to individualism. They made religion useful for the State again.

Kristol spread his ideas as a professor of sociology at New York University, through a column in the Wall Street Journal, through the magazines he founded (The Public Interest and The National Interest) and through the influential neocon weekly The Weekly Standard founded by his son William Kristol in 1995. The Weekly Standard was funded until 2009 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and then by billionaire Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group).

Kristol was also involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded and financed by the CIA in 1950. This anti-USSR organization active in approximately 35 countries published the British magazine Encounter, which Kristol founded together with the British former Marxist poet and writer Stephen Spender (1909-1995). Spender was very attracted to Judaism due to his partial Jewish origins and was also married to the Jewish concert pianist Natasha Litvin. When the CIA’s involvement in the Congress for Cultural Freedom was leaked to the press in 1967, Kristol withdrew from it and became involved in the neocon think tank American Enterprise Institute.

Kristol also edited the monthly magazine Commentary together with Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930) in 1947-1952. Podhoretz was the son of Jewish Marxists from Galicia who settled in Brooklyn. He studied at Columbia University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge. In 1960-1995, Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary. His influential essay ‘My Negro Problem – And Ours’ from 1963 advocated complete racial mixing of the white and black races, as for him « the wholesale merging of the 2 races was the most desirable alternative ».

In 1981-1987, Podhoretz was an advisor to the US Information Agency, an American propaganda service whose purpose was to monitor and to influence foreign public opinions and state institutions. In 2007, Podhoretz received the Guardian of Zion Award, an annual prize given by Israel’s Bar-Ilan University to an important supporter of the State of Israel.

Other leading names in this new ideology were Allan Bloom, Podhoretz’s wife Midge Decter and Kristol’s wife Gertrude Himmelfarb. Bloom (1930-1992) was born to a Jewish family in Indiana. At the University of Chicago, he was strongly influenced by Leo Strauss. Bloom later became a professor of philosophy at various universities. The later professor Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) was one of his students. The Jewish feminist journalist and writer Midge Rosenthal (1927-2022) – who changed her surname to Decter – was one of the founders of the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century and also served on the Board of Directors of the neocon think tank Heritage Foundation. Brooklyn-born Jewish historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) was an active Trotskyist during her studies at the University of Chicago, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge. Later, she was active in the neocon think tank American Enterprise Institute.

The Trotskyist Roots of Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism is wrongly considered ‘right-wing’ because of the prefix ‘neo’, which wrongly suggests a new conservative thinking. However, many neocons, on the contrary, have an extreme left past, namely in Trotskyism. After all, most neocons descend from Trotskyist Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe (mainly Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine). Since the USSR banned Trotskyism in the 1920s, it is understandable that they became active in the US as an anti-USSR lobby within the left-liberal Democratic Party and in other left-wing organizations.

Irving Kristol defined a neocon as “a progressive struck by reality.” This indicates that a neocon is someone who changed political strategies in order to better achieve his goals. After all, in the 1970s, the neocons exchanged Trotskyism for liberalism and left the Democratic Party. Because of their strong aversion to the USSR and the welfare state, they joined the anti-communism of the Republicans for strategic reasons.

A former Trotskyist, neocon Kristol continued to promote Marxist ideas such as reformist socialism and international revolution through nation building and militarily imposed democratic regimes. In addition, the neocons defend progressive demands such as abortion, euthanasia, mass immigration, globalization, multiculturalism and free trade capitalism. The welfare states are also seen as superfluous, although the Western peoples themselves would prefer to see their laboriously built up social security continue to exist.The neocons are therefore waving wildly exaggerated doomsday scenarios – such as an aging population and globalization – to prepare the population for a massacre in the government sector and social services. They seek support for this from the liberal-capitalist political forces. The term ‘poverty trap’, which refers to unemployed people who do not go to work because the costs caused by this dilute their slightly higher income from work, was also invented by neocons.

Each of these are core concepts of neocon philosophy. In 1979, Esquire magazine called Irving Kristol “the godfather of the most powerful new political force in America: neoconservatism.” That year also saw the publication of Peter Steinfels’ book ‘The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics’, which pointed to the increasing political and intellectual influence of the neocons.

The monthly magazine Commentary was the successor to the magazine Contemporary Jewish Record, which ceased operations in 1944. Commentary was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. The first editor-in-chief Elliot Ettelson Cohen (1899-1959) was the son of a Jewish shopkeeper from Tsarist Russia. During his tenure, Commentary focused on the traditionally very left-wing Jewish community, while at the same time wanting to introduce the ideas of young Jewish intellectuals to a wider audience. Norman Podhoretz, who became editor-in-chief in 1960, rightly stated that Commentary reconciled radical Trotskyist Jewish intellectuals with liberal-capitalist America. Commentary took an anti-USSR course and fully supported the three pillars of the Cold War: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO.

This magazine about politics, society, Judaism and socio-cultural topics has played a leading role in neoconservatism since the 1970s. Commentary transformed Jewish Trotskyism into neoconservatism and is the most influential American magazine of the past half century because it profoundly changed American political and intellectual life. After all, the opposition to the Vietnam War, the capitalism underlying that war and especially the hostility against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 aroused the ire of editor-in-chief Podhoretz. Commentary therefore depicted this opposition as anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-Semitic. This led to the emergence of neoconservatism, which fiercely defended liberal democracy and opposed the USSR and Third World countries that fought neo-colonialism. Strauss’s students – among other Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943) and Allan Bloom – argued that the US should wage a battle against ‘Evil’ and spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism, considered ‘Good’, in the world.

In addition, they talked the American population into a – fictitious – Islam danger, on the basis of which they advocate American intervention in the Near East. But above all, neocons argue for massive and unconditional US support for Israel, even to the extent that traditional conservative Russel Kirk (1918-1994) once argued that neocons confused the US capital with Tel-Aviv. In fact, according to Kirk, this was the main distinction between neocons and the original American conservatives. He already warned in 1988 that neoconservatism was very dangerous and warlike. The US-led Gulf War of 1990-1991 immediately proved him right.

Neocons emphatically strive for power in order to push through their reforms in the expectation that this will improve the quality of society. They are so convinced of their own right that they do not wait until there is broad support for their interventions, even in the case of major reforms. This makes neoconservatism a Marxist feasibility utopia.

The Neocon Resistance against President Richard Nixon

In the 1970s, neoconservatism emerged as a resistance movement against President Nixon’s policies. Republican Richard Nixon (1913-1994), together with Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) – national security advisor in 1969-1975 and Secretary of State in 1973-1977 – pursued a completely different foreign policy by establishing relations with Maoist China and initiating a détente with the USSR. In addition, Nixon also implemented social policies and abolished the gold standard, making dollars no longer convertible into gold.

Nixon and Kissinger took advantage of the high tensions and border conflicts between the USSR and China to establish secret relations with China in 1971, after which Nixon became the first American President to visit Maoist China in February 1972. Mao Zedong appeared to be enormously impressed by Nixon. Fearing a Sino-American alliance, the USSR now yielded to the American pursuit of détente, enabling Nixon and Kissinger to transform the bipolar world – the West vs. the communist bloc – into a multipolar balance of power. Nixon visited Moscow in May 1972 and negotiated trade agreements and two groundbreaking arms limitation treaties (SALT I and the ABM Treaty) with Soviet leader Brezhnev. The hostility of the Cold War was now replaced by détente, which calmed tensions. Relations between the USSR and the US improved greatly from 1972 onwards. At the end of May 1972, a five-year cooperation program on space travel was established. This led to the Apollo-Soyuz test project in 1975, in which an American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz performed a joint space mission.

China and the USSR now reduced their support for North Vietnam, which was advised to start peace talks with the US. Although Nixon initially seriously escalated the war in South Vietnam by also attacking the neighboring countries of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, he gradually withdrew his troops and Kissinger was able to conclude a peace agreement in 1973. After all, Nixon understood that for a successful peace the USSR and China had to be involved.

Nixon was further convinced that sensible government policies could benefit the entire population. He transferred federal powers to the states, provided more food aid and social assistance and stabilized wages and prices. Defense spending fell from 9.1% to 5.8% of GDP and average household income rose. In 1972, social security was greatly expanded by guaranteeing a minimum income. Nixon became very popular because of his successful socio-economic policies. He was re-elected in November 1972 with one of the largest election victories in American history: with the exception of Massachusetts and Washington DC, he obtained a majority in all American states.

In response to Nixon’s overwhelming victory, in December 1972, at the instigation of Democratic Senator Henry Jackson (1912-1983) – who had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination – the centrist faction Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) was founded within the Democratic Party. The CDM argued that Democrats needed to return to a broader and centrist stance to defeat Republicans. The CDM also attracted members from the Trotskyist Socialist Party of America and especially from its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League.

However, despite the CDM’s significant membership and support, Jackson failed to win the Democratic nomination in the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries. Some mainly non-Jewish CDM members – including Les Aspin, Lloyd Bentsen, Tom Foley, Samuel Huntington, William Richardson and James Woolsey – would later participate in the Carter (1977-1981) and Clinton (1993-2001) administrations, while countless, mostly Jewish others – Daniel Bell, Midge Decter, Nathan Glazer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Benjamin Wattenberg and Paul Wolfowitz – became neocons and ipso de facto Republicans and participated in the CIA propaganda organization Congress for Cultural Freedom, important neocon think tanks and the Reagan (1981-1989), Bush Sr. (1989-1993) and Bush Jr. (2001-2009) governments. So here was a transition from Trotskyist Jewish intellectuals in the Democratic Party to neocons within the Republican Party. The neocons previously formed an opposition movement within the Democratic Party, which was fiercely anti-USSR and rejected the détente of Nixon and Kissinger with the USSR. Neocon businessmen made enormous amounts of money available to neocon think tanks and magazines.

In 1973, the Straussians asked that the US pressure the USSR to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. However, Secretary of State Kissinger – although a Jew himself – felt that the situation of the Soviet Jews had nothing to do with the interests of the US and therefore refused to address the USSR about this. Senator Henry Jackson undermined détente with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, which made détente dependent on the USSR’s willingness to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. Jackson was criticized within in the Democratic Party for his close ties to the arms industry and his support for the Vietnam War and Israel. For the latter he also received significant financial support from American Jewish billionaires. Several of Jackson’s associates, such as Elliot Abrams (b. 1948), Richard Perle (b.1941), Benjamin Wattenberg (1933-2015), and Paul Wolfowitz, would later become leading neocons.

Kissinger was also not pleased with the persistent Israeli requests for American support and called the Israeli government “a sick bunch”: “We have vetoed eight resolutions for the past years, given them four billion dollars in aid (…) and we still are treated as if we have done nothing for them”. Various tape recordings from the White House from 1971 show that President Nixon also had serious doubts about the Israel lobby in Washington and about Israel.

Kissinger prevented Israel from destroying the encircled Egyptian 3rd Army in Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When the USSR did not dare to enforce its pro-Arab rhetoric, he was able to extricate Egypt from the Soviet camp and to transform it into an ally of the US, which meant a serious weakening of Soviet influence in the Near East.

Meanwhile, Nixon continued his social reforms. For example, in February 1974, he introduced health insurance based on employer and employee contributions. However, he was forced to resign in August 1974 due to the Watergate scandal, which began in June 1972 and consisted of a more than 2-year series of sensational media « revelations » that landed several Republican government officials and ultimately President Nixon himself in very serious trouble.

The Washington Post newspaper in particular significantly soiled the image of the Nixon administration (1969-1974): editors Howard Simons (1929-1989) and Hirsch Moritz ‘Harry’ Rosenfeld (1929-2021) organized at a very early stage the extraordinary reporting on what would become the Watergate scandal and put journalists Bob Woodward (°1943) and Carl Bernstein (°1944) on the case. Under the approving eye of editor-in-chief Benjamin Bradlee (1921-2014), Woodward and Bernstein suggested numerous accusations against the Nixon administration based on ‘anonymous sources’.

Simons was born to a Jewish family in Albany, New York State and earned a journalism degree from Columbia University. Rosenfeld came from a family of German Jews who settled in the New York City borough of the Bronx in 1939. Bernstein’s Jewish parents were members of the Communist Party of America and were shadowed by the FBI for subversive activities for 30 years, leaving them with an FBI file of more than 2,500 pages. Woodward has been accused for decades of exaggerations and fabrications in his reporting, especially regarding his ‘anonymous sources’ on the Watergate scandal.

This media offensive against the Nixon administration led to an intensive judicial investigation and the Senate even established an investigative committee that began to subpoena government employees. Nixon therefore had to fire several top employees in 1973 and ultimately came under fire himself, although he had nothing to do with the burglary and bribery affair that formed the basis of the Watergate scandal. From April 1974 onwards, there was open speculation about Nixon’s impeachment and when this actually threatened to happen in the summer of 1974, he resigned on August 9. Secretary of State Kissinger predicted during these final days that history would remember Nixon as a great President and that the Watergate scandal would prove to be a mere footnote.

Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford (1913-2006). The neocons exerted considerable pressure on Ford to appoint George Bush Sr. (1924-2018) as the new Vice President, but Ford displeased them by choosing the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979), former governor of New York State. Since, despite Nixon’s resignation, Parliament and media continued to strive to bring him to justice, Ford granted a presidential pardon to Nixon in September 1974 for his alleged role in the Watergate scandal. Despite the enormous impact of this scandal, its roots were never exposed. Nixon maintained his innocence until his death in 1994, although he admitted errors in his handling of the scandal. He would spend the remaining twenty years of his life rebuilding his badly damaged image.

In October 1974, Nixon was struck by a life-threatening form of phlebitis, for which he required surgery. President Ford came to visit him in the hospital, but the Washington Post – again – felt it necessary to mock the seriously ill Nixon. In the spring of 1975, Nixon’s health improved and he began work on his memoirs, although his assets were eaten up by high legal fees, among other things. At one point, former President Nixon had barely $500 in his bank account. From August 1975 his financial situation improved through a series of interviews for a British television program and the sale of his country residence. His autobiography ‘RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon’, published in 1978, became a bestseller.

Chinese state leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping remained grateful to Nixon for the improved relations with the US for years and repeatedly invited him to China. Nixon only managed to somewhat restore his tarnished reputation in the mid-1980s after highly publicized trips to the Near East and the USSR.

President Ford and Kissinger continued Nixon’s détente by, among other things, concluding the Helsinki Accords with the USSR. And when Israel continued to refuse to make peace with Egypt, Ford suspended all US military and economic aid to Israel for six months in 1975, amid intense protest from neocons. This was a real low point in Israeli-American relations.

The rise of neoconservatism

During the Ford administration (1974-1977), neocons such as White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021), presidential advisor Dick Cheney (b. 1941), Senator Jackson and his associate Paul Wolfowitz referred to the USSR as ‘Evil’, even though the CIA stated that the USSR posed no threat and no evidence of this could be found. The CIA was therefore accused – among other by the Straussian neocon professor Albert Wohlstetter (1913-1997) – of underestimating any threatening intentions of the USSR.

The Watergate scandal caused the Republican Party to lose heavily in the November 1974 legislative elections, giving the neocons an opportunity to gain more influence in government. When William Colby (1920-1996), head of the CIA, continued to refuse to allow an ad hoc study group of outside experts to do over the work of his analysts, Rumsfeld successfully pressed President Ford in 1975 for a thorough reorganization of the government. On November 4, 1975, several moderate Secretaries and top officials were replaced by neocons in this ‘Halloween Massacre’. Colby, among others, was replaced by Bush Sr. as head of the CIA, Kissinger remained Secretary of State but lost his position of National Security Advisor to General Brent Scowcroft (1925-2020), James Schlesinger was succeeded by Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, Cheney was given Rumsfelds vacant position of White House Chief of Staff and John Scali gave up his position as ambassador to the UN to Daniel Moynihan (1927-2003). Vice President Rockefeller also announced under pressure from neocons that he would not run as Ford’s running mate in the 1976 presidential elections.

The new head of CIA, Bush Sr., formed the anti-USSR study group Team B led by the Jewish professor of Russian history Richard Pipes (1923-2018) to ‘restudy’ the intentions of the USSR. All members of Team B were already anti-USSR a priori. Pipes, at the suggestion of Richard Perle, then an aide to Senator Jackson, included Wolfowitz in Team B. The study group’s highly controversial 1976 report claimed to have identified « an uninterrupted USSR pursuit of world hegemony » and « an intelligence failure ».

Afterwards, it turned out that Team B had been completely wrong on all levels. After all, the USSR did not have an “increasing GDP with which it could purchase more and more weapons”, but slowly sank into economic chaos. An alleged fleet of nuclear submarines undetectable by radar also never existed. Through these pure fabrications, the Straussians consequently presented the US with a fictitious threat from ‘Evil’. Team B’s report was used to justify the massive (and unnecessary) investments in armaments that began at the end of the Carter administration and exploded during the Reagan administration.

In the run-up to the 1976 presidential elections, the neocons put forward former governor of California and former Democrat (!) Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) as an alternative to Ford, who was blamed, among other things, for his détente towards the USSR and for suspending support for Israel. Nevertheless, Ford still managed to have himself declared the Republican presidential candidate. However, in the actual presidential elections he lost to the Democrat Jimmy Carter (b. 1924).

Within the Republican Party, infiltrated by neocons, the think tank American Enterprise Institute emerged in the 1970s. This included influential neocon intellectuals such as Nathan Glazer (1923-2019), Irving Kristol, Michael Novak (1933-2017), Benjamin Wattenberg and James Wilson (1931-2012). They influenced the traditional conservative supporters of the Republicans, causing the growing Protestant fundamentalism to align with neoconservatism. As a result, Reagan – who was a Protestant himself – became President in 1981 and immediately appointed a series of neocons (such as John Bolton, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, William Kristol, Lewis Libby and Elliot Abrams). Bush Sr. became Vice President.

Instead of détente, there was now an aggressive foreign and fiercely anti-USSR policy, which was strongly based on the Kirkpatrick doctrine that the former Marxist and former Democrat (!) Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926-2006) described in her controversial 1979 article ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ in Commentary. This meant that although most governments in the world are and always have been autocracies, it would be possible to democratize them in the long term. This Kirkpatrick doctrine was primarily intended to justify support for pro-American dictatorships in the Third World.

Many immigrants from the Eastern Bloc became active in the neocon movement. They were also fierce opponents of détente with the USSR and regarded progressism as superior. Moreover, Podhoretz criticized the proponents of détente very sharply in the early 1980s.

The American population was now talked into an even greater Soviet threat: the USSR would control an international terrorist network and therefore be behind terrorist attacks throughout the world. Once again, the CIA dismissed this as nonsense, but still spread the propaganda of the “Soviet international terror network”. Consequently, the US had to respond. The neocons now became democratic revolutionaries: the US would support international forces to change the world. For example, in the 1980s the Afghan Mujaheddin were heavily supported in their struggle against the USSR and the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista Ortega government. In addition, the US started an arms race with the USSR, which led to large budget deficits and rising government debt: Reagan’s defense policy increased defense spending by 40% in 1981-1985 and tripled the budget deficit.

The rise of the neocons led to years of Kulturkampf in the US. After all, they rejected the guilt about the defeat in Vietnam, as well as Nixon’s foreign policy. In addition, there was resistance against active international action by the US and against the identification of the USSR with ‘Evil’. Reagan’s foreign policy was criticized as aggressive, imperialistic and bellicose. Moreover, in 1986 the US was convicted by the International Court of Justice of war crimes against Nicaragua. Many Central Americans also condemned Reagan’s support for the Contras, calling him an over-the-top fanatic who overlooked massacres, torture and other atrocities. Nicaraguan President Ortega once said he hoped God would forgive Reagan for his “dirty war against Nicaragua”.

Neocons also influenced foreign policy in the subsequent Bush Sr. administration. For example, Dan Quayle (b. 1947) was then Vice President and Cheney Secretary of Defense with Wolfowitz as an employee. In 1991-1992, Wolfowitz opposed Bush’s decision not to depose the Iraqi regime after the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In a 1992 report to the government, he and Lewis Libby (b. 1950) proposed ‘preemptive’ strikes to « prevent the production of weapons of mass destruction » – already then! – and higher defense spending. However, the US suffered a huge budget deficit due to Reagan’s arms race.

During the Clinton administration, the neocons were expelled to the think tanks, where about twenty neocons met regularly, partly to discuss the Near East. A Richard Perle-led neocon study group that included Doug Feith and David Wurmser prepared the disputed report ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ in 1996. This advised the newly appointed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt an aggressive policy towards his neighbors: ending peace negotiations with the Palestinians, deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and ‘preemptive’ strikes against the Lebanese Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. According to this report, Israel had to strive for a thorough destabilization of the Near East in order to solve its strategic problems, but little Israel could not handle such enormous undertakings.

In 1998, the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century wrote a letter to President Clinton calling for the invasion of Iraq. This letter was signed by a series of prominent neocons: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Robert Zoellick. This once again shows that these ideas certainly did not come out of nowhere when the Bush Jr. administration took office.

The neocons’ obsession with the Near East can be traced back to their Zionism. After all, many neocons are of Jewish descent and feel connected to Israel and the Likud party. The neocons further believe that in the unipolar post-Cold War world the US had to use its military power to avoid being threatened and to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism. The concept of ‘regime change’ also comes from them.

Although Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. already adopted neocon ideas, neoconservatism only really triumphed under President George Bush Jr. (b. 1946), whose foreign and military policy was completely dominated by neocons. During the summer of 1998, Bush Jr., at the intercession of Bush Sr., met with his former adviser on Soviet and Eastern European Affairs Condoleeza Rice at the Bush family estate in Maine. This led to Rice advising Bush Jr. on foreign policy during his election campaign. Wolfowitz was also hired the same year. In early 1999, a full-fledged foreign policy advisory group was formed, drawn largely from the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. The Rice-led group also included Richard Armitage (b. 1945, former ambassador and former secret agent), Robert Blackwill (b. 1939, former adviser for European and Soviet Affairs), Stephen Hadley (b. 1947, former adviser for defense), Lewis Libby (former employee of the Departments of State and Defense), Richard Perle (adviser at the Department of Defense), George Schultz (1920-2021, former adviser to President Eisenhower, former Secretary of Labor, Treasury and State, professor and businessman), Paul Wolfowitz (former employee of the Departments of State and Defense), Dov Zakheim (b. 1948, former advisor at the Department of Defense), Robert Zoellick (b. 1953, former adviser and former Deputy Secretary of State). In this way, Bush Jr. wanted to compensate for his lack of foreign experience. This foreign policy advisory group was given the name ‘Vulcans’ during the 2000 election campaign.

After Bush’s election victory, almost all Vulcans were given important positions in his government: Condoleeza Rice (National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State), Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State), Robert Blackwill (ambassador and later Security Advisor), Stephen Hadley (Security Advisor), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney), Richard Perle (again advisor at the Department of Defense), Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense and later President of the World Bank), Dov Zakheim (again advisor at the Department of Defense), Robert Zoellick (Presidential Representative for Trade Policy and later Deputy Secretary of State).

Other neocons also received high positions: Cheney became Vice President, while Rumsfeld again became Secretary of Defense, John Bolton (b. 1948) became Deputy Secretary of State, Elliot Abrams became a member of the National Security Council and Doug Feith (b. 1953) became presidential adviser for defense. As a result, American foreign and military policy was fully aligned with Israel’s geopolitical interests. Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld were the driving forces behind the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

With the ‘Clean Break’ report from 1996 (cf. supra), the blueprint of his foreign policy had already been drawn up five years before the Bush Jr. government took office. Moreover, the three main authors of this report – Perle, Feith and Wurmser – were active within this government as advisors. A restructuring of the Near East now seemed a lot more realistic. The neocons presented it as if the interests of Israel and the US coincided. The centerpiece of the report was the removal of Saddam Hussein as the first step in transforming the Israel-hostile Near East into a more pro-Israel region.

Several political analysts, including paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan, pointed out the strong similarities between the ‘Clean Break’ report and 21st century facts: in 2000, Israeli leader Sharon blew up the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians with his provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in 2003 the US occupied Iraq, in 2006 Israel waged a (failed) war against Hezbollah and in 2011 Syria was seriously threatened by Western sanctions and US-backed terrorist groups. And then there is the ongoing threat of war against Iran.

From 2002 onwards, President Bush Jr. claimed that an ‘Axis of Evil’ consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed a danger to the US. This had to be combated by ‘preemptive’ wars. The Straussians planned to attack Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran in a first phase (reform of the Near East), in a second phase (reform of the Levant and North Africa) Libya, Syria and Lebanon, and in a third phase (reform of East Africa) Somalia and Sudan. Podhoretz also listed this series of countries to be attacked in Commentary. The principle of a simultaneous attack on Libya and Syria was already conceived in the week after the events of September 11, 2001. It was first publicly stated by Deputy Secretary of State John Bolton on May 6, 2002 in his speech ‘Beyond the Axis of Evil’. Former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark confirmed this once again on March 2, 2007 in a television interview, in which he also showed the list of countries that would be successively attacked by the US in the following years. The simultaneous attack on Libya and Syria effectively took place in 2011: Libya was destroyed by a US-led NATO attack and Syria was drawn into a years-long, devastating war by various US-backed terrorist groups.

Bush Jr. failed to achieve a UN Security Council resolution for an invasion of Iraq due to fierce opposition from several countries. This even led to a diplomatic crisis at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. The neocons saw the Iraq war as a testing ground: the US would try to install a parliamentary democracy in Iraq to reduce Arab hostility towards Israel. Podhoretz strongly advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Commentary and praised President Bush Jr., who also withdrew from the ABM arms limitation treaty with Russia. However, due to the American fiasco in Iraq, neoconservatism lost its influence, making it much less dominant during the second Bush Jr. administration.

Bush Jr.’s foreign policy was severely criticized internationally, especially by France, Uganda, Spain and Venezuela. Anti-Americanism increased sharply during his presidency. Former President Jimmy Carter also criticized Bush for years for an unnecessary war « based on lies and misinterpretations. » Nevertheless, in 2007, Podhoretz pushed for the US to attack Iran, even though he was well aware that this would exponentially increase anti-Americanism around the world.

Some neocon think tanks

Neocons want to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism internationally, including in unstable regions and also through war. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation (HF) and the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) are/were the main think tanks. An interesting detail is that the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century and the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard were in the same building.

1. American Enterprise Institute (AEI)

The AEI, founded in 1938, strives for downsizing government services, a free market, liberal democracy and an active foreign policy. This think tank was founded by executives from large companies (among other Chemical Bank, Chrysler and Paine Webber) and is funded by companies, foundations and private individuals. To date, the AEI Board of Directors consists of executives from multinational and financial companies, among other AllianceBernstein, American Express Company, Carlyle Group, Crow Holdings and Motorola.

Until the 1970s, the AEI had little influence in American politics. However, in 1972 the AEI started a research department and in 1977 the accession of former president Gerald Ford brought several top officials from his administration to the AEI. Ford also gave the AEI international influence. Several prominent neocons, such as Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Michael Novak, Benjamin Wattenberg and James Wilson, also started working for the AEI. At the same time, AEI’s financial resources and workforce increased exponentially.

In the 1980s, several AEI employees joined the Reagan administration, where they advocated a hardline anti-USSR position. In the period 1988-2000, the AEI was strengthened with, among others, John Bolton (then a top official under Reagan), Lynne Cheney (b. 1941, wife of Dick Cheney), Newt Gingrich (b. 1943, Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1995-1999), Frederick Kagan (b. 1970, son of PNAC co-founder Donald Kagan), Joshua Muravchik (b. 1947, then a researcher at the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy) and Richard Perle (advisor at the Department of Defense in 1987-2004), while financial resources continued to increase.

The AEI became especially important since the Bush Jr. administration took office. After all, several AEI employees were part of or worked behind the scenes for this government. Other government employees also maintained good contacts with the AEI. This think tank always paid a lot of attention to the Near East and was therefore closely involved in the preparation of the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent civil war. In addition, the AEI also targeted Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela and liberation movements such as Hezbollah. At the same time, calls were made for closer ties with countries with similar interests, such as Australia, Colombia, Georgia, Great Britain, Israel, Japan, Mexico and Poland.

2. Heritage Foundation (HF)

The HF was founded in 1973 by Joseph Coors (1917-2003), Edwin Feulner (b.1941) and Paul Weyrich (1942-2008) out of dissatisfaction with Nixon’s policies. They explicitly wanted to steer government policy in a different direction. The entrepreneur Coors was a backer of the Californian governor and later American president Reagan. He also provided the new think tank’s first annual budget with $250,000. Feulner and Weyrich were advisors to Republican lawmakers. In 1977, the influential Feulner became head of the HF. By issuing policy advice – then a completely new tactic in the world of Washington’s think tanks – he aroused national interest in the HF.

The HF was an important driving force behind the rise of Neoconservatism and focuses mainly on economic liberalism. ‘Heritage’ refers to Jewish-Protestant ideas and liberalism. This think tank promotes the free market, reduction of government services, individualism and a strong defense. The HF is funded by companies, foundations and private individuals.

The Reagan administration was strongly influenced by ‘Mandate for Leadership’, a 1981 HF book about government downsizing. Under the influence of the HF, the US also actively supported anti-USSR resistance groups around the world and Eastern Bloc dissidents. The concept of ‘Evil Empire’ with which the USSR was described in this period also comes from the HF.

The HF also strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush Jr. and his invasion of Iraq. Various HF employees also held positions in his government, such as Paul Bremer (b. 1941) who became governor of occupied Iraq. At the end of 2001, the HF established the Homeland Security Task Force, which outlined the contours of the new Department of Homeland Security.

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in June 2015, HF initially turned against him. Already in July 2015, the chairman of Heritage Action – HF’s political advocacy organization – said on Fox News: “Donald Trump is a clown. He must drop out of the race.” And in August 2015, Stephen Moore – economist at HF ​​– criticized Trump’s policy positions. In December 2015, HF Vice Chairman Kim Holmes opposed Trump’s candidacy and criticized his supporters as « an alienated class » who were agitating against liberal-progressive policymakers and the institutions they controlled.

When Trump won the Republican nomination and the presidential elections approached, the HF changed strategy. It began e-mailing potential candidates for government appointments in case Trump became president. The HF wanted to use questionnaires to assess their interest in an appointment in a possible Trump administration. The e-mail also requested that the completed questionnaires and a CV be returned to the HF by October 26, 2016 – approximately one week before the presidential elections.

After Trump’s effective victory in the presidential elections, the HF gained influence over the composition of his government, as well as over his policies. CNN reported that “no other institution in Washington has such enormous influence over the composition of the government”. According to CNN, this disproportionate influence of the HF was because the other neoconservative think tanks continued to oppose Trump during the presidential elections, while the HF eventually started supporting Trump and thus was able to infiltrate his movement.

At least 66 HF employees and former employees were appointed in the Trump administration (2017-2021). In addition, hundreds more people selected by the HF were appointed to top positions at government agencies. In January 2018, the HF stated that the Trump administration had already incorporated 64% of the 334 policy measures proposed by the HF.

In April 2023, HF Chairman Kevin Roberts founded Project 2025 to provide the 2024 Republican presidential candidate with an ideological framework and workforce for his potential administration. Project 2025 includes a collection of policy proposals – 922 pages – to reform the government apparatus. It states that the executive branch is under the direct control of the president under Article II of the US Constitution. It proposes a thorough purge of the government apparatus in which tens of thousands of government employees would be fired for being politically useless. Many legal experts said this would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of Church and State and civil rights. Project 2025 used bellicose rhetoric and apocalyptic language in describing this ‘battle plan’.

Although the HF has been considered highly controversial and strongly criticized in the American political community for many years, its impact on public policy has historically made it one of the most influential American think tanks, both in the US and internationally.

3. Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

The PNAC was founded in 1997 by the New Citizenship Project and aimed at US international hegemony. It wanted to achieve this through military strength, diplomacy and moral principles. The 90-page PNAC report ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ from September 2000 noted the absence of a “catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor” and also mentioned four military objectives: protecting the US, convincingly winning several wars, acting as an international police officer and reforming the military. The PNAC lobbied American and European politicians very intensively for these objectives.

The 25 founders of the PNAC included John Bolton (top official under Reagan and Bush Sr.), Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida and brother of President Bush Jr.), Dick Cheney (White House Chief of Staff under Ford and Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.), Elliot Asher Cohen (b. 1956, professor of political science), Midge Decter (journalist, writer and wife of Podhoretz), Steve Forbes (head of Forbes Magazine), Aaron Friedberg (professor of international relations), Francis Fukuyama (professor of philosophy, political science and sociology), Donald Kagan (professor of history), Zalmay Khalilzad (employee of the Department of State under Reagan and of the Department of Defense under Bush Sr.), William Kristol (editor-in-chief of the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard), John Lehman (businessman and Secretary for the Navy under Reagan), Lewis Libby (employee of the Department of State under Reagan and the Department of Defense under Bush Sr.), Norman Podhoretz (editor-in-chief of the neocon magazine Commentary), Dan Quayle (Vice President under Bush Sr.), Donald Rumsfeld (White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense under Ford, presidential advisor under Reagan and Department of Defense advisor under Bush Sr.) and Paul Wolfowitz (employee of the Department of Defense under Ford and advisor to the Department of State under Reagan and the Department of Defense under Bush Sr.). Later, Richard Perle (adviser to the Department of Defense in 1987-2004) and George Weigel (well-known progressive Catholic publicist and political commentator) also joined.

The PNAC is a highly controversial organization because it advocated US dominance of the world, space and the Internet in the 21st century. There was a counter-reaction with the BRussells Tribunal and From the Wilderness. The citizens’ initiative BRussells Tribunal was founded in 2004 by, among others, cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) and opposes US foreign policy. It therefore rejected the PNAC and the American occupation of Iraq. Brussells Tribunal also denounced the assassination campaign against Iraqi academics and the destruction of Iraq’s cultural identity by the US military. From the Wilderness stated that the PNAC wanted to conquer the world and that the attacks of September 11, 2011 were deliberately allowed by American government members with a view to conquering Afghanistan and Iraq and restricting freedoms in the US.

In his well-known book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ from 1992, professor and PNAC co-founder Francis Fukuyama posited that after the demise of the USSR, history had ended and from then on capitalism and parliamentary democracies would triumph. For the Bush Jr. administration, his book was a justification for the invasion of Iraq. It also was one of the main sources of inspiration for the PNAC. However, Fukuyama indicted those in power in the White House in his 2006 book ‘America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy’. He stated that the US lost international credibility and authority due to the Iraq war. Worldwide, and especially in the Near East, it strongly fueled anti-Americanism. Moreover, the US had no stabilization plan for occupied Iraq. Fukuyama also stated that the Bush Jr. administration’s rhetoric about the “international war on terror” and the “Islamic threat” had been greatly exaggerated. Yet Fukuyama remains a convinced neocon who pursues global democratization led by the US. He did, however, accuse the Bush Jr. administration of its unilateral approach and its ‘preemptive’ warfare to spread liberal democracy. The regime changes previously applied by the US were therefore neglected. Fukuyama therefore wants to continue neocon foreign policy in a thoughtful manner that does not arouse fear or anti-Americanism among other countries.

From 2006 onwards, the activity of the PNAC disappeared. In December 2006, former director Gary Schmitt (b. 1952) said on the BBC News television channel that the PNAC was never intended to “last forever” and had “already done its job” because “our view has been adopted”. Thus, the mission of the PNAC was accomplished and therefore, in 2009, it was replaced by the new think tank Foreign Policy Initiative. The main goals of this FPI were to counter the isolationist current in the Republican Party during the Obama administration (2009-2017) and to keep the party focused on the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The FPI was founded by Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Daniel Senor (b. 1971). Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire born in 1944 to a Jewish family in New Jersey, was the most important donor to the FPI.

The FPI advocated increased US military involvement in the war in Afghanistan, a new war against Iran and the cancellation by the Department of Defense of a $572 million contract with Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport. Regarding the war in Syria, the FPI proposed that the US impose a partial no-fly zone, arm Islamist groups and deploy Turkey-based Patriot anti-aircraft missiles against the Syrian air force in the northwestern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. It also opposed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

The FPI, which was intended to be temporary from the start, was stopped at the end of the Obama administration in 2017 because its mission – to have the Republican Party defend the wars in the Near East during this term of office (cf. supra) – had been accomplished. The incoming Trump administration also caused division among the founders of the FPI about what should be achieved during this reign. This was due to the fact that although donor Singer took an anti-Trump position during the 2016 presidential elections, he immediately changed course after Trump’s victory: together with 25 other billionaires, he donated $ 1 million for his inauguration as President. Kagan and Kristol, on the other hand, remained virulently anti-Trump and even left the Republican Party. The FPI was therefore no longer useful to Singer and he decided to reduce his donation to the FPI to a very low amount, after which the FPI came to the conclusion that there was no point in continuing.

A number of top neocons

Elliot Abrams was born in 1948 to a Jewish family in New York and is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz. Abrams worked as a foreign policy advisor to Republican presidents Reagan and Bush Jr. During the Reagan administration, he became discredited for concealing the atrocities of pro-American regimes in Central America and the Contras in Nicaragua. Abrams was ultimately convicted of withholding information and making false statements to the US Parliament. During the Bush Jr. administration, he served as presidential advisor on the Near East and North Africa and on the global spread of democracy. According to the British newspaper The Observer, Abrams was also involved in the failed coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.

Jeb Bush, born in 1953, comes from the wealthy Protestant entrepreneurial Bush family, which also produced Presidents Bush Sr. (his father) and Bush Jr. (his brother). Jeb Bush co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997. He served as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007 with the support of both Cuban and non-Cuban Latinos, as well as Florida’s Jewish community.

Protestant Zionist Dick Cheney was born in Nebraska in 1941. After studies at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin, he began working for presidential aide Donald Rumsfeld in 1969. In the following years, Cheney held various other positions in the White House before becoming an adviser to President Ford in 1974. In 1975, he became White House Chief of Staff.

As Secretary of Defense in the Bush Sr. administration, Cheney led the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq, establishing military bases in Saudi Arabia. After 1993, he became involved in the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney headed energy giant Halliburton.

Under Bush Jr., Cheney was Vice President from 2000 to 2008 and was also able to appoint Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. However, he failed to put Wolfowitz in charge of the CIA (cf. infra). To justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney contributed significantly to the development of the ‘War on Terror’ concept and to the false accusations of weapons of mass destruction. Cheney was the most powerful and influential Vice President in American history. He and Rumsfeld also developed a torture program for prisoners of war. Cheney also greatly influenced taxation and the state budget. After leaving office, he strongly criticized the Obama administration’s security policies.

Doug Feith was born in Philadelphia in 1953, the son of Zionist Jewish businessman Dalck Feith, who emigrated from Poland to the US in 1942. After studies at Harvard University and Georgetown University, Feith became a professor of security policy at the latter university. He also wrote very pro-Israeli contributions for Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Feith strongly opposed the détente with the USSR, the ABM arms limitation treaty and the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. He intensively defends American support for Israel too.

In 1996, Feith was among the authors of the controversial report ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, which formulated aggressive policy recommendations for then Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In 2001, Feith became a defense advisor to President Bush Jr. In 2004, he was questioned by the FBI on suspicion of passing on classified information to the Zionist lobby group AIPAC. Feith is currently an employee of the think tank Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which advocates a close alliance between the US and Israel.

Steve Forbes, born in New Jersey in 1947, was appointed in 1985 by President Reagan to head the CIA radio stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcasted American propaganda in various languages ​​in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Reagan increased the budget of these anti-USSR radio stations and made them more critical of the USSR and its satellite states.

The pro-Israel Forbes co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997 and serves on the Heritage Foundation’s Board of Directors. He advocates free trade, reduction of government services, strict crime legislation, legalization of drugs, gay marriage and reduction of social security. Today, he is head of his own publication, Forbes Magazine.

The Jewish professor of international politics Aaron Friedberg (b. 1956) was co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in 1997. In 2003-2005, he served as security adviser and director of policy planning to Vice President Cheney.

Nathan Glazer (1923-2019) was born as the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. In the early 1940s, he studied at the City College of New York, which was then a Trotskyist anti-USSR hotbed. Glazer met several Jewish Trotskyists from Eastern Europe, such as Daniel Bell (1919-2011), Irving Howe (1920-1993) and Irving Kristol.

Glazer served as a top official in the Kennedy (1961-1963) and Johnson (1963-1969) administrations. He became professor of sociology at the University of California in 1964 and at Harvard University in 1969. Together with his fellow sociology professor Daniel Bell – one of the most important post-war Jewish intellectuals in the US – and Irving Kristol, Glazer founded the influential magazine The Public Interest in 1965. Glazer was also a strong promoter of multiculturalism.

Donald Kagan (1932-2021) came from a Jewish family from Lithuania, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The Trotskyist Kagan became a neocon in the 1970s and was in 1997 one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century. He was first a professor of history at Cornell University and then at Yale University.

The Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad (b. 1951) studied at the American University of Beyrut and the University of Chicago. At the latter university, he met the prominent nuclear strategist, presidential advisor and professor Albert Wohlstetter, who introduced him to government circles. Khalilzad is married to the Jewish feminist and political analyst Cheryl Benard (b. 1953). He founded the international business consultancy Khalilzad Associates in Washington, which works for construction and energy companies.

In 1979-1989, Khalilzad was a professor of political science at Columbia University. In 1984, he worked for Wolfowitz at the State Department and in 1985-1989 he was a government advisor on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war. During that period, Khalilzad worked closely with the strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had engineered American support for the Afghan Mujaheddin. In 1990-1992, he worked at the Department of Defense.

Khalilzad co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997. In 2001, he was an advisor to President Bush Jr. and a member of the National Security Council. Khalilzad served as ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002-2005, to Iraq in 2005-2007 and to the UN in 2007-2009.

Oklahoma-born Protestant Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926-2006) studied political science at Columbia University and at the French Institut des Sciences Politiques. Influenced by her Marxist grandfather, Kirkpatrick was then a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (the youth wing of the Trotskyist Socialist Party of America). At Columbia University, she was strongly influenced by the Jewish Marxist professor of political science Franz Neumann (1900-1954), who had previously been active in the SPD in Germany.

From 1967, Kirkpatrick taught at Georgetown University. In the 1970s, she joined the Democratic Party, where she worked closely with Senator Henry Jackson. However, Kirkpatrick became disenchanted with the Democrats because of the détente towards the USSR. Her Kirkpatrick Doctrine, which justified American support for Third World dictatorships and claimed that this could lead to democracy in the long term, became known through her article ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ in Commentary in 1979. Republican President Reagan therefore made her member of the National Security Council in 1981 and ambassador to the UN. As ambassador to the UN, the strongly pro-Israel Kirkpatrick opposed any attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1985, she resigned and returned to professor at Georgetown University. Kirkpatrick was also affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

William Kristol, born in New York in 1952, is the son of the Jewish neocon godfather Irving Kristol and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. Kristol initially taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. In 1981-1989, he was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State William Bennet in the Reagan administration and in 1989-1993 Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the Bush Sr. administration. His nickname ‘Dan Quayle’s brain’ acquired in this last position indicates that Kristol exerted a considerable influence.

Kristol is active in various neocon organizations. In 1995, he founded the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard. In 1997 he co-founded the Project for the New American Century and, of course, defended the invasion of Iraq. Kristol has been advocating for an American attack on Iran for years and, in 2010, he criticized President Obama’s « lukewarm approach to Iran ». He also actively supported the American war against Libya in 2011.

From 2003 to 2013, Kristol was a political commentator on Fox News. In 2014, he created the podcast ‘Conversations with Bill Kristol’, in which he has in-depth conversations with academics and public figures about foreign policy, economics, history and politics, among other things.

Until 2016, Kristol was editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, which closed in 2018. The demise was due to a conflict that arose between the anti-Trump editorial team and the pro-Trump owner Clarity Media Group. The Washington Examiner, Clarity Media Group’s other neocon magazine, on the other hand, took the position desired by its owner, while some of The Weekly Standard’s subscribers also defected to The Washington Examiner. Consequently, Clarity Media Group decided to discontinue The Weekly Standard.

Kristol then became editor-in-chief of the news and opinion website The Bulwark, launched in 2018, which focuses on neocons within the Republican Party. Kristol is also a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel’s Leadership, a neocon lobby group that opposes Israel-critical parliamentarians.

Businessman John Lehman, born in Philadelphia in 1942, served as Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration (1981-1987). Since then he has been active in various neocon think tanks, such as the Project for the New American Century, the Heritage Foundation, the Committee on the Present Danger, …

Lewis Libby (b. 1950) comes from the wealthy Jewish banking family Leibowitz from Connecticut. His father changed the original family name Leibowitz to Libby. After studying political science at Yale University and law at Columbia University, the friendly Yale professor Paul Wolfowitz then launched his law career. Libby worked for Wolfowitz at the State Department in 1981-1985 and at the Department of Defense in 1989-1993.

In 1997, Libby co-founded the Project for the New American Century. During Bush Jr.’s election campaign, he belonged to the neocon advisory group Vulcans. In 2001, Libby became an advisor to President Bush Jr., as well as Chief of Staff and advisor to Vice President Cheney. He was considered the most fervent representative of the Israel lobby in the Bush Jr. administration. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw even said of Libby’s involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations: “It’s a toss-up whether he is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day”.

In 2005, Libby resigned after being cited for perjury, making false statements and obstructing the judicial investigation in the Plame case. In 2007, Libby was convicted and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, 400 hours of community service and a $250,000 fine. However, the prison sentence was waived by President Bush Jr.

Liberal Catholic Michael Novak (1933-2017) came from a family of Slovak descent and studied philosophy and English at Stonehill College, theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and history and philosophy of religion at Harvard University. His progressive writings on the Second Vatican Council, which he attended as a journalist, were severely criticized by conservative Catholics. It did win him the sympathy of the Protestant theologian Robert McAfee, who helped him get a professorship at Stanford University in 1965.

In 1969-1972, Novak was dean at the State University of New York. In 1973-1976, he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and then became a professor of religious studies at Syracuse University. Since 1978, he has also been affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute. His publications dealt with capitalism, democratization and rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics. In the 1970s, Novak also served on the Board of Directors of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a neocon faction within the Democratic Party that sought to influence party policy.

During the Reagan administration, Novak served on behalf of the US on the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1981-1982 and he led the US delegation to the Conference on Security & Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1986. In 1987-1988, Novak was a professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Joshua Muravchik was born in New York in 1947, the son of a prominent Jewish socialist. From 1968 to 1973, he was national chairman of the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League. Muravchik belonged to the group of Marxist intellectuals who transformed themselves into neocons in the 1960s and 1970s.

Muravchik studied at the City College of New York and Georgetown University. In 1975-1979, he was an aide to three Democratic lawmakers, including Henry Jackson. In 1977-1979, he was also head of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority faction within the Democratic Party, founded by Jackson. In the mid-1980s, he was a researcher at the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Since 1992, he has been an assistant professor at the Institute of World Politics, a private university in Washington specializing in security issues, intelligence services and foreign policy. At the same time, he worked as a researcher for the American Enterprise Institute in 1987-2008 and at John Hopkins University in 2009-2014.

Much of Muravchik’s work focuses on defending Israel and advocating an American ‘preemptive’ strike on Iran. On Iran, he stated that « our only option is war. »

Richard Perle was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1941, but grew up in California. After studying political science at the University of Southern California, the London School of Economics and Princeton University, Perle worked for Democratic Senator Henry Jackson in 1969-1980, for whom he drafted the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that made détente with the USSR dependent on the possibility of emigration for Soviet Jews. Perle also led resistance to the Carter administration’s disarmament talks with the USSR. In 1987, he criticized the Reagan administration’s INF disarmament treaty with the USSR, as well as the Obama administration’s renewal of the START arms limitation treaty with Russia in 2010.

Perle was regularly accused of actually working for Israel and even spying for it. As early as 1970, the FBI caught him discussing classified information with someone from the Israeli embassy. In 1983, it was revealed that he received significant sums of money to serve the interests of an Israeli arms manufacturer.

Perle served as a consultant to the Department of Defense from 1987 to 2004 and is a member of several neocon think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. He also fervently defended the American invasion of Iraq and, in 1996, he was among the authors of the controversial report ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, which contained policy advice for then Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The controversial historian Richard Pipes (1923-2018) was the son of a Jewish businessman from Poland. The Pipes family immigrated to the US in 1940. After studying at Muskingum College, Cornell University and Harvard University, Pipes taught Russian history at Harvard University from 1950 to 1996. He also wrote for Commentary. During the 1970s, Pipes criticized the détente with the USSR and served as an advisor to Senator Henry Jackson. In 1976, Pipes led the controversial study group Team B, which was tasked with reassessing the USSR’s geopolitical capabilities and objectives. In 1981-1982, he served on the National Security Council. Pipes was also a member of the neocon think tank Committee on the Present Danger for many years.

Pipes’ scientific work, however, is controversial in the academic world. Critics argue that his historical work merely aims to label the USSR as the ‘Evil Empire’. In addition, he wrote in full about Lenin’s alleged “unspoken assumptions”, while completely ignoring what Lenin actually said. Pipes is further accused of the selective use of documents: what fitted his objective was described in detail and what did not fit his objective was simply overlooked. The Russian writer and intellectual Alexandr Solzhenitsyn also dismissed Pipe’s work as “the Polish version of Russian history”.

Daniel Senor (b. 1971) comes from a Jewish family from Utica (New York State) and was an advisor to the Department of Defense, a presidential advisor and a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2009, he co-founded the neocon think tank Foreign Policy Initiative with Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Senor is currently an opinion writer at The New York Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the former neocon magazine The Weekly Standard.

Dan Quayle was born in Indiana in 1947 as the grandson of the wealthy and influential newspaper magnate Eugene Pulliam. After studying political science at DePauw University and law at Indiana University, Quayle served in the American Parliament from 1976. In 1989-1993 he was Vice President under Bush Sr. The investment banker Quayle co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997. He also serves in several boards of directors of major companies, is a director at Aozora Bank in Japan and is chairman of the Global Investments department of the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management.

Illinois-born Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021) was a naval pilot and flight instructor in the US Navy in 1954-1957. He then worked for two parliamentarians (until 1960) and for an investment bank (until 1962), after which he became a Republican Member of Parliament. Rumsfeld served as Nixon’s presidential advisor from 1969 to 1972. In 1973, he was ambassador to NATO in Brussels.

Rumsfeld became White House Chief of Staff under President Ford in 1974. At his instigation, Ford thoroughly reshuffled his government in November 1975 (later dubbed the « Halloween Massacre »). Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense. He halted the gradual decline in the defense budget and strengthened US nuclear and conventional armaments, undermining Secretary of State Kissinger’s SALT negotiations with the USSR. Rumsfeld used Team B’s controversial 1976 report to build cruise missiles and a large number of Navy ships.

After the Democratic Carter administration took office in 1977, Rumsfeld briefly taught at Princeton University and Northwestern University in Chicago before moving on to top business positions. Under Reagan, he served as presidential advisor on arms control and nuclear weapons in 1982-1986 and as presidential envoy on the Near East and the International Law of the Sea in 1982-1984. In the Bush Sr. administration, Rumsfeld served as an advisor to the Department of Defense from 1990 to 1993. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century.

Under President Bush Jr., Rumsfeld served again as Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006, dominating the planning of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He is believed responsible both in the US and internationally for the detention of prisoners of war without the protection of the Geneva Conventions, as well as for the subsequent torture and abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. In 2009, Rumsfeld was even named a war criminal by the UN Human Rights Council.

Benjamin Wattenberg (1933-2015) came from a Jewish family from New York. In 1966-1968, he worked as an assistant and speechwriter for President Johnson. In 1970, together with political scientist, election specialist and presidential advisor Richard Scammon (1915-2001), he drew up the strategy that gave the Democrats victory in the 1970 parliamentary elections and that made Republican Richard Nixon president again in 1972. In the 1970s, Wattenberg served as an adviser to Democratic Senator Henry Jackson. He also worked as a top official for Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr., and was affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

Professor of political science James Wilson (1931-2012) taught at Harvard University in 1961-1987, at the University of California in 1987-1997, at Pepperdine University in 1998-2009 and then at Boston College. He also held various positions in the White House and was an advisor to several American presidents. Wilson was also affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

Leading neocon Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father was statistics professor and AIPAC member Jacob Wolfowitz (1910-1981), who actively supported Soviet Jews and Israel. Wolfowitz first studied mathematics at Cornell University in the 1960s, where he met professor Allan Bloom and was also a member of the secret student group Quil and Dragger. While studying political science at the University of Chicago, he met professors Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, as well as his fellow students James Wilson and Richard Perle.

In 1970-1972, Wolfowitz taught political science at Yale University, where Lewis Libby was one of his students. He then served as an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. In 1976, Wolfowitz belonged to the controversial anti-USSR study group Team B, which was tasked with ‘reexamining’ the CIA’s analyzes of the USSR. In 1977-1980, Wolfowitz worked for the Department of Defense. In 1980, he became professor of international relations at John Hopkins University.

In the Reagan administration, Wolfowitz became an employee of the State Department in 1981 at the suggestion of John Lehman. He strongly rejected Reagan’s rapprochement with China, which brought him into conflict with Secretary of State Alexander Haig (1924-2010). In 1982, the New York Times predicted that Wolfowitz would be replaced at the State Department. Instead, the opposite happened in 1983: Haig – who was also at odds with the half-Jewish and virulently anti-USSR Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1917-2006) – was replaced by the neocon George Schultz and Wolfowitz was promoted to Schultz’s assistant for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad became Wolfowitz’s employees. In 1986-1989, Wolfowitz was ambassador to Indonesia.

During the Bush Sr. administration, Wolfowitz served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Secretary Cheney, with Libby again as his assistant. As a result, they were closely involved in the war against Iraq in 1990-1991. Wolfowitz strongly regretted that the US limited itself in this war to the reconquest of Kuwait and did not advance to Baghdad. He and Libby would continue to lobby for a ‘preemptive’ and unilateral strike against Iraq throughout the 1990s.

In 1994-2001, Wolfowitz was again a professor at John Hopkins University, where he promoted his neocon vision. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for a New American Century.

Wolfowitz divorced his wife Clare Selgin in 1999 and started a relationship with the British-Libyan World Bank employee Shaha Ali Riza, which would get him into trouble in 2000 and 2007 (cf. infra). During Bush Jr.’s 2000 election campaign, Wolfowitz belonged to Bush’s foreign policy advisory group Vulcans. For the subsequent Bush Jr. administration, Wolfowitz was nominated to head the CIA, but this failed because his ex-wife wrote a letter to Bush Jr. calling his relationship with a foreign national a security risk to the US. He then became Deputy Secretary of Defense again under Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001-2005.

Wolfowitz took advantage of the events of September 11, 2001 to immediately revive his rhetoric about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘preemptive’ attacks against ‘terrorists’. From then on, he and Rumsfeld advocated an attack on Iraq at every opportunity. Because the CIA did not follow through on their claims about ‘Iraqi weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘Iraqi support of terrorism’, they created the Office of Special Plans study group within the Department of Defense to ‘find’ evidence. This OSP quickly overtook the existing intelligence services and, based on often dubious information, became President Bush Jr.’s main source of intelligence on Iraq. This led to accusations that the Bush Jr. administration was creating intelligence to get Parliament to approve an invasion of Iraq.

In 2005, Wolfowitz was successfully nominated by President Bush Jr. as chairman of the World Bank. However, Wolfowitz made himself unpopular through a series of controversial appointments of neocons and pushing through neocon policies in the World Bank. His affair with World Bank employee Shaha Ali Riza also led to controversy as internal rules of the World Bank prohibit relationships between executives and staff. Moreover, Wolfowitz had given Riza a promotion in 2005 with a disproportionate salary increase. Ultimately, Wolfowitz was forced to resign as chairman of the World Bank in 2007. He then became a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.

Conclusion

Neoconservatism arose from the virulent enmity of Jewish Trotskyists who fled from Eastern Europe for both the Stalinist USSR and Russia. They came mainly from the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania). These Jewish immigrants settled mainly in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1920s and 1930s. In the US they formed a very close community through friendships, professional relationships and marriages. Some also Anglicized their surnames, for example ‘Horenstein’ became Howe, ‘Leibowitz’ became ‘Libby’, ‘Piepes’ became ‘Pipes’ and ‘Rosenthal’ became ‘Decter’. Their children studied en masse at the City College of New York and formed the Trotskyist group New York Intellectuals.

To combat Stalin from his Mexican exile, the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky formed a rival communist movement with the Fourth International. Out of disgust for Stalinism, a number of important American Jewish radical left intellectuals gathered around Trotsky in the 1930s, such as the young communists Irving Howe, Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. In the 1960s, they exchanged their Trotskyism for Neoconservatism.

The main ideologues of neoconservatism are therefore Marxists who reoriented themselves. The names have changed, but the objectives remained the same. After all, the liberal theses of neoconservatism equally support universalism, materialism and the feasibility utopia, because both Marxism and liberalism rely on the same philosophical foundations. So, the communists were more likely to be in New York than in Moscow during the Cold War. Neoconservatism also made religion useful for the State again.

Neoconservatism was turned into an actual movement by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. This neoconservative movement can best be described as an extended family based largely on the informal social networks these two godfathers created.

Neocons are democratic imperialists who want to change society and the world. Their messianism and their urge to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism worldwide are also at odds with real conservatism. After all, real conservatives have no universal pretensions and rather defend non-interventionism and isolationism. The neocons also want to convert their active support for Israel, if necessary, into military interventions in countries that they consider dangerous to their and Israel’s interests.

The neocon ideal of multiculturalism implies mass immigration. However, cultures have different values, norms and legislative frameworks. To make social interaction possible, a common denominator is needed. Consequently, the final goal is not multiculturalism, but monoculturalism: the neocons therefore want to create a uniform, unitary human being.

There are a striking number of intellectuals among the neocons. They are therefore not a marginal group, but, on the contrary, they form the intellectual framework of American foreign policy. However, President Richard Nixon had a very different approach to the two superpowers China and the USSR than all other post-war American presidents, with the exception of President John Kennedy (1917-1963), who also strove to end the Cold War. To the anger of the neocons, he established relations with China and significantly improved relations with the USSR. In the US itself, Nixon decentralized the government, expanded social security and combated inflation, unemployment and crime. He also abolished the gold standard, while his wage and price policy was the largest peacetime government intervention in American history.

The neocons hated the détente of the 1970s: they feared losing their favorite enemy – the USSR. After Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, they therefore claimed that the CIA produced far too rosy analyzes of the USSR. The government reshuffle of 1975, which they instigated, put George Bush Sr. in charge of the CIA, after which he set up the a priori anti-USSR Team B to make an ‘alternative assessment’ of the CIA data. Team B’s controversial and completely erroneous report incorrectly stated that the CIA was wrong.

Although Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dismissed Team B’s report, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld still promoted it as a ‘reliable’ study. Rumsfeld thus undermined the arms limitation negotiations of the following years (i.e. during the Carter administration in 1977-1981). In addition, Team B’s report also provided the basis for the unnecessary explosion of the defense budget during the Reagan administration.

During a trip to Great Britain in 1978, former President Nixon said about the Watergate scandal: “Some people say I didn’t handle it properly and they’re right. I screwed it up. Mea culpa. But let’s get on to my achievements. You’ll be here in the year 2000 and we’ll see how I’m regarded then”…

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 certainly did not defeat totalitarianism. On the contrary, it has taken on a different – ​​conservative-looking – guise and has Europe and North America in its grip. The advocacy of top neocons such as Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol in favor of the Republican Party, the rejection of President Obama’s policies and the infiltration of the power apparatus around President Trump clearly shows that the neocons want to re-enter the US government. After all, their end goal remains an attack on Iran and American world dominance. The fight for our freedom will therefore continue for a long time!

References

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BALINT (B.), Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed The Jewish Left Into The Neoconservative Right, New York, Public Affairs, 2010, pp. 304.

BRZEZINSKI (Z.), The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York, Basic Books, 1997, pp. 240.

DRURY (S.), Leo Strauss and the American Right, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 256.

EASTON (N.), Gang of Five, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002, pp. 464.

GREEN (K.), Jew and Philosopher – The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. XIV + 278.

HOEVELER (D.), Watch on the right: conservative intellectuals in the Reagan era, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. XIII + 333.

JEFFERS (T.), Norman Podhoretz: A Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 418.

MEARSHEIMER (J.) en WALT (S.), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, pp. 496.

SAUNDERS (F.), The Cultural Cold War, New York, New Press, 1999, pp. 419.

WALD (A.), The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 456.

WEDEL (J.), Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market, New York, Basic Books, 2009, pp. 283.