Mach
03-13-2016, 03:08 AM
A decent overview of a taken over party (Republican) pulling it's head out of the sand (Middle East).
Too bad this kind of info didn't come from more of a libertarian site.
This is only a small part of the entire read.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11189350/twilight-of-the-neoconservatives
The once-fringe neoconservative movement, in the space of a few short years, had seized first their party's intellectual power centers, then its legislative agenda, and now the commanding heights of American leadership itself. Against all odds, they had won.
Today, less than two decades after seizing the Republican Party, they are on the verge of losing it. The party's two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are promising to break from neoconservatism — and voters seem to be responding.
Neoconservatives are fighting back, but they're losing. Republican elites might still support them, but the voters do not seem to.
On Monday, a number of leading neoconservatives, including some who had participated in the movement's rise to power, signed on to Sen. Marco Rubio's "National Security Advisory Council." That same day, CNN learned that some of Rubio's own staffers were urging him to quit the presidential race before the mid-March primary in his home state, if only to spare him the humiliation of his expected defeat.
Many neoconservatives, perhaps sensing they had no viable candidate to express their views for them, signed an open letter denouncing Trump. Others are threatening not just to oppose Trump, but to split with the party entirely and support Hillary Clinton.
Neoconservatives can threaten to quit the Republican Party, or warn that the party is diverging from their values, but it looks increasingly like they may have it backward: that it is the Republican Party, as constituted by its voters and their policy preferences, that is rejecting neoconservatives.
It's a divide that, if widened too far, could risk separating neoconservative elites from the party itself. But because elite- and academic-minded neoconservatives seized power by capturing elite institutions — think tanks, policy journals, donors — but not by doing the harder work of attracting voters, this is a divide that may have always been there, just beneath the surface, waiting to be opened by a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.
In a mid-February debate, for example, Trump united the half-dozen other candidates against him by declaring that the Iraq invasion had been a disaster. A week later, he again said something that so outraged the other candidates that they once again all agreed Trump had gone beyond the pale: He declared that he would remain officially neutral on Israel-Palestine. Trump also drew objections for warning that regime change in Syria would risk exacerbating chaos there.
On the surface, these seem like banal and even mainstream positions, especially compared with Trump's other statements. Official US policy on Israel-Palestine has been neutrality for decades. On Iraq, both foreign policy experts and voters largely consider the 2003 invasion a terrible mistake. Pentagon officials themselves often lament wasteful spending. And most Syria analysts agree that removing Assad by force would worsen the violence.
But Trump's statements, reasonable though they might seem to many voters, appalled neoconservative-aligned writers and establishment candidates. And that may have been deliberate: Trump was directly challenging neoconservative orthodoxy, which states that the Iraq War was just and necessary, that intervention and regime change are desirable, and that the US must side unequivocally with Israel.
This put neoconservatives in the position of denouncing Trump for positions that are, in fact, quite mainstream. In those moments, as establishment candidates shouted down Trump for saying things that would be uncontroversial to most people, what you were seeing was the degree to which neoconservatives had estranged their party's foreign policy from the actual preferences of its voters.
This is not to suggest that any such reckoning would necessarily have ended with the Republican Party outright rejecting neoconservatism. But it would have at least brought the party to revisit, and perhaps temper, the totality of its ideological commitment.
The party might have returned, even if only in part, to its oft-celebrated legacy of foreign policy realism, most recently embodied by George H.W. Bush. It might even have embraced its libertarian strain. But the reckoning never came. Party elites and voters alike were denied a painful but necessary conversation over neoconservatism's place as unquestioned party orthodoxy.
Until someone came along and forced that conversation: Donald Trump.
Like so much of what Trump says, his claim to have opposed the Iraq War from the start turns out to be a lie. But this is hardly the point. Trump has positioned himself as challenging Republican Party orthodoxy, and, for months, one of the orthodoxies he has most loudly and single-mindedly challenged is the wisdom of invading Iraq.
"George W. Bush made a mistake," Trump said in a February debate, as one of many examples. "We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."
And therein lies Trump's real threat on foreign policy: He is demonstrating that it would be within the Republican Party's political interests to jettison the neoconservatives.
He has proven that there is a real constituency for opposing neoconservatism among Republicans; that an anti-neoconservative foreign policy — even one as incoherent and nonsensical as his own — can succeed with GOP voters, and would have a far better chance in a national election.
Neoconservative party elites are now announcing they will vote against Trump if he wins the primary, and that they may even leave or seek to divide the party itself. But it appears possible it is the party that is leaving them.
Neoconservative threats to support Hillary Clinton against their own party's nominee are not idle — and not specific to Trump. A number of neoconservatives threatened (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/are-neocons-getting-ready-to-ally-with-hillary-clinton.html) the same when libertarian Rand Paul looked like a contender for the 2016 GOP nomination.
Too bad this kind of info didn't come from more of a libertarian site.
This is only a small part of the entire read.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11189350/twilight-of-the-neoconservatives
The once-fringe neoconservative movement, in the space of a few short years, had seized first their party's intellectual power centers, then its legislative agenda, and now the commanding heights of American leadership itself. Against all odds, they had won.
Today, less than two decades after seizing the Republican Party, they are on the verge of losing it. The party's two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are promising to break from neoconservatism — and voters seem to be responding.
Neoconservatives are fighting back, but they're losing. Republican elites might still support them, but the voters do not seem to.
On Monday, a number of leading neoconservatives, including some who had participated in the movement's rise to power, signed on to Sen. Marco Rubio's "National Security Advisory Council." That same day, CNN learned that some of Rubio's own staffers were urging him to quit the presidential race before the mid-March primary in his home state, if only to spare him the humiliation of his expected defeat.
Many neoconservatives, perhaps sensing they had no viable candidate to express their views for them, signed an open letter denouncing Trump. Others are threatening not just to oppose Trump, but to split with the party entirely and support Hillary Clinton.
Neoconservatives can threaten to quit the Republican Party, or warn that the party is diverging from their values, but it looks increasingly like they may have it backward: that it is the Republican Party, as constituted by its voters and their policy preferences, that is rejecting neoconservatives.
It's a divide that, if widened too far, could risk separating neoconservative elites from the party itself. But because elite- and academic-minded neoconservatives seized power by capturing elite institutions — think tanks, policy journals, donors — but not by doing the harder work of attracting voters, this is a divide that may have always been there, just beneath the surface, waiting to be opened by a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.
In a mid-February debate, for example, Trump united the half-dozen other candidates against him by declaring that the Iraq invasion had been a disaster. A week later, he again said something that so outraged the other candidates that they once again all agreed Trump had gone beyond the pale: He declared that he would remain officially neutral on Israel-Palestine. Trump also drew objections for warning that regime change in Syria would risk exacerbating chaos there.
On the surface, these seem like banal and even mainstream positions, especially compared with Trump's other statements. Official US policy on Israel-Palestine has been neutrality for decades. On Iraq, both foreign policy experts and voters largely consider the 2003 invasion a terrible mistake. Pentagon officials themselves often lament wasteful spending. And most Syria analysts agree that removing Assad by force would worsen the violence.
But Trump's statements, reasonable though they might seem to many voters, appalled neoconservative-aligned writers and establishment candidates. And that may have been deliberate: Trump was directly challenging neoconservative orthodoxy, which states that the Iraq War was just and necessary, that intervention and regime change are desirable, and that the US must side unequivocally with Israel.
This put neoconservatives in the position of denouncing Trump for positions that are, in fact, quite mainstream. In those moments, as establishment candidates shouted down Trump for saying things that would be uncontroversial to most people, what you were seeing was the degree to which neoconservatives had estranged their party's foreign policy from the actual preferences of its voters.
This is not to suggest that any such reckoning would necessarily have ended with the Republican Party outright rejecting neoconservatism. But it would have at least brought the party to revisit, and perhaps temper, the totality of its ideological commitment.
The party might have returned, even if only in part, to its oft-celebrated legacy of foreign policy realism, most recently embodied by George H.W. Bush. It might even have embraced its libertarian strain. But the reckoning never came. Party elites and voters alike were denied a painful but necessary conversation over neoconservatism's place as unquestioned party orthodoxy.
Until someone came along and forced that conversation: Donald Trump.
Like so much of what Trump says, his claim to have opposed the Iraq War from the start turns out to be a lie. But this is hardly the point. Trump has positioned himself as challenging Republican Party orthodoxy, and, for months, one of the orthodoxies he has most loudly and single-mindedly challenged is the wisdom of invading Iraq.
"George W. Bush made a mistake," Trump said in a February debate, as one of many examples. "We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."
And therein lies Trump's real threat on foreign policy: He is demonstrating that it would be within the Republican Party's political interests to jettison the neoconservatives.
He has proven that there is a real constituency for opposing neoconservatism among Republicans; that an anti-neoconservative foreign policy — even one as incoherent and nonsensical as his own — can succeed with GOP voters, and would have a far better chance in a national election.
Neoconservative party elites are now announcing they will vote against Trump if he wins the primary, and that they may even leave or seek to divide the party itself. But it appears possible it is the party that is leaving them.
Neoconservative threats to support Hillary Clinton against their own party's nominee are not idle — and not specific to Trump. A number of neoconservatives threatened (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/are-neocons-getting-ready-to-ally-with-hillary-clinton.html) the same when libertarian Rand Paul looked like a contender for the 2016 GOP nomination.