The neoconservatives led us into one of the great blunders of American history. The Iraq War still looms large over American politics, even as it’s been largely memory-holed. The election of Barack Obama was, in part, a reaction to the excesses and militarism of the George W. Bush administration. The rise of Donald Trump was, in part, a reaction to Obama. Trump, even if he wasn’t initially, became a vocal opponent of the Iraq War and rendered the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party irrelevant.
Instead of proclaiming a commitment to supporting democracy abroad, Trump was the first American president to show little, if any, interest in the values that had long defined the American project. He promoted a much narrower conception of American interests, focused on immigration restrictions, transactional economic gains and letting our authoritarian allies be as authoritarian as they wanted to be. This was “America first.”
In a recent essay in the Atlantic, David Brooks argues that the original neocons — well before the Iraq War discredited them — had important insights about domestic politics. Witnessing the rise of secularism and decline of public morality in the 1960s and 70s, they wanted to “put virtue at the center of their public-policy thinking; they were not afraid to be moralistic.”
But that moral impulse also had — and still has — relevance for America’s global role and leadership. I hesitate to say this. Neoconservatism of this sort is dead, and for good reason. It failed. At the same time, when I look at the current crop of Republican leaders and their apparent disregard for American ideals and Christian morality, I can’t help but look with some nostalgia at the Republicans of old.
Last week, referring to “mainstream Muslims,” Trump ally Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida) said “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction. I think you destroy them first.” After the terrorist attack in Australia that took the lives of 15 people during a Hanukkah celebration, Fine doubled down, calling for “deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible. Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us. The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.” Not to be outdone, Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville declared “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult. Islamists aren’t here to assimilate. They’re here to conquer. … We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.”
Such sentiments have been building. In Texas, a group of Muslims have proposed developing a 400-acre plot near Dallas that would include hundreds of homes, a school and a mosque. Over the past year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has waged a personal jihad against the project, saying sharia law is “not allowed in Texas” and launching several investigations into the planned community. Unsurprisingly, apart from the fact that they happen to be Muslims, there is no evidence that the members of the East Plano Islamic Center plan to impose sharia law, whatever that might even mean.
Republican leaders, including Trump, have shown no interest in criticizing this upsurge of anti-Muslim vitriol within their ranks. Instead, in saying and doing nothing, they have normalized it.
Contrast this with how President George W. Bush talked about Muslims after Sept. 11. Visiting the Islamic Center of Washington six days after the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, Bush quoted from the Quran and declared “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” He defended Muslim women who wore hijabs, insisting they “must feel comfortable going outside their homes” and condemning those who would harass them as representing “the worst of humankind.” Days later, addressing a joint session of Congress, he stated unequivocally: “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends.”
Bush’s remarks reflected a conviction about what America represented and what differentiated us from our enemies — at a time when Americans needed to hear it most. And it wasn’t just limited to ensuring Muslims felt safe at home. Bush had admirable views about democracy’s universality, for which he deserves credit. He excoriated critics for suggesting that Muslims weren’t ready for democracy; this was nothing more than cultural condescension. In a 2003 speech, he asked, “Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter?”
The contrast reveals something profound about what we’ve lost. Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric, for all its flaws and the disasters that followed, was grounded in a vision of American exceptionalism that was simultaneously moral and strategic. It recognized that America’s global influence depended not merely on our military and economic power, but on our ability to embody — however imperfectly — universal ideals that transcended narrow tribal loyalties.
Tragically, Bush failed to live up to his lofty rhetoric. After a brief attempt during his so-called Freedom Agenda to pressure Arab autocrats to open up their political systems in 2004 and 2005, he returned to turning a blind eye to dictators in the name of stability. But the moral aspiration counted for something, because it spoke to the kind of America that we could still become. Without that aspiration, we would just be a country like any other, concerned only with what happens within our borders and indifferent to the fate of the millions suffering under repression in faraway lands.
In this sense, the domestic and the foreign are intertwined. If we value democracy at home, we should care about it elsewhere. A world dominated by autocratic regimes would be one increasingly inhospitable to American interests and ideals. As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul argues in his new book “Autocrats vs. Democrats,” to compete effectively with authoritarian nations such as China and Russia requires us to stress that we offer a democratic alternative.
But Trump has been so intent on repudiating the legacy of the neocons that he has overcorrected so far in the other direction that America’s values barely make a blip in his recently released National Security Strategy. The strategy insists that “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.” When it comes to the Middle East, the only real goal expressed appears to be “[preventing] an adversarial power from dominating [the region].” According to the document, “the key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.” In other words, forget about even pretending to care about political reform or human rights.
Oddly enough, standing up for democracy is mentioned only in relation to Europe — the one region of the world that is almost entirely made of democracies. Trump’s national security strategy notes that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” The implication is clear: For the Trump administration, democracy in Europe will flourish only if far-right parties continue gaining ground. These are parties that, for all their differences, share one thing: aggressive anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies, including expelling Muslim migrants and limiting the visibility of Islam in public life. This is little surprise. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly signaled their preference for right-wing populist parties such as the rabidly anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany.
It is worth remembering that Trump rose to political prominence in 2016 with a campaign pledge to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
This is the through line in today’s Republican Party: Muslims are a threat at home. They are a threat to Europe. And they must be managed and kept in line in the Middle East by dictators. This is the new morality, which is to say no morality at all.
The neoconservatives, led by Bush, brought disaster through their reckless attempt to remake Iraq through military force. For that, they shouldn’t be forgiven. In doing so, they tainted the very idea of democracy promotion and morality in foreign policy. But that doesn’t mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and do away with that moral sensibility altogether. Two things can be true at once: The neoconservatives also got some things right, namely their understanding that America stood for something beyond naked self-interest. They understood that terrorist attacks were no excuse to demonize Muslims at home, and that Muslims abroad were deserving of freedom and democracy like anyone else.
That is a message worth believing in, especially now when the U.S. seems intent on promoting a new and frightening clash of civilizations with a religion that claims nearly 2 billion adherents, including the millions of American Muslims who find themselves in the crosshairs of a Republican Party that has lost any real sense of moral grounding.
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