The Current Events Room
The Neocons strike back
Trump ran for president on a Realpolitik foreign policy platform and he rejected neoconservativism. As President he has been all over the place but trending Realpolitik. The killing of General Soleimani revived the neocons. Although they were pissed that Trump did not escalate after Iran hit our bases in Iraq.
The article does include a great history of the neocon movement- well worth the read.
Read the rest of the article at the link.There was a time not so long ago, before President Donald Trump’s surprise decision early this year to liquidate the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, when it appeared that America’s neoconservatives were floundering. The president was itching to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un. He was reportedly willing to hold talks with the president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.
Indeed, this past summer, Trump’s anti-interventionist supporters in the conservative media were riding high. When he refrained from attacking Iran in June after it shot down an American drone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared, “Donald Trump was elected president precisely to keep us out of disaster like war with Iran.” Carlson went on to condemn the hawks in Trump’s Cabinet and their allies, who he claimed were egging the president on—familiar names to anyone who has followed the decades-long neoconservative project of aggressively using military force to topple unfriendly regimes and project American power over the globe. “So how did we get so close to starting [a war]?” he asked. “One of [the hawks’] key allies is the national security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend of Bill Kristol’s. Together they helped plan the Iraq War.”
By the time Trump met with Kim in late June, becoming the first sitting president to set foot on North Korean soil, Bolton was on the outs. Carlson was on the president’s North Korean junket, while Trump’s national security adviser was in Mongolia. “John Bolton is absolutely a hawk,” Trump told NBC in June. “If it was up to him, he’d take on the whole world at one time, OK?” In September, Bolton was fired.
The standard-bearer of the Republican Party had made clear his distaste for the neocons’ belligerent approach to global affairs, much to the neocons’ own entitled chagrin. As recently as December, Bolton, now outside the tent pissing in, was hammering Trump for “bluffing” through an announcement that the administration wanted North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. “The idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true,” Bolton told Axios.
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