Verbosities

(Cross-posted from Random Thoughts and Thoroughbred Selections)

It came up in conversation today, so I thought I'd pull a little clip to hopefully explain a little better what Neoconservative foreign policy entails. Emphasis added:

Finally, for a great power, the "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns...

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-a-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination...

Suddenly, after two decades during which "imperial decline" and "imperial overstretch" were the academic and journalistic watchwords, the United States emerged as uniquely powerful... With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it or the world will discover them for you.

The older, traditional elements in the Republican Party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published.

[Irving Kristol - The Neoconservative Persuasion - AEI, August 2003]

Distilling this down, Irving Kristol is saying that the United States, as a uniquely strong military and ideological power, has the responsibility to find ways to use it to ensure the survival and proliferation of this ideology, mainly through using our military strength as a means of persuasion. Well, that and as of 2003 the president was "doing a heckuva job, Bushie."

"Neocon" isn't a meaningless label. It is a philosophy.

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