With US warships menacing Venezuela amidst rumours of regime change in Caracas, it seems that the neoconservatives, champions of regime change, are back. While they reached the peak of their influence under the administrations of US president George W. Bush from 2001-2009, they have long haunted the swampland of Beltway think tanks and research institutes, with columns and sinecures aplenty. Even when they have not been in office, they have often been in power, as their views on US foreign policy formed part of the bipartisan consensus across the thirty years prior to Donald Trump’s first term in office from 2016-2020. This consensus was that the US was, in the words of Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the “indispensable nation.”
Despite their ideological affinity with globalist liberalism, not to mention the disastrous record of adventurist wars in the Middle East, some neoconservatives have now — remarkably — joined forces with the populist insurgency that was fuelled in part by the failure of the very policies they championed. All this despite the fact that Trump himself said his greatest regret over his first term in office was how much leeway he gave the neocons. How is it that we find ourselves here again?
Historically, neoconservatism was an unabashedly globalist vision, committed to spreading liberalism and democracy through military might, trampling over the rights of independent states in the process. The major point of difference with their Democratic opponents was how much multilateral support was needed for the forever war. While leftist liberals fretted over the need to secure the benedictions of the UN and preferred deploying Blue Helmets, the neocons were happy to shrug off international law and deploy squads of Marines. But these were disagreements about means rather than ends. The ultimate aim was the same — forever wars to defend global liberalism and nation-building.
It is the Florida neoconservatives that have been the most prominent converts to national populism. Congressman Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio, the latter appointed Secretary of State by Trump, have undergone the most dramatic conversions from the worship of American power abroad to personal loyalty to Trump. John Bolton, a Bush-era neocon who briefly served as national security adviser during Trump’s first time, has since been the target of Trumpian lawfare, currently facing federal charges for having allegedly mishandled classified materials.
Even stranger, however, than the Floridian converts are the British neoconservatives joining the populist bandwagon. Douglas Murray, author of the 2005 book Neoconservatism: why we need it, was spotted slinking around the celebrations at Mar-a-Lago that followed Trump’s electoral victory last year. More recently, Alan Mendoza, leader of the London-based Henry Jackson Society — named for one of the original neoconservative cold warriors, the American Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson — was appointed chief adviser on global affairs to Nigel Farage’s Reform party in November.
The neocons have form when it comes to failing upwards. Their ideological origins famously lie in Trotskyism, named for the Ukrainian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky who notoriously lost to Joseph Stalin in the battle to decide who would lead the early Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” triumphed over Trotsky’s internationalist vision, which nonetheless enamoured a coterie of New York intellectuals in the middle of the last century. Defeat did not hold them back. While the neocons’ forebears abandoned communism in the aftermath of the Second World War, they retained and transmitted some of the ideological moulds formed in the heat of internecine Bolshevik feuding of the 1920s — notably the hostility to the national interest. Although Trotsky’s vision was rooted in the prospect of a chain of coordinated proletarian revolts more than spreading communism by invasion, his wayward ideological offspring were happy to swap in the armed might of the US state for the revolutionary working class. Unsurprisingly however, the effort to spread liberal democracy by force has been no less successful than the effort to spread global communism.
For all the litany of failure, there is some logic to Floridian neoconservatives joining Trump. The US is still the most powerful country in the world, even if its margin of supremacy is significantly eroded since the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, the peak of neoconservative influence in foreign affairs. With Trump’s sabre-rattling against Venezuela, Rubio may yet get the opportunity to practice neoconservatism in the Americas. Neoconservatism in one hemisphere may not be quite as alluring as global neoconservatism, but neocons have rarely seen a war they did not want to send others to fight in, especially if it involves regime-change.
The effort to graft British neoconservatism to populism is significantly stranger than Floridian conservatives seeking regime change in Caracas. While Farage has had to distance himself from the pro-Russian leanings of his Reform base following the conviction of Reform leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, for accepting Russian bribes, Britain is not especially alluring from the neoconservative viewpoint — unlike the American war machine, Britain’s enfeebled military can hardly swap in for the might of the revolutionary proletariat to spread freedom.
For all its drawbacks, at least Britain’s geopolitical weakness means there is no chance of British power being embroiled in more foolish wars. This offers at least one check on neoconservative globalism. Second, and more importantly, Britain voted for Brexit — and neocons are deeply hostile to national sovereignty, seeing it as an offence to liberal globalism, only fit to be pulverised by sanctions and bombing campaigns. Third, and most decisively, Trump is breaking up the Western alliance. The most recent leaks coming from the White House even suggest that Trump aims to set up a new global power directorate dubbed the C5 (“Core 5”) encompassing the US, China, India, Russia and Japan — a vision for global leadership in which the larger Western world no longer figures. The supposed “Free World” that was the centrepiece of neocon crusading for decades no longer exists. Neoconservatives remain trapped in the twentieth century, fixated on transnational ideological crusades and vast strategic alliances in which the national interest is suppressed and forgotten. A fluid, multipolar world with no permanent friends or allies is alien to this way of thinking.
As with Trotskyism’s hostility to socialism-in-one-country, so too neoconservatism could never be satisfied with liberal freedom-in-one-country. Neoconservatism is especially ill-suited to a middling power such as Britain whose voters support national sovereignty and that does not have the power to spread freedom by force, especially when it cannot rely on the US. Despite the fact that the neoconservative-populist alliance will find itself largely impotent without US power, neoconservative efforts to latch themselves onto populism tells us that the Anglo-populists themselves have few independent ideas of their own, reliant as they are on neocons for any ideological charge. Until that new foreign policy vision emerges, the countries of the former West like Britain, will remain trapped in the politics of the last century.
Another day and another warning to the UK and to Europe that the Russians are coming to get us and that, as a country and a continent, we should be preparing for war.
At the start of this week, the new head of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, and the head of the UK armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, took to public podiums to sound twin alarms about the threat, as they see it, presented by Russia, and the need for the country to be prepared – including being prepared to lose lives. Last week, a similar warning came from NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, addressing a meeting in Berlin.
Here’s a flavour of what they had to say. Metreweli made no apology for focussing on Russia, because, as she went on: ‘We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO.’ She accused Russia of ‘testing us in the grey zone’, listing cyberattacks, drones buzzing near airports and bases, ‘state-sponsored’ arson and sabotage, as well as information warfare, all of which added up to Russia ‘exporting chaos’.
The chief of the defence staff said that the threat was more dangerous than he had ever known it, and called for a ‘whole-of-nation response’. Directly countering the view of his predecessor from a year before that ‘the chance of a significant direct attack or invasion by Russia on the UK’ would be ‘remote’, he said that ‘other than proximity’, the threat in the UK ‘isn’t really any different to the threat in Germany’. He warned that we ‘will all have a part to play… [and] if necessary, to fight’, with more families coming to know ‘what sacrifice for our nation means’.
And so to Rutte, who warned: ‘Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.’ To prevent this, he said, we need to be crystal clear about the threat. ‘We are Russia’s next target. And we are already in harm’s way.’ What is happening in
Ukraine ‘could happen to Allied countries, too’, he said, making it imperative to ‘shift to a wartime mindset’.
Amid all this alarm, we are still not quite at the point where schoolchildren are practising hiding under their desks for fear of a nuclear strike (as many of a certain age may remember from the height of the Cold War). And the British public, for one, seems largely unmoved by this supposedly imminent Russian threat. After all, Russia’s advances in Ukraine have been distinctly limited over the best part of four years. There is a noticeable mismatch between the claims that Russia is too weak to win in Ukraine yet also strong enough to threaten London or Berlin.
Public responses to similar alarms in France and Germany have been – a little – more vocal, though no more cooperative. In France, Knighton’s opposite number, Fabien Mandon, found himself facing a storm of objection when he warned that all of France was at risk if it was not ready ‘to accept losing its children’. In Germany meanwhile, government plans to reintroduce conscription on a voluntary basis have prompted big street protests by young people raised on the evils of militarism and the benefits of peace.
Responses in the UK and Europe have spanned a scale from apathy to opposition (which has been condemned, of course, by those sounding the alarms as reflecting the complacency of the ignorant masses). But one country has certainly been paying attention – and that is Russia. Now it may be that these warnings were directed also at the Russians, as another strand of Western deterrence, although they seemed to be primarily intended for the home audiences.
Whatever the intent, however, the warnings, and calls for a new military readiness on the part of Europeans, are being heard loud and clear in Moscow – which presents a big risk. If, as I would argue, Russia views NATO as a bigger, more powerful enemy poised on its western flank and supporting Ukraine as a proxy, how might it interpret this sort of Western war talk, with all its appeals to citizens to prepare for an armed conflict with Russia within, well, five years or less?
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, gave a clue when he said recently that, ‘We are not going to fight with Europe, I have said this a hundred times already’. He also added that, ‘If Europe suddenly wants to fight and starts, we’ll be ready at a moment’s notice’. What then happened, of course, was that much of the UK and other English-language media headlined only the second part – about Russia’s preparedness for war – relegating the non-intention of fighting with Europe to the small print.
What Putin’s response showed, however, was that the notion of one or more European countries picking a military fight with Russia is in the Kremlin’s sights, and that the various European alarms about Russia’s current actions and intentions are mirrored in Russia. Trepidation is not only on the European side.
It should additionally be noted that, while Putin appears secure in his position, any internal political pressure on Ukraine policy comes not from doves wanting the war to end, but from hawks, such as former prime minister and president Dmitry Medvedev, who heads the Security Council of the Russian Federation.
And there is a risk here that needs to be recognised and taken a lot more seriously than it appears to be at present. If Russia becomes convinced that the Europeans, together or separately, are mobilising their citizens for a war with Russia, then it could conclude that its best prospects – as the weaker party, as it sees itself – lie in pre-emptive action. If it is not careful, NATO and the more vocal of its member states run the risk of provoking the very outcome they profess to want to deter.
As to the reasons for the current spate of anti-Russia alarmism from NATO and European states, there are many to choose from. In the UK, the spies and the top brass want more money from a cash-strapped government that gave them nothing in the latest budget and seems nowhere near likely to reach the Trump-ordained five per cent of GDP by 2035. Across Europe there is widely shared emotional sympathy for Ukraine which professional policymakers have allowed to cloud their judgement of the national interest. There is also an underlying paranoia about Russia left over from the Cold War and rekindled by the invasion of Ukraine. Regardless of motivation, however, this sort of war talk risks being highly inflammatory, and wise political leaders would do well to start reining it back before it is too late.
The UK and Europe face many threats to their security, of which Russia is but one. For the UK alone, you could list the daily border breaches by unauthorised Channel crossings, the penetration of Chinese technology into critical infrastructure, costly mistakes in military procurement, and continuing dependence on complex supply lines for strategic goods. To narrow the focus to Russia carries the risk both of an insecure, nuclear-armed state lashing out, in the mistaken belief that it faces a threat to its survival, and of ignoring a host of other, perhaps even graver, threats that loom on the near horizon.
