“Neocon” may have become a dirty word, but after a few years, their agenda is back in play.
And no doubt many of their players, too.
After being banished to the wilderness for plunging the nation into a 20-year war, the neocons fell flat with the Trump base in Ukraine and lost the thread with MAGA in Israel. Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere are another matter. The neocons have evolved, and regime change is back on the menu.
How? Rather than pushing “democracy” and “freedom” like George W. Bush’s famous second inaugural speech at the height of the Iraq War, neoconservatives have adopted the prevailing MAGA/New Right language of “America First” to inject regime change back into fashion.
If you don’t think so, just listen to what Marco Rubio – once a reliable foot soldier for neoconservative foreign policy on Capitol Hill since his election to the Senate in 2011 – has to say about Nicolas Maduro today. He insists that Maduro is “not the President of Venezuela and his regime is not the legitimate government,” but a “corrupt, criminal and illegitimate (regime)” that undermines “America’s national security interests.”
Meanwhile, he calls Maduro an “enemy of humanity” who “has strangled democracy and grasped at power in Venezuela” and announced a $50 million bounty on his head. Since then, there has been a massive military buildup in the region and talk of bringing the lead narco terrorist to justice.
This hasn’t been lost on observers, even in conventional Right circles. “You thought I was joking when I said Trump was the greatest neoconservative president we’ve had in ages,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty exclaimed in a recent column.
Supporters of Trump say the president is still allergic to “regime change wars” and that the administration is only interested in short, sharp actions against drug cartels and Maduro. Yet Trump hasn’t fully denied that aspiration either. In fact, he teases a little about it every day. The President has even confirmed that he gave the CIA – who know a thing or two about assassinations and toppling governments – the authority to conduct covert operations in and around Venezuela.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
So what is different about today? Trump’s populist base elected him because he espoused a nationalism that promised a foreign policy focused on American interests and our own backyard: cracking down on illegal immigration and drugs being top priorities. Going after cartels fits neatly into a “return of the Monroe Doctrine” and “pivot back to the Western Hemisphere.”
“Both inside and out of the administration there are many MAGA-aligned thinkers who want a more regionalized strategy in place of a globalist or imperial American foreign policy. They tend to be for less engagement with the Middle East and Europe and more attention to the Western Hemisphere,” noted Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy.
“Where that outlook intersects with neoconservatism is that the neocons have, of course, long wanted regime change and the promotion of liberal democracy in Latin America. Since there’s a fight on to define what the Monroe Doctrine means in the 21st century, the neocons have an advantage in that they already have a plan for Latin America and for Venezuela in particular.”
McCarthy points to neoconservative Elliott Abrams, who has probably set the record for Washington comebacks since his conviction in the Iran-Contra Affair. Abrams was in the thick of Reagan’s destabilizing attempts to overthrow communists in Latin America in the 80s. He has shown up in both Republican and Democratic administrations, always promoting regime change as a way to advance American interests in the region. He now runs the neoconservative Vandenberg Coalition and drove Trump’s failed policy to overturn Maduro during his first administration (Rubio was in on that too). Abrams is not on the inside today, but has been all over mainstream media for his quick takes on recent anti-narco military operations.
“There was less emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine in the first term, but now the neocons interested in Latin America are adapting their ideas for a Monroe Doctrine framework, and since there isn’t a fully articulated alternative on the non-neocon MAGA right, the neocons are in a position to influence the agenda,” charged McCarthy.
One may wonder who “they” are when the most visible neocons of the early 21st Century are now Never Trumpers who seemingly spend most of their time tweeting about “No Kings” and the total collapse of American democracy. Bill Kristol, David Frum, Elliot Cohen, Jen Rubin – they are part of a domestic commentariat who, even if they supported what Trump was doing in the Caribbean, wouldn’t say so publicly (except for maybe on Gaza).
The folks at the reliable neoconservative Hudson Institute, however, are railing against the realists (they call “isolationists”) in Trumpworld on Ukraine and Israel, and are now dipping their toe into the Americas. They hosted regime change advocates in a recent forum, where CSIS’s Eric Farnsworth trotted out the new language in support of regime change:
“I think in the biggest sense, to have Venezuela free and prosperous and return to democracy that is absolutely in the U.S. interest, to say nothing of, if I can say, the interests of Colombia and Brazil and Peru and Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean countries and the countries, frankly, in Europe where, like Spain, where Venezuela has intervened in elections and things like that.”
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