Tag: neocons

The Rubio Doctrine: Neocons Are Back!

According to several recent news reports, the two major Trump foreign policy shifts last week are the handiwork of Marco Rubio, the President’s Secretary of State and (acting) National Security Advisor. As with all neocon plans, they will be big on promises and small on delivery.

First up, according to Bloomberg it was Rubio who finally convinced President Trump to take “ownership” of the US proxy war on Russia, and for the first time place sanctions on Russia. Up to this point President Trump chose to portray himself as a mediator between Ukraine and Russia. But with this move against Russia’s oil sector he can no longer credibly claim that this is “Joe Biden’s war.”

The Trump move followed a confusing few weeks since the Trump/Putin Alaska summit in August. After that meeting Trump dropped the neocon position that a ceasefire in the Russia/Ukraine war must occur before any peace negotiations. It was a sign that Trump was looking more realistically at the war. He also said he did not think Ukraine would win, which is pretty obvious.

A surprise call to Putin the day before Ukrainian president Zelensky was to arrive in town just over a week ago reinforced that position and Zelensky left Washington empty-handed. He was seeking Tomahawk missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory.

Then out of the blue President Trump last week announced through his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the US would be sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies until Russia declares a ceasefire in the war before negotiations. That won’t happen, but what it does mean is that Rubio and the neocons have successfully gotten Trump to step on the escalation escalator. That is what they always do. It will be much harder to back down now.

At the same time the US Administration was jumping deeper into the Russia/Ukraine war, a long-time neocon dream was suddenly back in play. Although in Trump’s first term a “regime change” operation was attempted against Venezuela, it failed spectacularly. But the neocons have long dreamed of overthrowing the Venezuelan government – they almost got their way back in 2002 – and suddenly after several weeks of extrajudicial murder on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war, President Trump announced that land strikes on Venezuela would begin soon.

He did mention that he might brief Congress on his plans for war on Venezuela, not that Congress can be bothered to care much one way or the other.

The neocon old guard that still dominates Washington foreign policy is taking a victory lap. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was on the Sunday shows beaming over the conversion of “no regime-change wars” President Trump to “regime change wars” President Trump.

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The Neocons Have Finally Found a Way Into MAGA Hearts

“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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Discredited Neocon Talking Points From The Iraq War Are Back, Lazily Re-Purposed For Iran

Remember all the infamous one-liners from the Global War on Terror? In the years after 9/11, when the neocon establishment in Washington was pushing ahead with its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were everywhere. 

It’s a slam dunk case! We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’ll be greeted as liberators. Islam is a religion of peace. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.

Those last two are direct quotes from President George W. Bush, the man most responsible — whether through extreme naiveté or extreme duplicity — for propagating these ridiculous slogans and using them to justify decades-long wars that ended in ignominy for the United States. You’d think that after Iraq and Afghanistan this kind of rhetoric would be totally discredited. But you’d be wrong.

Over the past few days, almost since the moment Israel began bombing Iran, we’ve seen the reappearance of almost all the old GWOT rhetoric. Then as now, the purpose is to justify a U.S. military adventure abroad and gaslight the American people into supporting regime change in Iran.

For those of us who were in high school and college during and immediately after 9/11, who saw the propaganda play out in real time, it’s an amazing thing to witness what’s happening now.

In particular, the point about needing to stop Iran before it gets a nuclear weapon is almost word-for-word how Iraq hawks argued for a preventative war against Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraq’s WMDs had to be destroyed, we were told, before they could be used in a terror attack against the U.S. that would dwarf 9/11. 

For those keeping track, we have been hearing about Iran’s impending nuclear weapon for at least 20 years. Tehran, we’re told, is always just months or weeks away from having deployable nukes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was getting “extremely close” to a nuclear weapon — in 1996.

Similarly, the point about how we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here — a ubiquitous line in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — is exactly what Netanyahu argued recently on ABC News. “You want these people to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to your cities? Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York. Look, I understand ‘America First.’ I don’t understand ‘America Dead.’” (It’s worth noting, too, that Netanyahu was a loud voice in the build-up to the Iraq War warning against Saddam’s non-existent nuclear program.)

Remember how we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq? That was Vice President Dick Cheney’s line. Turns out the Iranians are also waiting to be liberated and will greet western militaries with open arms! After all, God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom, right? According to Mark Levin, who is old enough to know better, isolationists “stand in the way of Trump and Netanyahu transforming the Middle East” — as if transforming the Middle East is both a feasible and desirable thing for the United States to do.

It’s the same with all these neocon arguments. Remember Ahmed Chalabi? He was the western-friendly Iraqi dissident politician and founder of the Iraqi National Congress, which became a major source of evidence of Iraq’s WMD program and ties to Al Qaeda for the Bush administration. Chalabi himself was at one point floated as a possible post-Saddam leader of Iraq.

Yet nearly all the information Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress provided to U.S. intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the war turned out to be false, including information from an Iraqi defector codenamed named “Curveball,” whose first-hand descriptions of mobile biological weapons factories wound up in intelligence dossiers that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. In the end, Chalabi’s fabrications were exposed (no WMDs were ever found in Iraq), and he was revealed as almost certainly an Iranian agent.

Now we have a new Chalabi: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, who this week released a pro-regime change video. “The Islamic Republic has come to an end and is falling,” he said. “What has begun is irreversible. The future is bright and together we will navigate this sharp turn in history. Now is the time to stand; it is time to take back Iran. May I be with you soon.”

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Pete Hegseth, a ‘Recovering Neocon?’

Politicians frequently “change their minds.” In principle, willingness to change one’s mind is a laudable trait, whether you’re a politician or any other type of person. To absorb new information, and then adjust one’s outlook in accordance with that information, is a prudent habit to cultivate for anyone who wants to engage constructively with the world. However, the propensity of political figures to “change their minds” usually requires an extra layer of critical examination, unless you’re inclined to just credulously accept their self-serving bulls**t.

When a political figure resolutely declares that they have an unflinching ethical or policy conviction, and then go on to abandon that conviction, at minimum this should obligate some explanation for the shift. If the explanation reflects a sincere and transparent reevaluation of certain facts or premises, that’s one thing to consider. If the explanation reflects naked expediency and opportunism, that’s another thing. If no real explanation is provided at all, that’s something else entirely. “Mind-changing,” thus, is not a virtue unto itself — nor is it necessarily a defect. The crucial factor is the accompanying explanation (or lack thereof), and how much soundness one ascribes to it.

For instance, if Bernie Sanders suddenly announced tomorrow that he was no longer in favor of imposing higher taxes on billionaires, that would certainly raise doubts as to the veracity and coherence of his life-long political project. If Thomas Massie declared he was suddenly in favor of the state controlling key economic sectors, that too would make one wonder about the fundamental reliability and consistency of his long-articulated worldview. So, while political figures are certainly free to “change their mind” about things, the rest of us are also free to make judgments about whether those “mind-changes” are credible.

How, then, to evaluate the claimed “mind-change” of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense? In the recent past, Hegseth wasn’t just a casual supporter of the Iraq War — he was a full-blown professional pro-war activist and lobbyist, whose entire career was conjoined with his strident pro-war advocacy. Hegseth ran a group called “Veterans for Freedom,” whose explicit purpose was to pressure Congress to support the Iraq War and galvanize public opinion behind George W. Bush’s foreign policy, including by appearing in the media to make robust pro-war arguments — a role which Hegseth eventually marshaled into a gig on Fox News. As Hegseth fondly recounted in his 2020 book, American Crusade, one of the group’s primary tasks was to tour around the United States exhorting fellow citizens to join their pro-war cause. “We gave speeches aimed at building support for the war,” Hegseth recalled. “I believed in the mission we had in Iraq.”

But nowadays, Hegseth appears to be singing a different tune. In a podcast appearance last month, host Shawn Ryan asked: “Should we have been in Iraq?” To which Hesgeth replied: “I was a huge proponent of it at the time, but in retrospect, absolutely not,” adding, “I’ve been a recovering neocon for six years now.”

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Assad’s Downfall Proves Neocons Have Learned Nothing From Disastrous Middle East Meddling

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fled his country, now under the protection of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In only a few days, a regime that had withstood over a decade of brutal civil war crumbled into dust before the onslaught of a new rebel offensive.

Now, Syria teeters on the brink of tribal mayhem as disparate factions espousing differing strains of radical Islamism begin to squabble over the carcass and jostle for power. ISIS has even reemerged as part of the victorious rebel coalition, prompting U.S. airstrikes over the weekend.

But, on cue, the neocons crawled out of the woodwork to gloat, finding some solace in the bloodshed and mayhem after their recent electoral drubbing. In a little over 24 hours, they proved that they’ve learned nothing from over two decades of disastrous American meddling in the Middle East.

Unrepentant warmonger and Never Trumper Bill Kristol wasted no time waxing poetic on the carnage, posting on X, “The fall of Assad. On some days, one can believe that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.” Perhaps the image of a toppled Assad statue reminded Kristol of when the same thing happened during the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq — back when people actually cared about what he had to say.

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Neocons Try Again in Syria

A day after Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon last week the long dormant war in Syria reignited as jihadist forces seized the city of Aleppo and advanced virtually unhindered in its quest to overthrow the Syrian government until finally meeting resistance from the Syrian Army backed up by Russia. This is the last chance for neocons in the United States to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before Donald Trump, who tried to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, resumes the presidency in 49 days.

On the neocon list of ways to make the world safer for Israel, Iran originally occupied pride of place. “Real men go to Tehran!” was the muscular brag. But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was persuaded to acquiesce in a less ambitious plan – to “do Iraq” and remove the “evil dictator” in Baghdad first.

As the invaders/occupiers got bogged down in Iraq, it seemed more sensible to “do Syria” next. With the help of “friendly services,” the neocons mounted a false-flag chemical attack outside Damascus in late August 2013, blaming it on President Bashar al-Assad, whom U.S. President Barack Obama had earlier said, “had to go.”

Obama had called such a chemical attack a red line but, mirabile dictu, chose to honor the U.S. Constitution by asking Congress first. Worse still for the neocons, during the first days of September, Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by persuading Syria to destroy its chemical weapons under U.N. supervision.

Obama later admitted that virtually all of his advisers had wanted him to order Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria.

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The Insanity of Neocons

Stephen Bryen, who’s now retired from a stellar career at the very highest levels both in the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex and in the Executive and also the Legislative branches of the U.S. Government, and whose predictions about the war in Ukraine war thus far have consistently turned out to be true, is, for whatever reason, nonetheless a neocon (advocate for increasing yet further the U.S. empire) in the case of China; and, so, while he’s realistic about the need for the U.S. Government to withdraw from Ukraine, he is nonetheless a normal neocon in regards to China.

On November 29th, he headlined “China Alarmed As US Marine Prepare HIMARS and ATACMS for Yonaguni”, and argued that it’s a good move by Biden now, that he’ll be placing in Japan U.S. missiles that can hit Taiwan for the purpose of “stopping a Taiwan invasion,” by which stupid phrase he intends to mean that we’ll be stopping “an invasion of Taiwan,” by — you guess whom, which is, of course, according to the neocons’ plan, to be done by — China, as soon as Taiwan will announce that it is NOT a part of China, and for which purpose the U.S. Government has been arming Taiwan so that Taiwan can then (with American weapons and maybe direct Military involvement) resist the invasion by China that will be China’s inevitable response to this U.S.-planned breakaway from China by Taiwan. And THAT will then give the U.S. Government the ‘right’ to invade and conquer China — which is the real objective of all of this scheming and war-planning by Breyen and ogther neocons.

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Warmongering Neocons To Spend $2 Million On Ads For Ukraine War

With Republican support for the proxy war in Ukraine continuing to erode, Bill Kristol and fellow warmongering, neocon colleagues have launched a $2 million campaign to rally GOP voters and legislators to the lost cause — and specifically, to Biden’s request that Congress approve another $20.6 billion in Ukraine war funding.

While top congressional leaders are expected to back Biden’s request, more and more Republican legislators are saying “enough is enough.” 

Kristol routinely spawns new political entities to advance the neocon agenda. In this case, a group called Defending Democracy Together — an anti-Trump 501(c)(3) of which Kristol is president — has itself spun out an entity called Republicans for Ukraine. It’s a textbook example of astroturfing — the term that describes a political drive that fosters the illusion of widespread grassroots support for a particular political position. 

Both organizations are led by Kristol and Sarah Longwell, a Never Trumper who is also the publisher The Bulwark, a neocon website she cofounded in 2018 with Charlie Sykes and — there he is again — Bill Kristol. Defending Democracy Together’s other projects include “Republicans Against Trump,” “Republicans For Voting Rights,” “Republicans For The Rule Of Law,” as well as a pro-immigration entity and another that promotes alarmism about Russian tweets. 

Kristol and Longwell’s hopeless effort to materially change the Ukraine poll numbers centers on a collection of video testimonials from self-identified Republicans who want the US government to redistribute even more wealth to Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman in the name of fighting Russia — as if American security had anything at all to do with which government controls the Donbas region.  

The ad campaign will be delivered on television, billboards and online. A TV spot will run during the first Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, August 23. 

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Return of a Disgraced Neocon

CNN reports that President Joe Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a position on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which according to the U.S. State Department is responsible for “appraising activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and pays “acute attention” to the U.S. government’s official foreign propaganda arm, the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Usually when you hear someone called a “neocon” it’s not a strictly accurate description from a technical point of view and is frequently used to just mean “warmonger.”

But Abrams is actually a proper Project for a New American Century neoconservative ideologue with deep ties to the old-school neocons of the 1970s, and has helped promote violent U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East for decades.

In addition to serving as the Trump administration’s special representative for both Iran and Venezuela (two of the nations where former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy was at its most murderous), Abrams is probably best known for confessing to his role in the criminal coverup of Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration.

CNN — notoriously reluctant to criticize either U.S. foreign policy or Democratic presidential administrations — was surprisingly critical on this point in its report on Biden’s nomination of Abrams to the position.

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Bush-Era Neocons Should Shut The Fuck Up About Iraq (And Everything Else)

David Frum and Max Boot, two neoconservatives who helped grease the wheels for the invasion of Iraq, have some thoughts they’d like to share with us as we approach the 20th anniversary of that horrific and unforgivable war. Both of these perspectives can be read in widely esteemed mainstream publications, because everyone who was responsible for inflicting that war upon our species has enjoyed mainstream influence and esteem to this very day.

Both men concede in their own ways that the war was a mistake, while simultaneously cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine that has brought humanity closer to nuclear armageddon than it has been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both men mix their Iraq War retrospectives with war apologia, historical revisionism, and outright lies. And both men should shut the fuck up. About everything. Forever.

Frum’s article is posted in The Atlantic, where he is a senior editor, and it is titled “The Iraq War Reconsidered“. Frum is credited with authoring George W Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech, which marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of US military expansionism and “humanitarian interventions” in geostrategically valuable nations after 9/11.

In just the second sentence of his article Frum opens with an absolute scorcher of a lie, saying “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads” were discovered in Iraq to suggest that the weapons of mass destruction narrative had been proven at least somewhat true. As The Intercept’s Jon Schwartz explained back in 2015, the only chemical weapons in Iraq were either (A) munitions sealed in bunkers at an Iraqi weapons complex by UN inspectors in the nineties and left there because they were too dangerous to move, and (B) some old munitions that had been lost and forgotten after the Iran-Iraq War. In neither of these cases is it true that Saddam Hussein was hiding any weapons of mass destruction.

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