Neocons and
Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill
Hillary Clinton wants the American voters to be
very afraid of Donald Trump, but there is reason to
fear as well what a neoconservative/neoliberal
Clinton presidency would mean for the world, writes
Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
May 13, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
-
For centuries
hereditary monarchy was the dominant way to select
national leaders, evolving into an intricate system
that sustained itself through power and propaganda
even as its ideological roots shriveled amid the Age
of Reason. Yet, as monarchy became a dead idea, it
still killed millions in its death throes.
Today, the
dangerous “dead ideas” are neoconservatism and its
close ally, neoliberalism. These are concepts that
have organized American foreign policy and
economics, respectively, over the past several
decades – and they have failed miserably, at least
from the perspective of average Americans and people
of the nations on the receiving end of these
ideologies.
Neither
approach has benefited mankind; both have led to
untold death and destruction; yet the twin “neos”
have built such a powerful propaganda and political
apparatus, especially in Official Washington, that
they will surely continue to wreak havoc for years
to come. They are zombie ideas and they kill.
Yet, the
Democratic Party is poised to nominate an adherent
to both “neos” in the person of Hillary Clinton.
Rather than move forward from President Barack
Obama’s unease with what he calls the Washington
“playbook,” the Democrats are retreating into its
perceived safety.
After all,
the Washington Establishment remains enthralled to
both “neos,” favoring the “regime change”
interventionism of neoconservatism and the “free
trade” globalism of neoliberalism. So, Clinton has
emerged as the clear favorite of the elites, at
least since the field of alternatives has narrowed
to populist billionaire Donald Trump and democratic
socialist Bernie Sanders.
Democratic
Party insiders appear to be counting on the
mainstream news media and prominent opinion-leaders
to marginalize Trump, the presumptive Republican
nominee, and to finish off Sanders, who faces long
odds against Clinton’s delegate lead for the
Democratic nomination, especially among the party
regulars known as “super-delegates.”
But the
Democratic hierarchy is placing this bet on Clinton
in a year when much of the American electorate has
risen up against the twin “neos,” exhausted by the
perpetual wars demanded by the neoconservatives and
impoverished by the export of decent-paying
manufacturing jobs driven by the neoliberals.
Though much
of the popular resistance to the “neos” remains
poorly defined in the minds of rebellious voters,
the common denominator of the contrasting appeals of
Trump and Sanders is that millions of Americans are
rejecting the “neos” and repudiating the
establishment institutions that insist on sustaining
these ideologies.
The
Pressing Question
Thus, the
pressing question for Campaign 2016 is whether
America will escape from the zombies of the twin
“neos” or spend the next four years
surrounded by these undead ideas as the world
lurches closer to an existential crisis.
The main
thing that the zombie “neos” have going for them is
that the vast majority of Very Important People in
Official Washington have embraced these concepts and
have achieved money and fame as a result. These VIPs
are no more likely to renounce their fat salaries
and overblown influence than the favored courtiers
of a King or Queen would side with the unwashed
rabble.
The “neo”
adherents are also very skilled at framing issues to
their benefit, made easier by the fact that they
face almost no opposition or resistance from the
mainstream media or the major think tanks.
The
neoconservatives have become Washington’s foreign
policy establishment, driving the old-time
“realists” who favored more judicious use of
American power to the sidelines.
Meanwhile,
the neoliberals dominate economic policy debates,
treating the “markets” as some new-age god and
“privatization” of public assets as scripture. They
have pushed aside the old New Dealers who called for
a robust government role to protect the people from
the excesses of capitalism and to build public
infrastructure to benefit the nation as a whole.
The absence
of any strong resistance to the now dominant “neo”
ideologies is why we saw the catastrophic “group
think” over Iraq’s WMD in 2003 and why for many
years no one of great significance dared question
the benefits of “free trade.”
After all,
both strategies benefited the elites.
Neoconservative warmongering diverted trillions of
dollars into the Military-Industrial Complex and
neoliberal job outsourcing has made billions of
dollars for individual corporate executives and
stock investors on Wall Street.
Those
interests have, in turn, kicked back a share of the
proceeds to fund Washington think tanks, to finance
news outlets, and to lavish campaign donations and
speaking fees on friendly politicians. So, for the
insiders, this game has been a case of win-win.
The
Losers
Not so much
for the “losers,” those average citizens who have
seen the Great American Middle Class hollowed out
over the past few decades, watched America’s public
infrastructure decay, and worried about their sons
and daughters being sent off to fight unnecessary,
perpetual and futile wars.
But
inundated with clever propaganda – and scrambling to
make ends meet – most Americans see the reality as
if through a glass darkly. Many of them, as Barack
Obama indelicately said during the 2008 campaign,
“cling to guns or religion.” They have little else –
and many are killing themselves with opiates that
dull their pain or with those guns that they see as
their last link to “freedom.”
What is
clear, however, is that large numbers don’t trust –
and don’t want – Hillary Clinton, who had a net
24-point unfavorable rating in
one recent poll. It turns out that
another indelicate Obama comment from Campaign 2008
may not have been true, when he vouched that “you’re
likable enough, Hillary.” For many Americans, that’s
not the case (although Trump trumped Clinton with a
41-point net negative).
If the
Democrats do nominate Hillary Clinton, they will be
hoping that the neocon/neolib establishment can so
demonize Donald Trump that a plurality of Americans
will vote for the former Secretary of State out of
abject fear over what crazy things the narcissistic
billionaire might do in the White House.
Trump’s
policy prescriptions have been all over the place –
and it is hard to know what reflects his actual
thinking (or his genuine ignorance) as opposed to
what constitutes his skillful showmanship that made
him the “survivor” in the real-life reality TV
competition for the Republican nomination.
Does Trump
really believe that global warming is a hoax or is
he just pandering to the know-nothing element of the
Republican Party? Does he actually consider Obama’s
Iran nuclear deal to be a disaster or is he just
playing to the hate-Obama crowd on the Right?
Opposing the ‘Neos’
But Trump
is not a fan of the “neos.” He forthrightly takes on
the neocons over the Iraq War and excoriates
ex-Secretary of State Clinton for her key role in
another “regime change” disaster in Libya. Further,
Trump calls for cooperation with Russia and China
rather than the neocon-preferred escalation of
tensions.
In his
April 27 foreign policy speech, Trump called for “a
new foreign policy direction for our country – one
that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with
strategy, and chaos with peace. …It’s time to invite
new voices and new visions into the fold. …
“My foreign
policy will always put the interests of the American
people, and American security, above all else. That
will be the foundation of every decision that I will
make. America First will be the major and overriding
theme of my administration.”
Such
comments – suggesting that “new voices” are needed
and that “ideology” should be cast aside – were
fighting words for the neocons, since it is their
voices that have drowned out all others and their
ideology that has dominated U.S. foreign policy in
recent years.
To make
matters worse, Trump outlined an “America First”
strategy in contrast to neocon demands that the U.S.
military be dispatched abroad to advance the
interests of Israel and other “allies.” Trump is not
interested in staging “regime changes” to eliminate
leaders who are deemed troublesome to Israel.
The real
estate tycoon also has made criticism of “free
trade” deals a centerpiece of his campaign, arguing
that those agreements have sold out American workers
by forcing them to compete with foreign workers
receiving a fraction of the pay.
Sen.
Sanders has struck similar themes in his insurgent
Democratic campaign, criticizing Hillary Clinton’s
longtime support for “free trade” and her enthusiasm
for “regime change” wars, such as those in Iraq and
Libya.
Examining
her long record in public life, there can be little
doubt that Clinton is a neocon on foreign policy and
a neolib on economic strategies. She stands firmly
with the consensus of Official Washington’s
establishment, which is why she has enjoyed its warm
embrace.
She has
followed Wall Street’s beloved neoliberal attitude
toward “free trade,” which has been very good for
multinational corporations as they shipped millions
of U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries.
(She has only cooled her ardor for trade deals to
stanch the flow of Democratic voters to Bernie
Sanders.)
Wars and More Wars
On foreign
policy, Clinton has consistently supported
neoconservative wars, although she might shy from
the neocon label per se, preferring its less noxious
synonym “liberal interventionist.”
But as
arch-neocon Robert Kagan, who has recast himself as
a “liberal interventionist,” told The New York Times
in 2014, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign
policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she
will pursue it’s something that might have been
called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not
going to call it that; they are going to call it
something else.”
Summing up
the feeling of thinkers like Kagan, the Times
reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which
many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”
In February
2016, distraught over the rise of Trump, Kagan,
whose Project for the New American Century wrote the
blueprint for George W. Bush’s Iraq War, openly
threw his support to Clinton, announcing his
decision in a Washington Post
op-ed.
And Kagan
is not mistaken when he views Hillary Clinton as a
fellow-traveler. She has often marched in lock step
with the neocons as they have implemented their
aggressive “regime change” schemes against
governments and political movements that don’t toe
Washington’s line or that deviate from Israel’s
goals in the Middle East.
She has
backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine
(2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya
(2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to
the present) all with various degrees of disastrous
results. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s
“Yes,
Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon” and “Would
a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?”]
Seeking ‘Coercion’
A glimpse
of what a Clinton-45 presidency might do could be
seen in a recent Politico
commentary by Dennis Ross, a former
special adviser to Secretary of State Clinton now
working at the staunchly pro-Israel Washington
Institute for Near East Policy.
In the
article, Ross painted a surreal world in which the
problems of the Middle East have been caused by
President Obama’s hesitancy to engage militarily
more aggressively across the region, not by the
neocon-driven decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and
the similar schemes to overthrow secular governments
in Libya and Syria in 2011, leaving those two
countries in ruin.
Channeling
the desires of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, Ross called for the United
States to yoke itself to the regional interests of
Israel, Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) in their rivalry against
Shiite-led Iran.
Ross
wrote: “Obama believes in the use of force only
in circumstances where our security and homeland
might be directly threatened. His mindset
justifies pre-emptive action against terrorists
and doing more to fight the Islamic State. But
it frames U.S. interests and the use of force to
support them in very narrow terms. …
“The
Saudis acted in [invading] Yemen in no small
part because they feared the United States would
impose no limits on Iranian expansion in the
area, and they felt the need to draw their own
lines.”
To
counter Obama’s hesitancy to apply military
force, Ross calls for a reassertion of a
muscular U.S. policy in the Middle East, much
along the lines that the neocon establishment
and Hillary Clinton also favor, including:
–Threatening Iran with “blunt, explicit language
on employing force, not sanctions” if Iran
deviates from the Obama-negotiated agreement to
constrain its nuclear program (the
bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran zombie lives!);
–“Contingency planning with GCC states and
Israel … to generate specific options for
countering Iran’s growing use of Shiite militias
to undermine regimes in the region”;
–A
readiness to arm Sunni tribes in Iraq if Iraq’s
prime minister doesn’t;
–Establish “safe havens with no-fly zones”
inside Syria if Russian President Vladimir Putin
does not force Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
to step down.
Employing the classic tough talk of the neocons,
Ross concludes, “Putin and Middle Eastern
leaders understand the logic of coercion. It is
time for us to reapply it.”
One
might note the many logical inconsistencies of
Ross’s arguments, including his failure to note
that much of Iran’s supposed meddling in the
Middle East has involved aiding the Syrian and
Iraqi governments in their battle against the
Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Or that Russia’s
intervention in Syria also has been to support
the internationally recognized government in its
fight against Sunni extremists and terrorists.
But the
significance of Ross’s prescription to “reapply”
U.S. “coercion” across the region is that he is
outlining what the world can expect from a
Clinton-45 presidency.
Clinton
made many of the same points in her speech
before the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee and in debates with Bernie Sanders. If
she stays on that track as president, there
would be at least a partial U.S. military
invasion of Syria, a very strong likelihood of
war with Iran, and an escalation of tensions
(and possible war) with nuclear-armed Russia.
The
logic of how all that is supposed to improve
matters is lost amid the classic neocon growling
about showing toughness or reapplying
“coercion.”
So, the
Democratic Party seems to be betting that
Hillary Clinton’s flood of ugly TV ads against
Trump can frighten the American people enough to
give the neocons and the neolibs one more lease
on the White House – and four more years to
wreak their zombie havoc on the world.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book,
America’s
Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
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