Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review.
There is a saying often repeated in circles critical of the foreign policy establishment: “Whoever gets elected, you always get John McCain”. You’re especially likely to hear it when a president turns into a war hawk after explicitly campaigning against regime change, military adventure, and even entangling alliances. And yet, thanks to a well-networked group of bipartisan operatives, the clear desires of the majority of the populace for a more restrained foreign policy are blatantly disregarded after every election cycle.
George W. Bush campaigned against nation-building and then launched regime-change wars. Barack Obama ran on rejecting Bush’s ruinous legacy but involved the U.S. in several conflicts, including a war in Libya that toppled the government. Trump’s first term came about as a rejection of the reflexive bipartisan hawkishness of the establishment, in particular the foreign policy record of Hillary Clinton. While he did not start any new wars in that first term, he ended up doubling down on many that he inherited, engaging in pointless antagonism with both Russia and Iran and showing early on that he was as die-hard an Israel-firster as any establishment figure. Biden concluded the Afghanistan fiasco, to his credit, but afterwards got embroiled in Ukraine and then Gaza, unleashing neo-McCarthyite hysteria against domestic critics.
This brings us to Trump II. After running against dumb wars and defeating the Cheney-family-backed candidate Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump has shown himself to be even more erratic and aggressive than he was in his first term—possibly more than any president since Bush Junior. As such, he has won the praise of many of his former critics, with MAGA now being represented by neoconservative ideologues. They once castigated Trump as a freakish aberration but are now all too happy to sing his praises for his neocon-like militarism and especially for launching a war with Iran.
According to the neoconservative worldview, future conflicts can be averted by first enforcing, through military intervention when needed, a kind of structural homogeneity based around democracy and capitalism. But as the past 25 years have proven, the neoconservative project not only immiserates the nations it targets, but also the very nation that launched this imperial quest. The United States and its allies are all less free, more unstable, and more unhinged after trying to spread freedom, democracy, and stability abroad.
But the current war with Iran has proven an especially disastrous endeavor. A civilizational state with thousands of years of history, Iran is no postcolonial mafia state like so many Arab nations who can be meddled with almost at whim. Its memory is long and its sense of patriotism transcends any one particular government, allowing it to better withstand assault from greater outside powers than the usual target of neoconservative messianism. As an amalgamation of so many eras of different ruling classes, Iran knows geographically-rooted interest is more important than passing fad. It is a knowledge the United States once had, arguably was born knowing, but which it has rejected in pursuit of global hegemony. Under the influence of neoconservatism and other varieties of hawkism, America has lost its ability to think strategically and now acts as one of the primary sources of global instability.
But herein lies the opportunity, as every time the neoconservatives manage to achieve their aims, their popularity and prestige collapse once the results become apparent. New and establishment-bucking political candidates openly run against them, thanks to a strong desire amongst the public to move on from wars that don’t advance the national interest. And the neoconservatives have, potentially, sown the seeds of their own dismantling in the security state they have helped to build. After all, if radical Islamic terrorism and racial supremacist organizations can be treated as investigable and even prosecutable offenses, why shouldn’t neoconservatism?
According to the FBI, international terrorism is defined in part by “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored)” and domestic terrorism is partly defined by “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature”. As a movement that constantly advocates for ideologically motivated violence at the macro-scale level across the planet, neoconservatism would appear to apply to these admittedly vague standards put in place by the present government.
If one counts the wars and sanctions regimes supported and advocated by them, the neoconservative movement and its fellow travelers have a much larger overall body count than any other ideological network in the 21st century. The state failures they have helped to engineer have led to the growth of religious extremism, organized crime, and human trafficking. Many neoconservatives demonstrate an affinity for–if not outright loyalty to– states like Israel and Ukraine that are themselves filled to the brim with violent extremist actors.
Obviously, one should be hesitant to use the very mass surveillance and lawfare techniques so often unjustly used and pioneered by the Bush and Obama administrations. We do not want to further compromise America’s republican institutions and ideal of legal neutrality. At the same time, the lack of actual accountability is the primary reason, along with media complicity, that the neoconservative architects of the war with Iraq never faced real public accountability. Government figures who planned blatant violations of American law like torture got away with it. There are good reasons to believe that the people who are waging a war of aggression in Iran and carrying out the suppression of protest rights at home will once again oversee an attack of civil liberties in support of their monomaniacal desire to remake the world along the lines of an ultimately unachievable philosophical ideal that hearkens back to a time of unchecked American power that no longer even exists. It thus becomes necessary to investigate these influence networks and to turn over the findings to the public, who will then be free to hold their representatives’ feet to the fire in order to determine what should be done about the planners of disastrous policies.
There are a number of arguments for such an approach. First there is the realpolitik argument. The surveillance state shows no willingness to ever diminish or pull back its odious influence. It is, however, mostly using this influence on the pro-neoconservative side of things. If the ‘Deep State’ is not going anywhere, it would be better to capture it for purposes of restraint rather than endless interventionism. Considering generational changes in attitudes around foreign policy, this concept of changing how the national interest is conceived of may be gradual and long-term, but it is well within the realm of possibility. Particularly when the argument can be made that the neoconservative worldview is not just harmful to national interests but actively weakens the country and its ability to judiciously exercise power.
The second argument, which is a more electoral-popular one, is also worth considering. If more candidates running for office could be corralled by policy advocacy organizations to explicitly promise to investigate and even potentially arrest and prosecute the architects of unnecessary wars and foreign influence networks that lobby for them, effectively purging them from rule as a cohesive faction using preexisting terrorism laws, then the intelligence agencies in bed with such movements may become more open to greater oversight of their operations. Perhaps even coming to fear the monster of their own creation and thus being more willing to scale back the panopticon they command. So long as it opens up the ability for lawmakers to push for something like a second Church Committee, it will still produce positive results even if the neoconservatives are not properly removed from power. Indeed, the ideal result might be to use the fear of the invasive state to get those who are usually its champions to see the wisdom in scaling back its immense War on Terror era powers. In this scenario threats to investigate actually become a bargaining chip to be used to reform the elements of an unelected bureaucracy that is so disproportionately in the tank for the most discredited foreign policy posture of the last 30 years.
The Iraq War boosters were allowed to slink away, only to reemerge in new forms later when the public, with its fruitfly-span memory, forgot about them. Gently scolded by the media that so often falls for their interventionist narrative, the neoconservatives always find ways to mutate into new forms as they flit endlessly between their allies throughout the political establishment.
Now, with the quagmire in Iran, which seems to only show the limits of U.S. empire unfolding before us, and where even an unlikely total U.S. victory would still bring no benefits to either side and only further entrench the U.S. in a region of the world it should seek no intervention in, it is time to learn this lesson from the past. It is not enough to merely fire neoconservatives from positions of power. They must be fully and ruthlessly purged from the policymaking apparatus in such a way that they will never return to influence again.
Dr. Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy; an expert in Grand Strategy and Geopolitics; and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. Department of State.
