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Is American Exceptionalism a Neoconservative Plot?
By Winfield Myers and Brent Tantillo
August 4, 2004

It's open season on neoconservatives, or neo-conservatives if you're either British or affect an English swagger. Books, articles, and movies charging neoconservatives with hijacking America's foreign policy to aid Halliburton or protect Israel abound.

Perhaps the most consequential critiques of the administration's foreign policy originate within a politically convenient alliance of foreign policy realists from the days of Nixon/Ford detente and hard core libertarian-isolationists. These troopers for "multilateralism," "cooperation," and "engagement" claim to embody the Reaganite conservatism that won the Cold War. They're pitted, we're assured, against a radical cabal of conniving intellectuals who used September 11 to capture the imagination of a naïve new president and deflect him onto a path of world domination and national ruin.

Near the top of this heap of aging pundits sit Stephan Halper and Jonathan Clarke of Cambridge University and the Cato Institute, respectively. Their recent book, The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, is a pay-back tome that traces the alleged neocon conspiracy from the (ostensibly) nefarious scholar Leo Strauss to George W. Bush. (Their source on Strauss and his protégés is Lyndon LaRouche's quarterly journal the Executive Intelligence Review, although they cite the wrong issue.) The book has breathed fresh life into the public careers of men grown accustomed to writing for a more rarified scholarly audience. And it's provided them a platform from which to proclaim that their fears are shared by legions of conservative insiders fed up with this administration, its advisors, and the entire neoconservative intellectual movement.

Yet a recent if little-noticed essay by the two raises questions about their enthusiasm for central tenets of the American experience. In "Neoconservatism and the American Future," on Opendemocracy.net, Halper and Clarke claim that neoconservatism has spawned an "axis of confusion" in U.S. foreign policy. More importantly, they reveal themselves as harsh critics of the idea of American exceptionalism - strange indeed for anyone claiming the mantel of Ronald Reagan, who always saw America as a "shining city on a hill" and wore his belief in American exceptionalism on his sleeve.

They claim that "What is happening may be described as a new institutional syndrome in Washington - the 'axis of disorder'. It represents a lethal combination of underperformance in the executive, on Capitol Hill and within the opinion-leading elite."

They betray their contempt for the Founding by the nature of their approval of the thesis advanced in a new book by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, who argues persuasively that the Bush Doctrine of preemption has a long pedigree in the annals of American foreign policy. When it appeared, Gaddis's work was heralded by administration supporters as a refutation of charges that Bush's actions departed radically from historical U.S. policy. But Halper and Clarke employ Gaddis's thesis for opposite ends: Preemption's long history doesn't justify its use today; it merely condemns America as an enterprise that was imperialist from the start. Which is to say, because Gaddis is right, America is wrong: "The implication of two 2004 studies broadly sympathetic to neo-conservatism - "Surprise, Security and the American Experience" by John Lewis Gaddis and "Power, Terror, Peace and War" by Walter Russell Mead - is that the unilateral exercise of American power draws on certain social and cultural themes, centering on an insular and aggressive nativism, that have animated America's interaction with the world from the earliest days of the republic. The implication is that, far from being an aberration, neo-conservatism is part of an established historical tradition."

Their concluding paragraph reiterates this claim: "[A]s comets return, so will the neo-conservatives' themes - especially the preference for unilateral military power as the option of first resort. Neo-conservatism offers a recurrently powerful ideological booster-rocket in support of America's military pre-eminence. If another 'perfect storm' on the 9/11 model recurs, where fear and confusion suspend the political process, the American response is likely to be predominantly military rather than political, diplomatic or economic - irrespective of the party affiliation of the White House incumbent."

This contradictory view evaluates the history of U.S. military action overseas against an isolationist/realist ideal unattained in the past and undesirable in the future. It assumes failure in Iraq and across the globe when evidence supports an inconclusive or contrary evaluation. The authors see a "systemic weakness - one that creates an ever-present danger of a neo-conservative special interest group turning a manageable, controllable challenge (as, in principle, was Iraq) into a major crisis."

Cumulatively, this is an exceptionally strong - if unintentional - affirmation of neoconservatism. Our "new institutional syndrome" turns out to be a commonplace in American history. If its roots are all Halper and Clarke claim, neoconservatism is but a modern manifestation of the pieties and virtues that have made America a beacon of freedom and opportunity around the world.

Thus, the authors' principal disagreement with the response to September 11 is less that it marked a departure from precedent than that it didn't. As for confusion, does that lie in the behavior of the United States over the past 228 years, or in the arguments of Halper and Clarke?

That the article ends on a fatalistic note seems almost perverse given that the cause for this hopelessness is nothing less than the character and behavior of the American republic from the Revolution until today. Introduced as a critique of neoconservatism, their thesis is in fact a condemnation of America's remarkable development into the world's preeminent economic and military power.

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Winfield Myers is Chief Executive Officer of Democracy Project, Inc. (www.democracy-project.com); He may be reached at wmyers@democracy-project.com. Brent Tantillo is a research fellow at Hudson Institute.

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.