Beware of War Hawks in “America First” Clothing

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Connor O'Keeffe
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For the past eight years, the two major political parties have been gripped by a messy and ongoing realignment. It began with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which was a major repudiation of the neoconservative-establishment coalition that had dominated the Republican Party since the presidency of George W. Bush.

Trump’s condemnation of the war in Iraq—which he correctly said was sold on lies—and his skepticism of continuing to fund radical Islamists in a misguided attempt to overthrow the government in Syria drove some of the staunchest Bush-era neoconservatives to leave the Republican Party and do everything they could to keep Trump out of power. It didn’t work.

Trump’s four years in office only accelerated the realignment. By the time the 2020 election rolled around, the political establishment had awakened and thrown its entire weight behind Joe Biden. Of course, Donald Trump stuck around after leaving office and is now, for the third time, the Republican nominee for President.

This election cycle has seen the same establishment support for Trump’s opponents that we’ve seen previously, along with “defections” from former high-level Republicans like W. Bush’s own Vice President Dick Cheney. Whether we’re seeing a permanent change in the Republican Party or a temporary coalition against one candidate will rest on what happens on and after election day next month. But it’s clear that, at least for the time being, the neoconservative domination of the American Right has dissipated.

Given how damaging the neoconservatives were to the well-being and security of the American people, this is a very positive development. But critics of Washington’s hyper-aggressive foreign policy need to understand that the flight of many of the worst war hawks from the Republican Party does not mean the GOP has returned to its non-interventionist roots. In fact, as many interventionists have fled, others have remained. And those interventionist elements are working hard to bring back the same old neoconservative foreign policy under the guise of a new “America First” doctrine.

Over the summer, former national security advisor Robert O’Brien penned a lengthy feature in Foreign Affairs that aimed to do just that. O’Brien was a representative to the UN during the George W. Bush presidency, and he worked at the State Department under both Bush and Barack Obama before leaving to work as an advisor on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. He’s an establishment creature if there ever was one. Still, he was appointed as Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2019 and is now seen as a contender for a cabinet position if Trump wins again.

O’Brien presents his article as “making the case for Trump’s foreign policy.” But despite being dressed up in some new language, the agenda he presents is largely the same old establishment interventionism.

In O’Brien’s view, Iran, China, and Russia are the three great enemies that can only be dealt with through a more aggressive stance from Washington. American taxpayers need to be forced to pay more for sharp increases in military hardware, especially for the Navy, to put pressure on Iran and China. Heavy sanctions and crackdowns on trade are prescribed to isolate and denigrate the regimes in Tehran and Beijing. O’Brien also calls for the US to more aggressively support foreign dissident movements that threaten these rival governments.

Even the war in Ukraine, on which Trump has been relatively good, is framed as having only happened because the US was not intervening enough in Eastern Europe in recent years. O’Brien does quickly mention that Trump wants a negotiated end to the war, but quickly moves on to celebrate all the lethal aid that’ll be sent to Ukraine and all the American military units that will be moved closer to Russia.

And O’Brien isn’t alone. Many right-wing commentators and influencers have tried to capitalize on all the populist energy driving the Trump movement to bolster their careers while sneaking in a standard establishment foreign policy. That could be seen at the so-called National Conservatism conference back in July, where a number of these figures got together and framed Iran and China as the chief threats facing the American public.

For decades, the American people have been forced to pay an enormous amount of money and to divert a tremendous amount of resources to counter a superpower that collapsed because communism cannot work, build a country from the top down in Afghanistan, overthrow the government of Iraq, and to try to topple several other countries to correct for the destabilizing effects of overthrowing that government in Iraq, all while militarizing the countries around Iran, Russia, and China in a vain attempt to get those governments to calm down.

These ventures have made the political establishment very wealthy, but all at the expense of the economic well-being and general safety of the rest of us. In recent years, many Americans on the right have finally begun to wake up to all this. The same old establishment lies cannot be allowed to lull them back to sleep.