Why the Neocons Hate Trump
Bill Kristol is downright despondent after his failed search for an alternative to Donald Trump. Max Boot is indignant about his “stupid” party’s willingness to ride a bragging bull into a delicate China policy shop. And the leading light of the first family of military interventionism — Robert Kagan — is actually lining up neoconservatives behind the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
At the same time, the Democrats have become the party of bare-knuckled, full-throated American Exceptionalism. That transformation was announced with a vein-popping zeal by retired general and wannabe motivation screamer John Allen at the Democratic convention in the City of Brotherly Love. During his “speech,” a few plaintive protests of “no more war” were actually drowned-out by Democrats chanting “USA-USA-USA!”
This is the same Democratic Party often criticized by Kagan & Co. as the purveyors of timidity, flaccidity, and moral perfidy. It’s not that Democrats haven’t dropped bombs, dealt arms and overturned regimes. They have. And they’ve even got the Peace Prize-winning Obama-dropper to prove it. But unlike enthusiastically belligerent Republicans, the Dems are supposed to be the party that does it, but doesn’t really like to do it.
But now, they’ve got Hillary Clinton. And she’s weaponized the State Department. She really likes regime change. And her nominating convention not only embraced the military, but it sanctified the very Gold Star families that neocon-style interventionism creates. It certainly created the pain of the Khan family who lost their son in the illegal war in Iraq. But the Dems didn’t mention that sad fact as they grabbed the flag away from the Republicans.
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Truly Neo-confusing.
It kinda feels like reality has slipped off its axis and we’ve landed on a Bizarro World version of America. Democrats are acting like Republicans. Pat Buchanan is championing the GOP’s “Peace Candidate.” And the neocons are fleeing from the party they’ve used like a geopolitical cudgel for the better part of three decades.
At first glance, it all makes sense. Trump captured the GOP nomination in no small part by trashing two of the neocons’ favorite things ever — the Bush family and the Iraq War. He also suggested early on that he’d approach the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as (gasp!) an honest broker. Trump said he really wanted to “make that deal.” Without irony, one-time neocon wonderboy Marco Rubio remarked that it isn’t a “real estate deal” when, in fact, that’s exactly what it is.
But the ever-pliable Trump quickly got religion on Israel. He did an about-face, marched into AIPAC’s annual confab, and staked out a claim on the reflexively pro-Israel side of the issue. But it wasn’t enough to assuage the angst of the GOP’s forever-circling hawks.
Frankly, nothing seems enough to sway the neocons in Donald’s direction. But it’s not for lack of trying on Trump’s part. Really, he’s checked off many of the boxes that make neocons smile.
Trump wants a “yuuge” military … the biggest and baddest ever! So big, that no one in a million years will ever challenge it. That sure sounds a lot like Reagan’s “peace through strength.” Neocons do love, Reagan. And, as if on cue, the Kristol/Kagan-led “Foreign Policy Initiative” just posted a clarion call to spend more bucks to buy bigger bangs for an already gargantuan military. Doesn’t that fit with Donald’s plan to spend defense dollars like a drunken sailor?
Maybe neocons don’t want the military to be so big that no one will ever try anything. Maybe they want a few challenges here and there, just for a little creative destruction to keep the world on its toes. But Trump’s right there with them. He wants to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. And he even said America has “no choice but to bomb Libya” and “take out” the Islamic State.
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