Though few in number, the
neoconservatives came to wield enormous influence on American foreign policy through the vigor of their ideas and their unique positioning in public discourse.
Neoconservatives have never been especially popular on the right, to say nothing of the left.
the
neoconservative wing of the Washington political class, indicates a flawed concept of both democratic change and a certain weakness in the movement, in this case, the anti-Assad movement.
The old
neoconservative wisdom arguing for an unavoidable link between Syria, Iran and their allies in the region is now being exploited to the maximum.
Long before 9/11, in fact,
neoconservative norm entrepreneurs set the stage by pushing for an open assertion of unilateral hegemony over the suffocating facade of multilateralism.
As Paul notes, "many
neoconservatives migrated to the Republican Party from the Democratic Left in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Neoconservative Catholics do not endorse all of the dimensions of freedom that libertarians endorse.
By my count, 9 of the 48 pieces in The
Neoconservative Persuasion are explicitly devoted to discussing why Kristol ended up a
neoconservative, and what that "persuasion" means to him.
The authors examined the movement's leaders today; the movement's publicly stated guiding ideas; the lineage of the ideas passed down from the movement's ex-Marxist founders; the actual, but usually unstated, principles of the underlying
neoconservative worldview; and, finally, the consequences of the guiding ideas and worldview in political policies that affect American lives.
In the week that I completed this review, Daniel Bell died at the age of 9 I, meriting international obituaries; Irving Kristol's book The
Neoconservative Persuasion was published and widely reviewed; and the New York Times magazine ran a short piece about Martin Peretz, a complicated son of Jewish neoconservatism in his own right.
Contemporary
neoconservative ideas on foreign policy continue to evince a cross-regional consistency; Israel is hardly an exceptional instance of
neoconservative support for democracy and a firm military posture against authoritarian regimes.
Sniegoski systematically explains the
neoconservative push for regime change that had been voiced and promoted since the early 1980s, throughout the Iraq-Iran War.
