Abstract
When Michelle Obama met Sarah Brown, the wife of the British prime minister, the First Lady gave, as a gift to Sarah’s two sons, a $15 model of Marine One, the presidential helicopter. According to one commentator, better tokens of esteem would have been “Action man models of her husband smiting the evil forces of neoconservatism.”1 The advent of the Obama presidency in January 2009 was widely expected to be a repudiation of the foreign policy of his predecessor. There was widespread anticipation in America and abroad that Bush’s failures, which were conventionally attributed to neoconservative influence, would be put right; the United States would “reset” relationships “crashed” by Bush’s war on terror; multilateralism would replace unilateralism; international law would be taken seriously again; extraordinary rendition would end and Guantanamo Bay would be closed; climate change would be prioritized; and ideology and idealism in foreign policy would be swapped for realism and pragmatism. In sum the deneoconization of foreign policy would restore America’s legitimacy as a force for good in the world.
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Notes
Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).
Max Hastings, Daily Telegraph, February 21, 2009; Elizabeth Kelley, Post-9/11 American Presidential Rhetoric: A Study of Protofascist Discourse (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007);
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 188, 211;
Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42;
Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (London: Routledge, 2007), 195–235.
James Bovard, The Bush Betrayal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004);
Philip Gold, Take Back the Right: How the Neo-Cons and the Religious Right Have Hijacked the Conservative Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004).
See Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire; Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Smith, A Pact with the Devil, 30–31;
Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk VA: IHS Press, 2008).
Krauthammer, Democratic Realism (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2004).
Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (London: Profile Books, 2006), 9–10 and Fukuyama, “After Neoconservatism,” NYT Magazine, February 19, 2006.
David Brooks, “The Neocon Cabal and other fantasies,” in Irwin Stelzer, ed., Neoconservatism (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 42.
See John B Judis, “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995, a critical review of John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) also casts the net widely to include numerous officials over several decades.
Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Fart III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 310.
See Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: an American Disaster (London: Verso, 2007);
Alan Weisman, Frince of Darkness: Richard Perle-The Kingdom, the Power, and the End of Empire in America (New York: Union Square Press, 2007), 170; and Woodward, State of Denial, 309–10.
See Barton Gelman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008).
Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 183.
See Leslie H Gelb, “Why Not the State Department?” in Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, eds., Perspectives on American Foreign Policy: Selected Readings (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983);
Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787–1957, 4th rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 171.
See Timothy J. Lynch, Turf War: The Clinton Administration and Northern Ireland (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2004).
Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin, 2004), 200.
Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, American Between the Wars, 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 171.
This problem is considered by Aggie Hirst, “Intellectuals and US Foreign policy,” in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller, and Mark Ledwidge, eds., New Directions in US Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2009), 106–19.
See, for example, John Bolton, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations (New York: Threshold Editions, 2007);
Douglas Feith, War And Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2008);
and Peter W. Rodman, Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush (New York: Knopf, 2009).
Donald E. Abelson A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy (Montreal: MQUP, 2007), 219.
Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, “The Sources of American Legitimacy,” Foreign Affairs, 83, 6, 2004, 18–32.
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 146.
See, for example, Paul Wolfowitz, “Statesmanship in the New Century,” in Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 307–36, 313.
See Steve A. Yetiv, Explaining Foreign Policy: US Decision-Making and the Persian Gulf War (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 62–77.
See Robert S. Litwak, Regime Change: U.S. Strategy through the Prism of 9/11 (Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2007).
David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003).
Daniel Pipes, “God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?” National Interest, 66, Winter 2001/02, 14–21.
Michael Foley, American Credo: The Place of Ideas in US Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 328.
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© 2010 Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Lynch, T.J. (2010). Did Bush Pursue a Neoconservative Foreign Policy?. In: Morgan, I., Davies, P.J. (eds) Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114333_7
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