US ELECTION 2016
American
neocons declare war on Trump
Prominent
Republican hawks are debating whether to hold their noses and vote
for Clinton instead.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
3/3/16, 7:44 AM CET
Donald Trump calls
the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he
would be a “neutral” arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians.
When it comes to America’s global role he asks, “Why are we
always at the forefront of everything?”
Even more than his
economic positions, Trump’s foreign policy views challenge GOP
orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts of the party
establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump’s
runaway train, one group is bitterly digging in against him: the
hawkish foreign policy elites known as neoconservatives.
In interviews with
POLITICO, leading neocons — people who promoted the Iraq War,
detest Putin and consider Israel’s security non-negotiable — said
Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to
support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they
could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.
“Hillary is the
lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former top
State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic
theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump’s
election would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign
policy,” Cohen said, adding that “he has already damaged it
considerably.”
Cohen, an Iraq war
backer who is often called a neoconservative but said he does not
identify himself that way, said he would “strongly prefer a third
party candidate” to Trump, but added: “Probably if absolutely no
alternative: Hillary.”
In a March 1
interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on
Foreign Relations who backed the Iraq War and often advocates a
hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton
over Trump. “I’m literally losing sleep over Donald Trump,” he
said. “She would be vastly preferable to Trump.”
Cohen helped to
organize an open letter signed by several dozen GOP foreign policy
insiders — many of whom are not considered neocons — that was
published Wednesday night by the military blog War on the Rocks.
“[W]e are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its
head,” the letter declared. It cited everything from Trump’s
“admiration for foreign dictators” to his “inexcusable”
support for “the expansive use of torture.”
The letter was
signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including
Boot; Peter Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George
W. Bush’s White House; Robert Zoellick, a former deputy to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush
Pentagon official; and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department official.
Several other
neocons said they find themselves in an impossible position,
constitutionally incapable of voting for Clinton but repelled by a
Republican whose foreign policy views they consider somewhere between
nonexistent and dangerous — and disconnected from their views about
American power and values abroad.
“1972 was the
first time I was old enough to vote for president, and I did not
vote. Couldn’t vote for McGovern for foreign policy reasons, nor
for Nixon because of Watergate,” said Elliott Abrams, a former
national security council aide to George W. Bush who specializes in
democracy and the Middle East. “I may be in the same boat in 2016,
unable to vote for Trump or Clinton.”
Weekly Standard
Editor Bill Kristol, something of a dean of Washington
neoconservatives, said he would seek out a third option before
choosing between Trump and Clinton.
“If it’s
Trump-Clinton, I’d work with others to recruit a strong
conservative third party candidate, and do my best to help him win
(which by the way would be more possible than people think,
especially when people — finally — realize Trump shouldn’t be
president and Hillary is indicted),” Kristol wrote in an email.
Kristol and Abrams
have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of
several neoconservatives, who admire his call for “moral clarity”
in foreign policy and strong emphasis on human rights and democracy.
Alarm brewing for
months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last
week, when Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American
global might, wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination
would force him to cross party lines.
“The only choice
will be to vote for Hillary Clinton,” Kagan warned. “The party
cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”
In an interview,
Kagan said his opposition to Trump “has nothing to do with foreign
policy.”
Trump
“What it has to do
with is the health and safety of American democracy,” he added. “I
don’t even know what Donald Trump’s foreign policy is. I don’t
think anybody does.”Though Trump’s foreign policy views don’t
fit any familiar category, he has outlined several clear positions at
odds with neoconservative doctrine.While neoconservatives believe
America plays a unique role in defending global order and Western
values, Trump has long complained about America’s military presence
abroad and the protection the U.S. provides to prosperous allies like
Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea.
Neocons depict
Russian President Vladimir Putin as a sinister tyrant challenging
America; Trump calls Putin a strong leader with whom he’d “get
along very well” and proposes a more cooperative relationship with
Moscow.
Neocons believe the
U.S. must forcefully defend Israel. But while Trump insists his
presidency would be “the best thing that could ever happen to
Israel,” he has alarmed pro-Israel Republicans with his pledge to
be a “neutral” arbiter in talks between Israel and the
Palestinians.
Trump has shown
little interest in the neoconservative cause of an interventionist
foreign policy guided by principles like democracy and human rights.
And he says the neocon project of invading Iraq may have been “the
worst decision” in presidential history.
Some conservative
foreign policy insiders opposed to Trump stop short of saying they
would vote for Clinton, despite elements of her foreign policy
record, such as her 2002 Senate vote to authorize force against Iraq,
that they find appealing.
“I could never
vote for Clinton under any circumstances,” said Abrams.
“I would ask Bob
[Kagan] what job he thinks Sidney Blumenthal will have at the NSC
before pulling the lever for Clinton,” he added — a reference to
the longtime Clinton adviser and bete noir of the right.
Danielle Pletka, a
defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute said she, too,
would seek some alternative to Trump and Clinton.
“[W]hile I will
never vote for a Democrat in wolf’s clothing like Trump, I will
also never vote for a candidate as dishonest, as rapacious, as
Hillary Clinton,” she wrote in an email. “My vote is a precious
thing, and while I will certainly go to the polls, if those are my
choices, I will write someone in. And no, it won’t be Bloomberg.
:)”The word “neoconservative” is subject to interpretation, and
some conservatives consider it pejorative. Originally used to
describe Democrats who adopted hard-line anti-Communist views during
the Cold War, the word’s colloquial meaning roughly amounts to
“hawkish GOP foreign policy intellectual.”Neocons have shown
little enthusiasm for Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has singled them
out for scorn. Speaking to Iowa voters in December, Cruz bashed what
he called the “crazy neocon invade-every-country-on-earth and send
our kids to die in the Middle East” element of his party.
Cruz has also
attacked Rubio in debates for supporting military action to topple
Middle Eastern dictators in Libya and Syria, and has said the world
was better off with former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in power.
But the neocons
reserve special scorn for Trump.
“A Trump
presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great
power,” Boot writes in the March 7 issue of the Weekly Standard,
along with Council on Foreign Relations economist Benn Steill.
Steill and Boot —
who also has advised Rubio — call Trump “singularly ill-equipped
to manage the resulting turmoil” from his policies. They recall the
September radio interview in which Trump confused the Kurds with
Iran’s elite military Quds force and admitted he was unfamiliar
with the leaders of major Islamist terror groups.
Cohen also added
that he doesn’t oppose Trump solely on foreign policy grounds,
calling the Manhattan mogul “the most dangerous demagogue in
American politics in my lifetime.”
Several other
prominent neoconservatives, including former Bush Pentagon official
Paul Wolfowitz and Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick
Cheney, did not respond to requests for comment.
Authors:
Michael Crowley
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