{"id":16583,"date":"2016-01-17T09:40:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T14:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16583"},"modified":"2016-01-17T09:41:02","modified_gmt":"2016-01-17T14:41:02","slug":"how-neocons-banished-realism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16583","title":{"rendered":"How Neocons Banished Realism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How Neocons Banished Realism<\/a><\/h3>\n

The grip that neocons and liberal interventionists\u00a0have on Official Washington\u2019s opinion circles is now so strong that \u201crealists\u201d who once provided an important counterbalance have been almost banished from foreign policy debates, a dangerous dilemma that James W Carden explores.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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In a widely remarked upon article for the online version of\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/em>\u00a0last week, Harvard\u2019s Stephen Walt asked a very good question. Why, Walt asked, are elite outlets like the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0\u201callergic to realist views, given that realists have been (mostly) right about some very important issues, and the columnists they publish have often been wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n

Walt then went on to do something pundits are generally loath to do: he admitted that he\u2019d didn\u2019t really know the answer. This is not to say that I do, but I think Walt\u2019s question is worth exploring.<\/p>\n

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\"Prominent<\/a><\/p>\n

Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan. (Photo credit: Mariusz Kubik, http:\/\/www.mariuszkubik.pl)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Why indeed? My own hunch is that we realists are a source of discomfit for the Beltway armchair warrior class not so much because we have been right about every major U.S. foreign policy question since the invasion of Iraq, but because we dare to question the premise which undergirds the twin orthodoxies of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism.<\/p>\n

The premise, shared by heroes of the Left and Right, is this: America, a \u201cshining city on a hill\u201d (John Winthrop, later vulgarized by Ronald Reagan) \u201cremains the one indispensable nation\u201d (Barack Obama) and deprived of America\u2019s \u201cbenevolent global hegemony\u201d (Robert Kagan) the world will surely collapse into anarchy.<\/p>\n

This strain of messianic thinking has deep roots in the psyche of the American establishment and so, in a sense, neoconservatism, which is really little more than a latter-day Trotskyist sect, is as\u00a0American as apple pie.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Neocons Banished Realism The grip that neocons and liberal interventionists\u00a0have on Official Washington\u2019s opinion circles is now so strong that \u201crealists\u201d who once provided an important counterbalance have been almost banished from foreign policy debates, a dangerous dilemma that James W Carden explores. In a widely remarked upon article for the online version of\u00a0Foreign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6963,326,2127,11771,561,669,865],"class_list":["post-16583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-consortium-news","tag-foreign-policy","tag-interventionism","tag-james-carden","tag-neocons","tag-reality","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16583"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16585,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16583\/revisions\/16585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}