There’s an orchestrated campaign to bring back the neoconservative voices of the Bush administration, now rebranded as Democrats and opponents of the populist right.

They’re baaaack! The neoconservatives have been lurking around the Swamp, waiting for their moment. Their war wagon got rolling again with an August endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz signed by more than 200 neocon apparatchiks, who claim to believe that “another four years of a Trump presidency would irreparably damage our beloved democracy.”

That’s pretty rich coming from the cabal of utopian airheads who brought us the Iraq debacle based entirely on skewed intelligence, as well as a bloated national security surveillance state aimed, as George W. Bush opined, at fighting an endless war on terror. Recall that Dubya went so far as to claim that his administration would “rid the world of evildoers.” Perpetual war for perpetual peace. The neocon playbook defines victory as reaching the end of history by transforming all the world’s governments into liberal capitalist democracies; in other words, “woke” globalism. 

It took the neocon backbenchers several paragraphs to get to their real point, which was foreign policy. They ranted about Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s alleged intention to kowtow to “dictators” like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. They breathlessly claim that democratic movements abroad would be “irreparably jeopardized” if Trump returns to the White House. Following the endorsement letter, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, endorsed Harris-Walz, as did a list of former top-level GOP officials.

Notably, the neocons and their neoliberal allies are sometimes one and the same: Former State Department official Victoria Nuland, for instance, was a major player in backing the 2014 Ukrainian coup that led to the Russia-Ukraine war. Before taking posts in the Obama and Biden administrations, she previously had worked for Vice President Cheney. The neocons and neoliberals both fear and loathe the antiestablishment populism of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.

The “very vocal and visible migration of the group of people who had been called neocons in the Republican Party” to the Democrats is “one of the most notable political developments over the last eight years,” the progressive investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has observed. Many neocons endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020; the trend continues in 2024, driven by Harris’s aggressive foreign policy comments at the Democratic National Convention. 

Harris’s remarks “affirmed the core worldview of these neocons,” Greenwald remarked, “about the U.S. role in the world, about what the United States president is obligated to do.” Before they became Republicans in the 1980s and infested the Reagan administration, many neocons were former Democrats and from hard-left family backgrounds. Yet they see the world through what Greenwald calls “a militaristic lens” and believe that war is always the answer. The GOP was once viewed as the best platform for their great global crusade. Now, as the MAGA political realignment that began in 2016 consolidates its power within the Republican Party, with former Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Trump, the neocons view the Democrats as the best vehicle for their policies.

Being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry. Their lack of shame displays a concomitant lack of self-reflection. Former Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and his ilk are still part of the media talk show circuit as foreign policy experts, and none has ever suffered any public humiliation for the litany of disasters for which they bear responsibility.

Few, however, have prospered as much as Dubya’s former national security advisor and second-term secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who heads the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Rice has had quite a career, working in the National Security Council under George H. W. Bush, and as provost at Stanford prior to joining Dubya’s administration in 2000. As secretary of state, Rice oversaw the implementation of the neocons’ ill-starred program of “transformational diplomacy.” This was aimed at
spreading American-style liberal democracy near and far, though one might question how much diplomacy—as opposed to carpet bombing—was involved. After leaving the Bush administration in 2009, Rice held various academic positions at Stanford before being named director at the Hoover Institution in 2020. “Condi” also holds seats on a number of corporate boards of directors.

Rice, too, is making a bid for renewed political relevance even as her neocon comrades denounce Trumpism. The return of these Bush-era faces reeks of an orchestrated campaign, and its aim likely goes beyond reaffirming their relevance. It has the odor of revenge. The rage their neoliberal cousins feel for Trump and the Middle American yokels likely drives Rice and her comrades as well.

As part of this campaign, Foreign Policy magazine published in its September-October issue Rice’s neocon manifesto, “The Perils of Isolationism: The World Still Needs America—and America Needs the World.” Rice equates an America that puts its own well being first, avoiding ill-conceived interventions while using diplomacy and trade policy to benefit American citizens, with isolationism. She wants America to be committed to “global engagement,” which means being willing, in John F. Kennedy’s words, to “pay any price, bear any burden” in the defense of freedom. Translation: America should use its power to support “woke” corporate globalism.

“The pre–World War II era was defined not only by great-power conflict and a weak international order but also by a rising tide of populism and isolationism,” Rice wrote. “So is the current era.” And what has brought us to our present dismally atavistic condition? Rice reads from the managerial regime’s script, denouncing “Internet echo chambers,” “divisive rhetoric,” and “ignorance of the complexity of history.” 

Her lack of self-awareness is staggering. Echo chambers? That’s an accurate description of mainstream media. Divisive rhetoric? Recall that a Time magazine cover recently depicted Donald Trump as Hitler and called him an existential threat to “our democracy.” Complaints about the Internet? The fact that the managerial regime does not fully control it, especially Elon Musk’s influential social media platform, X, is what they fear “threatens our democracy.”

Rice said she’s concerned about a “tattered sense of shared values.” But what kind of shared values can there be in the borderless, multicultural polyglot country she envisions? Rice endorses mass immigration, which is one of the main sources of the dilution of our shared values.

Rice further opines that “elite institutions”—Stanford University, for instance?—have “eroded” shared values. Here she’s gesturing to the hard-left, flag-burning, America-hating crowd at American campuses. Their antics are a bit disturbing to neocons like Rice, as they need the American flag to wave like a cape in a bullfight, drawing Middle Americans into their wars. Rice doesn’t seem to realize that by siding with the Democrats the neocons are also siding with the Democrats’ militant Che Guevera wing.

“Competing ideas” should be encouraged, Rice said. Except, I assume, if those competing ideas include the once unremarkable notion that America is not merely an idea, but a real place and a people. The neocons seem unaware of the deep contradictions in their ideology.

Rice is concerned that free trade, the basis for a borderless “economic commons” and a complement to Washington’s global military hegemony, is threatened by “isolationism.” She fervently wishes that the global commitments America took on during the Cold War should continue, essentially forever. American patriots who believed the Cold War was a temporary defensive emergency were way off the mark in Rice’s book. For the globalists, victory in the Cold War was but a prelude to conquering the entire planet. At the time, patriots naively believed that the collapse of Communism meant that America could refocus on domestic issues and address our country’s demographic, cultural, and moral erosion. Those are not concerns the neocons share. America is only a platform for their grand design, just as their membership in the Republican Party was only a means to an end.

Rice is disturbed that we have recently witnessed “the revenge of the sovereign state.” But what can self-governance mean if not sovereignty? The wish of countries in South America and Africa, as well as of Russia and China, to remain sovereign and resist globalist hegemony prompts Rice to warn about an emerging multipolar world. Rice claims that those states—and by extension the MAGA movement—want to revert to what she calls a “zero sum” economic and political game.

Here is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, for it is the neocons who view the world in the “who is not with us is against us” mode. Anyone who believes that America can protect her interests without constant warfare, or who wishes to preserve traditional American culture, or who supports balance-of-power foreign policy realism, is to Rice and the neocons yet another “threat to our democracy.”

These are not the only contradictions in Rice’s worldview. She was Dubya’s national security advisor when China was brought into the World Trade Organization. As she related in her Foreign Policy article, the neocons expected China to hop on the globalization train and forget about their sovereignty and national interests. They were supposed to become consumerist citizens of the world. After all, Rice noted, they had done us all a service by becoming the world’s source of cheap labor. It seemed inevitable that economic engagement with China would lead to its political reform, she wrote. 

Alas, she and the neocons were shocked to discover that China was just playing along to take advantage of America’s deindustrialization! “It is hard to overstate the … sense of betrayal that gripped U.S. leaders,” Rice wrote. The Chinese had played the neocons for suckers. Their End of History formula, laid out in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, hadn’t worked. The Chinese leadership had not decoupled foreign policy from national interests as a globalized U.S. had done. Instead, China acted as nations have done throughout history and took advantage of the situation to benefit itself.

To Rice’s credit, she at least conceded that the Trump administration had the right idea by responding to China’s betrayal with a limited “economic decoupling” of the U.S. from China. Yet Rice does not want “decoupling” to go too far. “The international economy will still be well served by trade and investment between the world’s two largest economies,” she wrote. In fact, patriotic Americans should judge economic policy on whether it benefits Americans, not on some abstract concept like free trade or the gross domestic product. But Rice and her ilk call that “isolationist” or “nativist.”

Rice added that “American universities remain open to training Chinese graduate students and to international collaboration, both of which have significant benefits for the U.S. scientific community.” At the same time, she acknowledged that might present a “challenge” to American security, as America’s foreign exchange programs are filled with students who end up spying for China. But it’s the benefits to the “international economy” that seem to concern Rice the most.

Rice delivers the standard neocon Putin-is-Hitler boilerplate without appearing to have the slightest inkling of what brought about the war in Ukraine. She also fantasizes about Russia being “isolated” by sanctions. Hasn’t she heard of the BRICS alliance? Or that Russian industry, bolstered no doubt by war production, is still going strong? It’s no surprise that she wants more military aid for the Ukrainians. She seems startled about Russian-Chinese cooperation. What did she and her neocon cronies expect?

Rice returns to her isolationism theme by claiming it was America’s absence from the world stage that helped bring on the 20th century’s world wars. On the contrary, opponents of American intervention have made credible arguments that U.S. entry into World War I may well have prevented a negotiated settlement in 1917. It’s reasonable to speculate that such a negotiated settlement would have stopped a number of historical dominoes from falling, including the collapse of the Russian empire and rise of Soviet Russia, as well as the punishing Versailles Treaty that made the rise of the Nazis and another war inevitable. That’s not to mention the millions of lives that could have been spared. War begets more war. The “War to End All Wars” set the stage for World War II, which begat the Cold War, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Those wars created a military industrial complex that relied on even more war to keep it afloat and which, with the increasing power of intelligence agencies, created the American deep state.

For Rice and the neocons it’s always 1938. These war nerds didn’t want the Cold War to end. It is their religion, the source of their sense of purpose, and their career ladder. 

The worst example of Rice’s flawed view of history concerns the legacy of George Kennan, the author of Cold War “containment” policy. Recall that following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kennan and other American elder statesmen counseled refraining from NATO expansion eastward and advised taking Russian interests into account during the creation of a new European security arrangement. They were ignored. As Kennan wrote in February 1997 in The New York Times, the “fateful error” of NATO expansion acted to “inflame the nationalistic, anti‐Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and to “restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East‐West relations.”

Rice seems not to be aware of Kennan’s warning about provoking Russia. Instead, she invokes his name to justify a strategy of containing Putin, as if America was once again facing Stalin in a “twilight struggle” with a renewed expansionist Russia. For Rice and the neocons it’s always 1938. These war nerds didn’t want the Cold War to end. It is their religion, the source of their sense of purpose, and their career ladder. They are playing foreign policy like a game of Risk, and what’s at stake is the threat of nuclear apocalypse. 

Victory in the Cold War has only led to new conflicts with Russia and China. Let’s not forget the Middle East, where the results of disastrous neocon policies are playing out. Neocons apparently believe America can entangle herself in wars on three fronts. In a sense, World War III has already begun, with Russia, China, India, and much of the Global South aligning against the Washington-Brussels-Davos axis. 

Rice has hopes, though, that “great-power DNA is still very much in the American genome.” She hopes the Washington elites can suppress “the new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” These terrifying specters are populism (i.e., policies that benefit ordinary people), nativism (i.e., favoring Americans and their interests over foreigners), isolationism (i.e., a skeptical attitude to military intervention), and protectionism (i.e., fair trade that benefits America, not free trade that benefits globalists). In other words, everything that benefits the American people must be suppressed so the neocons can continue their global mission.

The neocons are impervious to evidence and numb to real national interests, or even to any clear understanding of what a nation is and what the term “national interest” means. Their foreign policy is a deadly combination of hubris, arrogance, and ignorance. Foreign policy has become a pathological mania for these people, not a means of securing the country’s wellbeing. The neocons are a threat to our actual national security.

A “national interest” assumes a coherent nation. Yet the neocons have done their best to erode the nation itself. The state’s primary job is to ensure that there will be a nation to preserve, protect, and defend. Our first responsibility is to ourselves and our posterity. The American political realignment is culminating in a more populist, patriotic Republican Party, with the Democrats representing oligarchy and globalist expansion. The neocon war nerds have returned to their original home. Good riddance!