So, Are We All Neoconservatives Now?

I keep thinking about George Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram, which formed the basis for the consensus US Soviet policy up to the Reagan administration. One of his major conclusions in the telegram, though, is questionable in long term perspective, although it was justifiable in 1946 with Stalin still in power. At best, it was long delayed and not the result of individual transfer of power:

Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme [test] of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin's death was first such transfer, and its effect wracked Soviet state for 15 years[. . . .] Stalin's death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom.

Kennan wasn't an advocate of NATO. This article in The Hill outlines his opposition to much of Western Cold War strategy:

Writing in 1997 at age 92, he declared that expanding NATO to the east “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

“Such a decision,” he went on, “may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.”

Were he with us today, Kennan would undoubtedly say “I told you so.”

However, the Hill piece at the link is dated January 28, 2022, a full month before Putin's invasion and the recognition within a matter of days that Kennan's appraisals in fact weren't prescient. Stalin's death was handled with ruthless efficiency, while Khrushchev was even allowed a peaceful retirement. His successors died in their beds without provoking civil war, which was the consequence Kennan implicitly expected. Beyond that, while the Ukraine crisis is the result of the internal strains Kennan recognized, it didn't emerge with a Russian leadership transition. Instead, it came in the course of a long-term weakening of the Soviet system's successor state, over which Putin and his allies presided for decades.

Now let's look at someone wno might be regarded as Kennan's successor in formulating Western post-Soviet policy, Anne Applebaum. I'd read some of her books, and I was generally familiar with her public profile, but I never looked carefully at her bio until just now. According to the Wikipedia link,

Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. . . . She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). Applebaum earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history and literature from Yale University, where she attended the Soviet history course taught by Wolfgang Leonhard in fall 1982.

There you have a set of major data points. Trust me, I went to high school in Bethesda. If she went to Sidwell Friends and then Yale, she was connected. I suspect those connections, even more than her Yale degree, would have influenced her subsequent path. Take the analogy of the speedometer: it may say you're driving at 110 mph, but that's just an indication you have a fast car. Sidwell Friends and Yale are just the number; the connections are the car:

As a student, Applebaum spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), which, she has written, helped to shape her opinions. She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987). She studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.

Applebaum is a member of the elite; I've got to assume that, like her contemporary Antony Blinken, she was born into it, but Wikipedia makes no mention of how. The link does say of her career, though:

Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties". On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies". At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them.

. . . She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". In July 2016, before the US election, she was one of the first American journalists to write about the significance of Russia's ties to Donald Trump and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America."

I don't buy the view that Trump was, or is, Putin's puppet, and I think the right-wing intellectuals who admire Putin are at the Rod Dreher level. Nevertheless, It seems to me that Applebaum, if she doesn't specifically endorse neoconservatism, is clearly aligned with it -- as indeed are Secretaries Blinken and Austin. In fact, neoconservatism in foreign and military policy is hard to define. According to Wikipedia,

The term "neoconservative" was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush, with particular emphasis on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.

. . . The Bush Doctrine was greeted with accolades by many neoconservatives. When asked whether he agreed with the Bush Doctrine, Max Boot said he did and that "I think [Bush is] exactly right to say we can't sit back and wait for the next terrorist strike on Manhattan. We have to go out and stop the terrorists overseas. We have to play the role of the global policeman. ... But I also argue that we ought to go further". Discussing the significance of the Bush Doctrine, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol claimed: "The world is a mess. And, I think, it's very much to Bush's credit that he's gotten serious about dealing with it. ... The danger is not that we're going to do too much. The danger is that we're going to do too little".

It's worth noting that one inflection point in the 2008 election was Obama's insistence that by ending the Iraq war, which had been the creature of Bush's neoconservative advisers, the US would achieve a "peace dividend" that would allow funding universal medical care. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was effectively a disagreement over how that "peace dividend" would be distributed, not for the resumption of Bush Doctrine interventionism and as Wikipedia puts it,

Several neoconservatives played a major role in the Stop Trump movement in 2016, in opposition to the Republican presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, due to his criticism of interventionist foreign policies, as well as their perception of him as an "authoritarian" figure.

It seems to me that what we're looking at right now is a recalibration of the center, driven by the perceived exigencies of the Russo-Ukraine War, and a return to an even more muscular interventionism than Bush's. Anne Applebaum's most recent Atlantic piece is The Russian Empire Must Die:

I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire.

In other words, Applebaum is advocating an essentially neoconservative policy of proactive interventionism on behalf of Ukraine, but with the clear implication that Ukrainian independence is just one step toward the dissolution of the Russian empire -- and clearly Applebaum, with both Polish and US citizenship, sees Poland playing a major role in northeastern Europe in its wake.

This in turn was brought about by the complete surprise of Ukraine's performance in the first weeks after Putin's invasion. When I look at the Banksy mural in Ukraine at the top of this post, I think the figure of the big attacker being brought down by the smaller, childlike figure, applies to more than just Russia and Putin -- Zelensky has performed the same sort of martial arts move on Western received opinion, and he's done it in a matter of months.

The issue isn't whether Putin tried to affect the US midterms -- if he did, for instance, by delaying the evacuation of Kherson until the following day -- this was feckless and clumsy. Zelensky had already sent a much more powerful message. In fact, I believe he's handed the Democrats a strategy to move the political center, if they're smart enough to take it.

They do have to do something about Biden, but we'll have to see how this all shakes out.