Jacob Heilbrunn: Neocons and the Revolution
[Jacob Heilbrunn is senior editor at the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.]
In August 1997, I visited the retired diplomat at her spacious corner office at the American Enterprise Institute. "I guess they thought it was worth publishing," she spluttered. What had got her so steamed was my allusion to a recent philippic Robert Kagan had published in Commentary called "Democracies and Double Standards."
In his article, Kagan repudiated Kirkpatrick's famous 1979 essay "Dictatorships & Double Standards" in the same journal, which denounced U.S. President Jimmy Carter and caught the eye of his successor Ronald Reagan, who appointed her ambassador to the United Nations. As Kirkpatrick saw it, Carter had hustled the Shah of Iran and the leader of Nicaragua, both of them pro-American autocrats, out of office. The results were disastrous. Friendly authoritarians were gone; true totalitarians were taking over in both places. While authoritarian regimes of the right could mellow over time into democracies, totalitarians ones of the left would not. Anyway, it required "decades, if not centuries," she observed, for "people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits" to create a viable democracy.
Kagan was having none of it. He trumpeted a new neoconservative doctrine: Away with the cold, amoral realism of the Kirkpatrick school and in with a boisterous championing of what amounted to liberal interventionism, promoting democracy, the very "essence," as he put it, of American nationhood. Kagan bemoaned the fact, as he saw it, that both the right, out of despair at what it viewed as the cultural degeneration of America during the Clinton era, and the left, out of reflexive hostility to military intervention, had come to embrace the Kirkpatrick doctrine. He praised Bill Clinton's readiness to send the Marines to Haiti and condemned a "mood of despair" that had overcome many foreign-policy experts. In Kagan's view, America had to push Middle Eastern regimes to become more democratic, not settle for a cozy embrace with ruling elites. "We could and should be holding authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to higher standards of democracy, and encouraging democratic voices within those societies," he announced, "even it means risking some instability in some places."
Sound familiar?..
Read entire article at Foreign policy
In August 1997, I visited the retired diplomat at her spacious corner office at the American Enterprise Institute. "I guess they thought it was worth publishing," she spluttered. What had got her so steamed was my allusion to a recent philippic Robert Kagan had published in Commentary called "Democracies and Double Standards."
In his article, Kagan repudiated Kirkpatrick's famous 1979 essay "Dictatorships & Double Standards" in the same journal, which denounced U.S. President Jimmy Carter and caught the eye of his successor Ronald Reagan, who appointed her ambassador to the United Nations. As Kirkpatrick saw it, Carter had hustled the Shah of Iran and the leader of Nicaragua, both of them pro-American autocrats, out of office. The results were disastrous. Friendly authoritarians were gone; true totalitarians were taking over in both places. While authoritarian regimes of the right could mellow over time into democracies, totalitarians ones of the left would not. Anyway, it required "decades, if not centuries," she observed, for "people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits" to create a viable democracy.
Kagan was having none of it. He trumpeted a new neoconservative doctrine: Away with the cold, amoral realism of the Kirkpatrick school and in with a boisterous championing of what amounted to liberal interventionism, promoting democracy, the very "essence," as he put it, of American nationhood. Kagan bemoaned the fact, as he saw it, that both the right, out of despair at what it viewed as the cultural degeneration of America during the Clinton era, and the left, out of reflexive hostility to military intervention, had come to embrace the Kirkpatrick doctrine. He praised Bill Clinton's readiness to send the Marines to Haiti and condemned a "mood of despair" that had overcome many foreign-policy experts. In Kagan's view, America had to push Middle Eastern regimes to become more democratic, not settle for a cozy embrace with ruling elites. "We could and should be holding authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to higher standards of democracy, and encouraging democratic voices within those societies," he announced, "even it means risking some instability in some places."
Sound familiar?..