230 YEARS OF NEOCONSERVATISM, IT OUGHTTA BE MATURE:

The Neoconservative Convergence (Charles Krauthammer, Commentary)

By a fluke or a miracle, depending on your point of view, because of the confusion of a few disoriented voters in Palm Beach, Florida, this has been the decade of neoconservatism. Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children, and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that He works in very mysterious ways.

In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the last four-and-a-half years have seen an un-ashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to preempt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. Bush’s second inaugural address last January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the President offered its most succinct formulation: “The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom.”

The remarkable fact that the Bush Doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism’s own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history.

Jefferson and the export of freedom: Would the Founding Father have approved of nation-building in Iraq? Perhaps, but not necessarily by force (James Klurfeld, July 1, 2005, Newsday)

One of my favorite quotations from Thomas Jefferson comes from the last letter he ever wrote, declining an invitation to attend the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826 - the day, stunningly, that both he and John Adams passed away.

In that letter Jefferson, looking back a half century on events he helped begin, writes:

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbound exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man."

As we enter this July Fourth weekend, I'm struck by the continuing relevance of Jefferson's words.

It's hardly surprising that a republic founded on universal principles would retun to them again and again.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2005 9:21 AM