Paleo-neoconservatism

On MSNBC this morning, after the President's speech on Afghanistan, Joe Scarborough brought a panel on to discuss whether last night was the moment when "Paul Wolfowitz became President." The question, in other words, was whether Donald Trump had become a neocon, or given in to them, by committing to an indefinite, expanded American military presence in that benighted country. Trump himself acknowledged that he had changed his mind about Afghanistan, having once been inclined to withdraw. He now accepts at least one premise identified with the neocons (like Wolfowitz) of George W. Bush's time: that terrorists have a better chance of striking at us if they have a sympathetic country as a safe haven. That premise remains debatable. It'd be interesting to see someone attempt to correlate the volume of ISIS-inspired attacks over a given time period to the amount of territory the self-styled caliphate controlled in Iraq or Syria. My hunch is that the idea will outlast the caliphate, especially now that terrorism is most often carried out on a relatively small scale that doesn't seem to need the scale of logistical support that a sovereign country might provide. Such speculation doesn't change the likelihood of a power vacuum emerging in Afghanistan following a U.S. pullout, or the likelihood of an entity more hostile to us taking power there. Whether our presence alone prevents that outcome, and how much longer Americans in general and Trump's base in particular are prepared to accept that responsibility, remain to be determined.

The Wolfowitz question was a funny one for Scarborough to ask, since he had just shown a clip of the President from last night saying that the U.S. would no longer go around the world trying to remake every nation in our own image. That sounds like a repudiation of the "democracy promotion" that was a hallmark of both W-era neoconservatism and its Democratic counterpart under Clinton and Obama. But as at least one guest pointed out, Trump's position was not inconsistent with what might be called first-generation, Cold War era neoconservatism as practiced by people like Jeanne Kirkpatrick who often opposed democracy promotion. Kirkpatrick in particular became notorious for defending dictators aligned with the U.S. from demands for democratization. Her position was founded on a distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes, and on a suspicion that, under Marxist influence, superficially democratic uprisings against authoritarians would turn totalitarian too often for America's comfort. Exchange Islam for Marxism and you can see why this line of thinking might make a comeback after a stormy "Arab Spring." Trump apparently has decided that democracy is not the answer for Afghanistan, or at least that it's not the answer for any problem Afghanistan poses for the U.S. His next question should be whether an authoritarian solution is possible that includes a degree of power sharing to end that country's seemingly incorrigible sectarianism and ethnic strife, or whether his best bet is to put all his chips on one strong man who could be given the tools to keep everyone else in line. Some of Trump's supporters may be disappointed that simply nuking the place isn't an option, but if they thought their man would simply wash his hands of the place, they should have known better. His initial gut skepticism about our presence in Afghanistan might have been right on a practical level, but how would he ever have turned our withdrawal from a destabilized land in the face of hostile forces a win? Trump must win somewhere -- his personality presumably demands it -- and by now he may believe that he has a better chance of winning there than here.