Bob Kagan leads neocons changing their spots over Trump's war

Amidst the turbulent backdrop of Trump’s war on Iran, perhaps the most baffling development to date: Neoconservatives coming out of the woodwork … and making sense.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Robert Kagan, eminent primacist and once ardent supporter of the Iraq War, has seemingly swapped his once messianic quest for Jacksonian democracy in the Middle East for a sober recognition of the consequences of American military overreach.

Consider his sober retrospection here:

Even the threat of terrorism from the [Middle East] region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.

No, that is not Ron Paul speaking. It's Robert Kagan, who once wrote a book called "The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World." Today he is describing U.S blowback in the Middle East and referring to Israel as the South Vietnam of unreliable allies — viewpoints once dismissed as various ‘isms’: “anti-Americanism”, “anti-semitism”, “isolationism”, “conspiratorialism”, etc. But this standard regurgitation of ad-hominem attacks no longer works. The Overton window for criticizing America and Israel is shifting, if neoconservatives suddenly sounding like Gore Vidal or Pat Buchanan is any indication.

Kagan has compadres singing a similar tune. Bill Kristol, founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, was one of the first proponents of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and spent a good 20 years supporting U.S. wars in the Middle East before and after 9/11. But he has turned out to be a vocal opponent of the Iran War since its onset. While not altogether dropping his ideological agenda — Kristol still supports the idea of externally engineered democracy in Iran — he nonetheless has assailed the Trump administration for its incompetency and lack of clear strategic objectives.

David Frum is another such example. A former speechwriter for President George W. Bush tied infamously to his smearing of conservative Iraq War skeptics as “unpatriotic conservatives,” Frum now asks how “lawmakers can ensure that Iranians decide their future for themselves,” while sharing Kristol’s skepticism of the war’s strategic objectives, attributing it predominantly to Trump’s whim.

What is to be made of these seeming about-faces? Presuming a pivot to genuine restraint seems unlikely. One obvious answer is political expedience — in each of these cases, never-Trumpers are simply consistent in their oppositional positioning. One can see that in Kristol's and Frum’s comments — they don’t necessarily hate the aims of the war but the man who is waging it and how he is waging it.

Moreover, this is clearly a very unpopular conflict. These commentators recognize how U.S. public opinion has shifted on foreign policy in the Middle East. Beyond just a disillusionment with regime change and their resulting quagmires, young Americans’ view of Israel has drastically declined throughout the Gaza War and now with the ongoing U.S.-Israel war on Iran.

In this sense, Kagan’s positioning reflects a logical continuation of his skepticism of Israel dating back to the Obama administration, in which he first acknowledged the divergences between U.S. and Israeli national interests.

Still, neoconservatives are split on the ongoing Iran war. There are certainly many cheerleaders still out there — notably Bret Stephens, Eliot Cohen, and the analysts sitting at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Hudson Institute.

But for certain neoconservative commentators to separate themselves — even momentarily, situationally —from their warmongering roots is a noteworthy development. It seems savvy political operatives of all ideological hues sense the strain on the U.S.-Israel relationship from the American side and are responding in kind. They see the writing on the wall. This may be an attempt, too, to maintain a grip on narrative framing and to leave their demonstrably wrong views in the past by the curb.