A Tory Critique of Neoconservatives

...and the best way to justify withdrawal is to argue that Europe is not worth defending or bothering about because it is a rotting corpse...

...no less of a travesty than the European view of Reagan's America as trigger-happy and warmongering...

...and probably no diplomatic backing either...

...A\me America First nationalism may or may not be a good idea...

...Is the frustration caused all that serious...

...Admittedly Castro's Cuba is repressive to a degree that Pinochet's Chile is not...

...Far from this independent-mindedness being a moral that the neoconservative complaint about Europe is not really that it is dead, but that it is far too much alive for America's comfort...

...from any reluctance in principle to envisage the use of force...

...Today, even the Communist parties are, for the most part, strongly anti-Russian...

...So when I say that the neoconservative ideas about contemporary Western Europe are a travesty, this is not because of any ideological disinclination to recognize the symptoms of softness on Communism when they are genuinely there...

...As for the Middle East, Soviet restraint is actually rather encouraging, not to say exemplary...

...Conceivably the United States would be better off "going it alone," better off in the sense of being better able to promote its own national interest...

...Natives who violently challenged these claims were declared to be rebels...

...What all this amounts to, in effect, is a new theory of imperialism disguised as a crusade for freedom...

...from any ideologiqal anti-Americanism...

...And, of course, they are genuinely there in the European peace movement at the present time...

...Twenty-five years ago, when the various European nationalisms were weak, there really was good reason to suppose that significant sections of opinion would welcome the gift of Communism at the hands of the Red Army...

...Europe, they say, is dead, by which is meant "soft on Communism...

...become, that is, a fellow traveler of the United States...

...have no Communist past—is that to be held against me?— and would rather be dead than red...

...Worst news of all from the Russian point of view—or so it seems to us Europeans—is the extraordinary growth of nationalism all over the world, quite replacing Communism as the plausible wave of the future...

...Nowadays it is to be found even among —perhaps particularly among—right-wing intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, the ones known as neoconservatives, many of whom are—or do I have to say were?—my friends...

...Communism, except in Russia—not even in China—does not seem to us quite that uniquely dreadful threat that it once appeared to be, and I suspect that the more the virus is exposed to different climes, the weaker it will become, to the point where its capacity to spread to, and dominate, all parts of the body politic will be much less than was once feared...

...Instead of reacting to this tease in a friendly way, she angrily asked the ambassador, "Who the hell is this guy...

...And there is some truth in this fear...

...Anglo-French suzerainty over the Middle East, for example, was finally broken by President Eisenhower's opposition to the 1956 Suez operation when the United States stood firmly and furiously for Egypt's right of national self-determination and was wholly unresponsive to Sir Anthony Eden's claim that Arab nationalism would in the end serve the imperial purposes of the Soviet Union...

...and if what the Europeans are doing today is pro-Communist then the same accusation must be leveled against Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles for what they did then...

...Here again, the neoconservative view seems to us Europeans somewhat far-fetched, and difficult to go along with...

...It is simply that there seem to me encouraging signs at present that the peoples of Western and Eastern Europe are beginning to grow together, in spite of politics...

...I In reality, of course, it is not the European peace movement or European unilateral thermonuclear disarmament which worries the neoconservatives...

...But the point I am trying to emphasize is that it does not spring from any sympathy for Communism...

...So long as the U.S...

...does not like independent-minded allies, let the objection be stated in that form, rather than dressed up in a lot of nonsense about the allies having succumbed to the sickness of appeasement and pacifism...

...Nor do Europeans find the scale of Soviet adventurism in Africa, or of its success, all that sinister or alarming...

...It may very well be true that the Western European allies are now more of a source of weakness for the United States than strength...

...from people like Sir Geoffrey Howe, the British (and very Thatcherite) Foreign Secretary, whose only sin is to disagree, quietly and discreetly, with American perceptions of the gravity of the Soviet menace...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 15 The traditional American suspicion of entangling alliances was that the European powers would drag the United States into wars...

...So it really should not be at all surprising—still less shocking—if allies occasionally demur over U.S...

...That is to say, they planted their flags on territories judged to be strategically or economically crucial and claimed, henceforth, that such territories legally belonged to them...

...The only Englishmen they regard as sound are Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas, and Lord Chalfont...

...There is, they say, appeasement in the air, just as there was in the 1930s, and the greater distance Americans put between themselves and this pollution, the better for the United States...

...All went well until over the coffee I mildly suggested that it might be a good idea if Mrs...

...Perhaps our heads need examining...

...In other words, all this neoconservative talk of European decadence is so much alibi-building so as to provide the United States with a moral justification for going it alone...

...But it is not morally suspect...

...To any European this is an immensely moving spectacle, and I do not want to see the West do anything unnecessary to provoke the Soviet Union into bloody-mindedly putting a stop to it...

...remains very strong and very determined, she can indeed make a case for telling the rest of the world to get lost...

...But no more so than has been the case for many years...

...Truth to tell, what the Europeans are doing to the United States in the 1980s is very much the same as what the United States did to the Europeans in the 1950s, at the time of Suez: warn against, and refuse to go along with, imperial blunderings which tend to ignore genuine and legitimate national or sectional aspirations...

...and because peoples who don't go along with this doctrine by definition can't be concerned about freedom, they don't deserve to be treated as independent...

...at any rate diplomatically...

...Thus alliances, in those days, constituted no kind of restraint on the use of American power...

...My own feeling is that an alliance of free nations, of which the United States is only primus inter pares, is a much superior idea, and one much more truly in line with American values and character...

...Doug Bandow...

...It is just that those of us who live in Europe are bound to give greater emphasis to any infection from which the United States should run, it is an intellectual stimulus and challenge which the U.S...

...A great many, one suspects, might take the view that allies cannot be expected to be satellites and that a certain amount of argument and dissension is the inevitable—indeed desirable—price which any true leader of the free world must not only expect to pay but actually welcome paying, provided, of course, that the criticism is made in good faith...

...In other words, whereas alliances once upon a time facilitated what was, to all intents and purposes, American unilateralism, today they tend sometimes to be more a hindrance than a help...

...The United States, however, does not believe in imperialism...

...finds itself having to run a world order on its own, but without the benefit of any clear-cut imperial justification...

...withdraw from NATO just because the European allies show increasing signs of not being prepared always to toe Washington's line...

...interventions as they did over the Grenada invasion and would over anything similar in Nicaragua...

...No, this is not meant to be snide...

...even worse than not worth defending, positively contaminating, since too much contact with the corpse might infect the United States as well...

...very much implying by her tone that there must be something wrong with the embassy security arrangements for such a subversive to have got in...

...But what if these interventions on behalf of world freedom occasionally involve propping up military dictatorships...

...a difference which prompts the European allies to be less easily convinced than are the American neoconservatives of the necessity to stamp out every Communist growth anywhere in the world, even if this means, say, using right-wing dictatorship to do the job...

...Thus it becomes the duty of the rest of the world slavishly to follow America's lead, since such subservience to the United States is the only way to preserve freedom...

...That is why, of course, Democratic party opponents of the energetic use of American power are nowadays all for alliances, precisely because concerted action in present circumstances is often the equivalent of no action, or at any rate, delayed and possibly half-hearted action...

...One sees this process most dramatically in Vienna where coachloads, of visitors from both East and West Europe regularly intermingle...

...side, as in 1956 when the British were stopped by the United States from successfully invading Egypt to put an end to Colonel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal...

...All that is new now is that they are not as prepared as they once were to agree wholeheartedly with American methods...

...or from the general malaise of defeatism which I take to be what American neoconser-vatives mean by describing Europe as dead...

...In strict Realpolitik terms, possibly she would be, in the sense of being able to pursue United States national interests without regard to any other considerations...

...Come to think of it, the neoconser-vatives probably do accuse Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles of being pro-Communist, which prompts me to conclude with an impertinent query: Could it just be that the real problem is not so much that Europe is dead as that American neoconservatives are not quite grown, up...

...from, if anything, too little fear of the Soviet Union rather than too much...

...Would most Americans really want to see the U.S...

...hopeful sign of a coming together of the two parts than if one lives on the other side of the Atlantic...

...Neoconservatives really should make a greater imaginative effort to understand how genuinely questionable is much of their foreign policy...

...As we understand it, their view is that Communist totalitarianism, rather like AIDS, constitutes a uniquely dangerous threat, since any country once infected with the dread virus can never hope to recover...

...Given the anti-imperialist bias of the American nation, these kinds of obfuscations are much less easy for you to get away with than they were for us and, in any case, the international intellectual fashion has changed out of all recognition since the nineteenth century...

...What worries me about this group is not so much their views as the fanatical intensity with which they are expressed and the contemptuous impatience reserved for anyone bold enough to contradict...

...According to them, Europe—i.e., Britain and Western Europe—is ripe for Russia's plucking...

...too independent-minded...

...Nor is this body limited to the redneck philistine right which has always objected to Europe as a sink of potentially infectious corruption...

...In this respect, I admit, there really is a big difference between today and the postwar period when the allies were too weak and dependent ever to say "nay" to anything very important which the United States wanted to do—such nay-saying as there was in those days being much more on the U.S...

...At least when the European great powers in the nineteenth century tried to run a world order on behalf of civilization they did so on the clear and unequivocal basis of imperial conquest...

...But will it remain so after Castro is dead...

...In other words, an essential pre-condition for justifying a strong "America First" policy is to convince the American people that Europe is dead...

...off Europe more in anger than in sorrow...

...never has, having had to fight for its own national independence against an imperial power...

...I cannot believe that such differences between Europe and the United States—most of which are explicable in terms of history and geography—are enough to justify us Europeans being written off as dead...

...Oh, well, right-wing dictatorships are less permanent than left-wing ones, vide Mrs...

...Even The American Spectator, at any rate in the writings of Tom Bethell, seems prepared to write Peregrine Worsthorne is the deputy editor of the London Sunday Telegraph...

...But how much does this European skepticism matter to the United States...

...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 Is the Soviet Union, we ask, not having difficulties enough holding down Eastern Europe without trying to extend its faltering imperial sway even further into Western Europe where the ideological lure of Communism is now at an all-time low...

...quite the opposite, since alliances, in effect, gave a respectably multilateral legitimacy to what, in effect, was unilateral American action, as in Korea and even in Vietnam where allied troops also fought alongside Americans...

...During a recent East-West conference in London the American ambassador there gave a luncheon for Jeane Kirkpatrick, one of the participants, to which he invited a few English Tories—including myself—assumed to be roughly of the same political persuasion as the guest of honor...

...The Reaganite answer seems to be: so as to stop the spread of Soviet Communism and therefore preserve freedom in the world...

...Stated in that form the criticism is at least arguable...

...Kirkpatrick's distinctions between authoritarianism and totalitarianism...

...Such arguments, President Eisenhower replied, were just specious excuses for British imperialism...

...In his view, and in the view of many Tories on this side of the Atlantic, the Soviet challenge today is not so overwhelming and immediate as to require the kind of frantic response advocated by American neoconservatives...

...ere, I think, we come to the crux: When I say that the neoconservative ideas about contemporary Western Europe are a travesty, this is not because of any ideological disinclination to recognize the symptoms of softness on Communism when they are genuinely there...

...Perhaps I ought to explain something about myself...

...Allies may be more of a liability than an asset...

...Kirkpatrick, who had dominated the conversation, talked a little less grandiloquently about freedom and democracy because there was no agreed sense in the West as to what these terms actually meant...

...questionable in the sense of contradict-ing—indeed undermining—the very principle of non-intervention which used to be regarded as the most important principle of order in an international society of sovereign states...

...Also I love the United States, and once wrote for publication that if Britain fell under a left-wing government I would probably be prepared to spy for the CIA...

...But is that what most Americans would want their government to do...

...It could be, for example, that my own particular reason for not wanting to react too toughly at the moment to the various Soviet transgressions will turn out to be a bit naive...

...For there is, as I say, a difference in perception between the two sides of the Atlantic about the magnitude and urgency of the Soviet menace...

...If the United States were to get involved militarily in Central America today, however, there would be no equivalent allied troops fighting alongside...

...Without wanting in any way to play down the Orwellian 1984-ish side of Communism, cannot we Europeans legitimately point out that this apocalyptic view of the effect of Communism does not seem to be borne out much by what has been happening recently in Eastern and Central Europe, in particular in Poland, where some centers of power, other than the Communist party—church, trade unions, even press—do seem to have escaped the totalitarian maw...

...from a growing belief that Communism is not the wave of the future which it was once assumed to be...

...But not, in my view, for the kind of reasons given by the neoconservatives: namely, that the allies have gone soft on Communism...

...The allies are just as determined to resist the Soviet Union as ever they were...

...I am a lifelong Conservative...

...That argument is a cheat...

...Indeed, after the Second World War, the United States exploited her newfound strength, and Europe's newfound weakness, to help break up the old empires...

...London—Left-wing Europeans have always been anti-American and it would seem that there is now an equally silly body of prejudice forming—or rather re-forming—in the United States: that of right-wing anti-Europeanism...

...should welcome...

...but not our hearts...

...In other words, if Europe is dead now, it has been dead for a very long time and one wonders why American neoconservatives have taken such a long time to notice...

...As it happens, this particular right-wing attitude to the Soviet Union springs from European confidence rather than European despair...

...Or if the U.S...

...Only a mad Soviet leader, therefore—given all the other problems of the Soviet empire— would choose to launch an attack on Western Europe, and although much can be said against the post-Stalinist system, madness is not one of its characteristics...

...On the other hand, if European awkwardness does not spring from good faith but from incipient neutralism, then the case for the United States withdrawing from NATO really does make much more sense...

...Other examples of allied back-sliding are all too easy to enumerate: over the oil pipeline, over Middle East policy, over trading with the Soviet Union, over Grenada, and, most recently and most provocatively, over Central America...

...I quite understand how a liberal country, such as the United States, dedicated to the principles of national self-determination, freedom, democracy, can find itself imposing its will abroad (i.e., behaving imperially) in what it perceives to be the interest of civilization, since this was precisely Britain's 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 fate, too, the only difference being that we got round the contradiction between theory and practice by calling it the white man's burden...

...borders really are a bit unsatisfactory, since they seem, in effect, to argue that everybody interested in freedom should put America's security interests first, and if they don't, then they can't be interested in freedom...

...That is to say, they often pipe up at awkward moments with unwelcome comments on American policies, as happened recently in the case of the Strategic Defense Initiative which Sir Geoffrey Howe tactlessly—but altogether justifiably—compared to France's pre-war attempt to gain total defensive invulnerability through building the ill-starred Maginot Line...

...Thus the United States, as the main, indeed the only, serious defender of freedom in the world, has a specially urgent responsibility, if not right, to intervene to stop countries going Communist wherever that can be done without too much danger of provoking thermonuclear war—another condition almost as terminal...

...Surely there must be some other reason for this American neoconservative antipathy, and my explanation, for what it is worth, is that American neoconservatives are trying to blacken Europe's character so as to justify the United States leaving us in the lurch...

...So what right has the United States to intervene in Nicaragua or Lebanon...

...Today, at least among American neoconservatives, the fear is that entangling European alliances delay or stop the United States from fighting wars, or at any rate the world-wide cold war...

...If this is how she treats someone roughly on her side, then one dreads to think what those Third World representatives at the United Nations—with even less recognizable names than mine—have had to put up with...

...This European travesty of Reagan's America, however, is only held and peddled by left-wing idiots...

...Given such troublesome allies, it seems to me perfectly reasonable for Americans to ask: Would not the United States be better able to fight back Soviet expansionism on its own, without having to bother about carrying reluctant allies along with her...

...Such an estimate of the Soviet danger may be wrong...

...To put it bluntly, the name of the game is isolationism, or more precisely, America Firstism...

...Indeed, in those days—until the mid-seventies—the allies did not want to say "nay," since they saw the world situation in much the same way as did the United States...

...The new phenomenon to which they really object is criticism of American foreign policy from the right...

...America wants out of Europe...

...Now, of course, having helped to break up the European empires, the U.S...

...Would the United States once freed from this entangling alliance, really be all that better off in the battle against world Communism...

...But I refuse to concede that such a concern on my part has anything to do with my having gone soft on Communism...

...One does not need to be a Communist sympathizer to see that these neoconservative justifications for the exercise of American power outside U.S...

...Nor, judging by Soviet difficulties in Afghanistan, still unsubdued after five years, does the Red Army seem all that much of an invincible conquering force...

...Intellectually, this view may be foolish...

...Now I have to say right away that this description of Europe strikes me as a travesty...

...What worries me about the new right-wing American travesty of Europe is that it is held by people whom I respect...

...She does not claim, for example, to "own" Nicaragua as the British claimed to "own" Nigeria, or to "own" Lebanon as the British claimed to "own" Sudan...

...But those who take the other view-namely, that the Soviet Union is now such a deadly enemy that the United States can only avoid being overwhelmed by renouncing the luxury of alliances—really should not try to distort the issue by portraying Europe as having changed color: gone pink or red, just because we do not see eye to eye with the likes of Norman Podhoretz, Richard Pipes, or Jeane Kirkpatrick...

...Physically speaking, the United States gains very little by continuing to station troops in Berlin or South Korea...