JOSHUA MURAVCHIK would have us believe that neoconservatives are just energetic liberal internationalists, even though neoconservatives used to condemn liberals at every opportunity while trumpeting their own unique approach for remaking the world in America’s image. By pretending now that neocons were merely good-old-fashioned Wilsonians, he seeks to claim credit where none is due and to deny responsibility for neoconservatism’s failures.
Muravchik begins by blaming World War II on realism, implying that the war would have been prevented had neoconservatives been in charge. This is silly, neoconservatism did not even exist before World War II. In any case, the interwar period was characterized less by realist policies than by misplaced idealism (remember the Kellogg-Briand Pact?) and it is no accident that one of the classic realist works, E. H. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), was an incisive critique of idealistic interwar diplomacy.
More importantly, had neoconservatism been around back then, its emphasis on ideological purity would have been a recipe for disaster. The key strategic problem in the 1930s was the presence of several revisionist dictatorships: Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union. This meant that any serious attempt to stop Hitler required cutting a deal with the even-more murderous Stalin. Presumably, that is a policy no true neoconservative could condone. Instead, neoconservatives would have had America use force to topple all these tyrants and impose democracy, at immeasurable cost. World War II was a tragedy, to be sure, but the policies Muravchik decries allowed the United States to pay a comparatively small price and emerge the world’s dominant power.
