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So cleaning out my downloads folder today, I found I had a PDF copy of Irving Kristol's The Neoconservative Persuasion tucked away in a little cobwebbed corner of the hard drive, and I have no idea how it got there. Either I'm having serious memory loss, or the CIA has put four hundred pages of wonderful malware on my computer.

In any case, after having perused it for a short while, I can confirm that Mr. Kristol is a brilliant writer:

>Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical
term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation.
A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins
and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a
defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations
whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and
the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to
more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will
always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack
from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our
national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War
II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival
is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest
are necessary.

But I'm also finding that the views Our Glorious Founder, perhaps more than expected, don't necessarily align with those of this sub and a lot of modern Neoconservatism, at least from what I've read so far. From the same essay (emphasis added):

> And then, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics
where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is
surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign
policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite
neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to Professors Leo Strauss of
Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.)
These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist
would say). First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be
encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a
nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world
government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded
with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability
to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the
history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could
not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own selfdefinition,
was absolutely astonishing.

I get the feeling that many of the lines that jumped out at me as rather strange utterances from the Godfather of Neoconservatism are merely instances of miscommunication; Kristol had a very specific way of putting things -- supposedly "not having beliefs" on foreign policy is really, if you read further, a statement on the practicality and the importance of the lesson of history regarding that policy -- but the break between Kristol's philosophy of Neoconservatism and the modern persuasion -- for it remains, I'll agree with him, a "persuasion" and not a philosophy or a doctrine -- is very real and much more easily spotted than I'd previously assumed. As he says in this essay, however, our roots are in the American-led rules-based world order, not necessarily in the precise words of various moral justifications for it. Regardless of Kristol's particular suspicions of policies or institutions we might hold dear, he did a mighty fine job of defining this here ideology's place within American conservatism.

On just this, he opens:

> What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates,
speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is “neoconservative,”
and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of
us who are designated as “neocons” are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending
on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: is there any “there” there?
Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had
my moments of wonderment.

And soon concludes, after mulling a bit on the subject of just where his "persuasion" should be in the world:

> Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past
century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forwardlooking,
not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its
twentieth-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican
and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight
Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies
are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican
Party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing
and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be
blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional
political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political
conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed
official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican
ones, which result in popular Republican presidencies.

---------------------

Tl;Dr

I'm glad I downloaded this, even if I don't remember it. I think I'm in for a wild ride.

Its nonsense. It was used by Anti Semitic America First Movements in the 1930s to Justify Non Interventionism in World War 2 and Isolationism.

>In many of the countries the United States occupied, holding fair elections became a top priority, because once a democratically elected government was installed, the Americans felt they could withdraw. In 1925 the Coolidge administration refused to recognize the results of a stolen election in Nicaragua and the following year sent in the Marines, even though the strongman who had stuffed the ballot boxes, Gen. Emiliano Chamorro Vargas, was ardently pro-American. The United States went on to administer two elections in Nicaragua, in 1928 and 1932, that even the losers acknowledged were the fairest in the country’s history. “The interventions by U.S. Marines in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere in those years,” writes the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, “often bore striking resemblances to the interventions by Federal marshals in the conduct of elections in the American South in the 1960s: registering voters, protecting against electoral violence, ensuring a free vote and an honest count.”

>The interventions in Central America and the Caribbean have become infamous as “gunboat diplomacy” and as “banana wars” undertaken at the behest of powerful Wall Street interests. Smedley Butler helped solidify this myth when, after his retirement from the Marine Corps, he became an ardent isolationist and antiimperialist. He spent the 1930s denouncing his own career, claiming he had been “a racketeer for capitalism” and a “highclass muscle man for Big Business.”

>In fact, in the early years of the twentieth century, the United States was least likely to intervene in those nations (such as Argentina and Costa Rica) where American investors held the biggest stakes. The longest occupations were undertaken in precisely those countries —Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic—where the United States had the smallest economic stakes. Moreover, two of the most interventionist Presidents in U.S. history, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were united in their contempt for what TR called “malefactors of great wealth.” Wilson was probably the most imperialist President of all, and his interventions had a decidedly idealistic tinge. His goal, as he proclaimed at the start of his administration, was “to teach the South American republics to elect good men.”

>How well did the United States achieve this aim? The record is mixed. Its greatest success (outside those territories that remain under the Stars and Stripes to this day) was in the Philippines, which was (no coincidence) the site of one of its longest occupations. Among the institutions Americans bequeathed to the Filipinos were public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state. Unlike the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation; Congress was so concerned about protecting the Filipinos that it barred large landholdings by American individuals or corporations. The U.S. legacy was also a lasting one: The Philippines have been for the most part free and democratic save for the 1972–86 period, when Ferdinand Marcos ruled by fiat. That’s more than most other Asian countries can say.

>
The U.S. legacy in the Caribbean and Central America was more fleeting. It is not true, as some critics later charged, that the United States deliberately installed dictators such as Duvalier, Batista, and Somoza. The governments left in power by American troops were usually democratic and decent. But they were also too weak to survive on their own. In the past the United States might have intervened to support democratically elected regimes. In the 1930s, however, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt renounced the interventionist policies of his predecessors, stretching back to the days of his cousin Theodore and beyond. Henceforth, FDR said, U.S. relations with Latin America would be governed by the Good Neighbor policy, which meant in essence that Washington would work with whoever came to power, no matter how.

The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot is also a good read for early US Wars as well.

>A myth has flourished around these interventions—that they were conducted, as Smedley Butler later claimed, at the behest of Wall Street banks and banana companies. But in fact, as I argue in Chapters 6–7 and 10, the desire to protect American economic interests was only one of the motives behind the Banana Wars, and often not the most important one. Strategic and, yes, moral concerns played a vital role, especially in the actions of Woodrow Wilson,who vowed "to teach the South American republics to elect good men." "The interventions by U.S. Marines in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in those years," writes the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, "often bore striking resemblances to the interventions by Federal marshals in the conduct of elections in the American South in the 1960s: registering voters, protecting against electoral violence, ensuring a free vote and an honest count.

I recommend reading the book to get a good understanding of American Interventions in the Banana Wars unlike the New Left historians of the 1960s version of history.

Asked previously on Tuesday, but this sub is more active.

Any good recommendations for important conservative readings? Books, classic articles etc. Any good contemporary pundit is also welcome, especially if they write on international issues or for an international audience.

e: These seem v interesting

Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

The City and Man, Leo Strauss

In case you guys haven’t seen it, there is a really well-written, insightful book comparing the United States to Rome in a positive way.

It is called Empires of Trust: How Rome Built — And America is Building — A New World by Thomas Madden. It’s a bit outdated, since it doesn’t consider Donald Trump and his attempts to tear down the new world order, but it is nevertheless an excellent rebuttal to people who think America is declining and that being like Rome is automatically a negative thing.

https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Trust-Built-America-Building-/dp/0452295459?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-ipad-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0452295459

Have any of you read this and can recommend it? I thought it sounded really interesting.

You are ready, padawan learner

Edit: And then I thought, weeeelll, not everyone likes academic writing like me. So here's
some more bite-sized Irving Kristol stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Before-Church-State-Sacramental-Kingdom/dp/1945125144

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/01/liturgy-of-liberalism

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/11/a-christian-strategy

https://www.amazon.de/Why-Liberalism-Failed-Politics-Culture/dp/0300223447

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/01/conservative-democracy

***

It's not that hard to find reasonable conservative critics of 'the liberal order' who are not calling for a LARP-y reconstruction of western institutions. Unlike the left, the anti-liberal right actually has states that it can point to (e.g. Hungary, Poland) as reasonably good cases of their politics at work.

awww yiss

Since it came up in that thread, this is your daily reminder that this is required reading if you aren't a commie

https://www.amazon.com/Strategies-Containment-Critical-Appraisal-American/dp/019517447X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523814107&sr=8-1&keywords=strategies+of+containment+by+john+lewis+gaddis

Just read this book before then

https://www.amazon.com/Salafi-Jihadism-History-Idea-SHIRAZ-MAHER/dp/0141986263/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=AS9G2MR5E5QMT5S7HDPD

https://www.amazon.com/Jihad-Saudi-Arabia-Pan-Islamism-Cambridge/dp/0521732360

http://www.defence.gov.au/ADC/Publications/IndoPac/Wimhurst_IPSP_Nov16_(updated).pdf

https://ctc.usma.edu/constructing-takfir-from-abdullah-azzam-to-djamel-zitouni/

https://www.managementboek.nl/code/inkijkexemplaar/9781783262878/the-father-of-jihad-engels-muhammed-haniff-hassan.pdf

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/sayyid-qutb-father-of-salafi-jihadism-forerunner-of-the-islamic-/10096380

If you want to understand the history and origin of modern Jihadism, you should start with Sayed Qutb. All jihadist Islamists (and note not all Islamists are jihadist), Sunni or Shi'a, derive their beliefs from him.

Islamism, the belief Islam should have a role in governance, has existed since the inception of Islam. Offensive jihadism on the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, is a modern phenomenon.

When Iran says they want to 'export the Islamic Revolution' and they act upon this statement through financing terrorism, this is offensive jihadism and was adopted from Sayed Qutb (who the Fedayeen e Islami, which Khomeini was a part of, was close to)

When ISIS says they want to "conquer Rome" (as in they want to establish a Caliphate in Europe), same principle but from a Sunni perspective.

I haven't read it, but I'd imagine that Savage Wars of Peace would also be good. Max discusses small-scale conflicts in US History that are usually paved over by Chomskyites as being imperialist: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Wars-Peace-Small-American/dp/0465064930

I'd imagine it's probably a lot like his article about liberal imperialism here: https://www.americanheritage.com/content/liberal-imperialism