Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's go back a little in the history of the neo-conservatives, because they emerge in the late seventies, maybe the early eighties, as a response to dissatisfaction with the liberal agenda at home in the United States and a dissatisfaction with the Kissingerian policies of détente. Talk a little about that, because they were a very different group in that early phase than they became in the later phase.
That's right. The name "neo-conservatives" gives you an impression that this is a movement of the right. In fact, these people all emerged from not exactly a Trotskyist past but certainly from a socialist background. Many of them sat around at the University of New York in so-called "Alcove 1" which was the alcove right next to Alcove 2 which was the Trotskyists. They were the non-communist socialists, and that's where they were coming from.
Now, you're absolutely right that in the sixties and early seventies, two things were going on in this country. Domestically, one was the rise of the counter-culture, the rise of relativism, the rise of questioning of many of the classic underpinnings of American political assumptions. That was going on, on the one hand. On the other hand, internationally you had the Vietnam War that was unraveling, and as you say, there was the Kissengerian embrace of détente.
Now this group of then-leftist thinkers started to become discontented with both those aspects. On welfare, for example, they started to think that the "entitlement culture," Daniel Patrick Moynihan, people like that, thought to question that and to move from left to a more centrist and then rightist position. That was on the domestic side.
On the international side you had the group around Senator Scoop Jackson from Washington, who was a very, very strong anti-communist. Although this was a movement of the left, anti-communism was always a very substantial intellectual underpinning of these people's thinking. Senator Jackson got a group around him which said, "We don't want to have détente with the Soviet Union, we don't want to have peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union, and by the way, when we're talking about Vietnam, stop talking as though America was a criminal country. In fact, America may have gone off the rails but it's not something which we should question the existence or the validity of the American ideal." So, that started the movement from left to right.
This group of intellectuals [included] people like Norman Podhoretz or Irving Kristol ...
Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Right. These were primarily men of ideas, although Moynihan did go into politics. But there was a parallel movement of complementary ideas within the national security bureaucracy itself, among intellectuals who primarily focused on issues of hardware and nuclear strategy.
That's right. The key person there is Albert Wohlstetter, who was a conceptualizer of the nuclear war, but he had one extremely important contribution in terms of neo-conservatist thought because he was the one who saw the emerging technology, the technological dominance, of the United States and what it actually could do for warfare. He was a person who thought purely about nuclear war. If you remember back then, the concept was "mutually assured destruction," i.e., that if the Soviet Union and the United States got into a nuclear exchange it would just simply be all over, we'd all be destroyed. Wohlstetter started to see that with the emergence of the early days of smart technology, of much more precision targeting of nuclear weapons, particularly of Cruise missile technology, that this was in fact something that you would actually think more creatively about. In fact, it might be possible to have what he saw as a nuclear exchange on a more controlled basis, that it wouldn't in fact go global, so you would actually be able to use nuclear weapons certainly in a theater way, if not on a battlefield way. So, Wohlstetter saw this emerging technological innovation on the part of American military technology which introduced the concept that war fighting was something which could be carried out in a much more discriminatory way.
The next step in that evolution of ideas is that some of this technology could be applied to conventional weapons on the one hand, and also that you could design to limit collateral damage, giving the American arsenal weapons that could be used for interventions that might be related to ideas of American values transforming the world.
Precisely, yes. That was the huge change, which is that the linking of American power to the advancement of American ideals. The fact that advances in military technology allowed you to imagine campaigns where the collateral damage which hitherto would have ruled out war fighting, because you wouldn't have been able to control the impact on civilian casualties, suddenly became a possibility. You were able suddenly to imagine a campaign where the targeting was so precise and so controlled that this question of collateral damage became a legible or a manageable component of your strategy, you were able to argue, at least with reasonable plausibility, that collateral damage was not intended and was kept to an absolute minimum, and anyway, was probably proportionate to the positive outcome.
You think about why the United Nations was set up after World War II; it was actually to outlaw war unless in terms of self-defense, and after World War II, the United States and the rest of the allies put the Nazis on trial for the crime of making war. So, you had that concept which was that war itself was a crime and that it's something that only should be resorted to as an absolutely, absolutely last resort and then really only either as a question of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter or as a part of a unanimous Security Council declaration or resolution. Now suddenly all that changed, and you were able to see warfare as a much more viable and practical instrument of American foreign policy. This is where the neo-conservative embrace of ideals of American democracy, and so forth, suddenly were linked to the means to put those into effect, and that had a tremendously enabling aspect for their ideas.
Two important names here, both gentlemen being students of Wohlstetter, were Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
Precisely that, who emerged under the Reagan administration in important positions. Paul Wolfowitz, who was then an ambassador in Indonesia, but also and perhaps more importantly, was assistant undersecretary of state for East Asia, where he saw the overthrow of Aquino and the transformation of the Philippines into a functioning democracy. He had first-hand experience of that transformation, interestingly enough, a transformation which caused a few raised eyebrows among his bosses who didn't quite see things precisely his way.
This would have been in the Reagan administration.
Under the Reagan administration, yes, who didn't necessarily see this as a stability-enhancing development.
Richard Perle, who had a checkered relationship with then-Secretary of State George Schultz, ended up with an important contribution at the Reykjavik summit with then-Soviet leader Gorbachev when he defended Cruise missile technology, in fact, when Reagan was tempted to try to go to zero on that. Perle said, "Oh no, we mustn't give that up." So, he as an ascendant of the Wohlstetter philosophy saw the possibilities and a need to attain that technology, not to give it up.
Now it's important here to note that many of the neo-conservatives left the Democratic Party and supported Reagan, but then in the latter part of his administration, when he moved toward recognizing the possibilities of Gorbachev and wanting to go towards arms control, some of the neo-conservatives broke with him.
Absolutely. That was a disappointment. In the beginning of the Reagan administration, they'd had tremendous expectations that Reagan would support them, and his "evil empire" speech played into that. But there was a very interesting aspect, because the neo-conservatives today write as though the Reagan era was a golden age, that there you had a man who was strongly ideologically committed and saw the power of American military force.
In fact, if you look particularly at the second Reagan administration you see a man who was much more aware of the full range of instruments available to the United States and played his cards a great deal more carefully and more subtle sequence than the neo-conservatives today would lead you to think -- than is their interpretation of Reaganism. Reagan was successful because he stuck to the golden rules of American diplomacy, which was to use the full range, to persuade, to listen, to offer aid. He worked with the Polish steel workers, used the AFL-CIO, was working with the Pope who has just died. So, he was very much not one of these sort of bludgeoning, military option first unilateralists in the sense that neo-conservatives would have you imagine with some of their writings.
He understood the politics part of international politics, I guess.
That's what I'm saying. He understood that by working with the grain you can sometimes achieve -- well, you can often, you can usually achieve things more easily than if you try and bludgeon your way forward.
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