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Bouvard on Neoconservatism's Enduring Foreign Policy Logic

X / Twitter · Dec 09, 2025 · 1 min read

Despite "neocon" becoming one of the most discrediting epithets in US politics US foreign policy has not reaaly replaced neoconservatism because it has not been explicitly recognized that neoconservative foreign policy was first of all a response to "realist" detente which

argued for concessions to the USSR and an acknowledgement of its legitimacy. The privileging of "liberal democracy" and "authoritarians" over "totalitarians" followed from rejecting that approach. At most, the Iraq War was an overreach, but US foreign policy language has not

jettisoned a friend/enemy approach framed in moral terms, even if priorities and classifications are shifting. Nor can it, since any state must tilt toward similarly organized states. Attacking neocons was necessary for Trump to scale down commitments to the Middle East and

(especially) break with globalist free trade policies associated (rightly?) with the neocons but anyone harping on this now does so in order to turn American "moralizing" against the US so as to denounce the US as "hypocritical." In this sense, criticizing European immigration

practices and free speech restrictions in more in the "neocon" tradition than otherwise. And, in fact, I would defy anyone to try and make a pure "realism" coherent--try and construct a pure state power approach to the world without accounting for morality.

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