Winter 2009

Less than 48 hours after John McCain conceded defeat in the presidential election, a group of conservative activists gathered for a post-mortem at the Stanley, Virginia, weekend home of Brent Bozell III. The meeting had been planned well before the election, but the participants kept it quiet, to avoid the appearance they were “measuring the coffin for McCain,” as one of them later put it. Still the group, organized by Bozell, founder of the conservative press watchdog Media Research Center and a nephew of William F. Buckley, wanted to get to work quickly after the Republican Party’s across-the-board loss.

There were social conservatives (Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council); economic conservatives (Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform); pioneer conservatives (Morton Blackwell, of multiple Republican campaigns and conservative organizations); literary conservatives (R. Emmett Tyrrell, of The American Spectator); and direct-mail conservatives (Richard Viguerie). But there was no one who could primarily be called a neoconservative. This wasn’t entirely an accident; looking toward the future after an electoral battering, at least a few of the attendees were not eager to make a place for those whose conservative credentials they have often questioned and who in particular they regard as most closely associated with the war in Iraq.

“Among some people in the meeting there was the belief that the neocons to a great degree are responsible for the disastrous state of affairs within the Republican Party, by advocating big-government conservatism, which is a contradiction in terms, and by advocating unnecessary nation-building, which split the conservative movement in two,” Bozell told me recently. “It wasn’t universal that the neocons needed to be confronted . . . but they weren’t exactly on everyone’s Christmas list.”

If you’re looking for tension between the conservative world and its neoconservative wing, there it is. But it would hardly be accurate to say neoconservatives were a major topic at the get-together in Virginia. As Tony Perkins told me, the discussion “was more focused on repairing the divisions between fiscal and social conservatives, with the understanding that foreign policy issues would be addressed as we proceeded.” In other words, foreign policy wasn’t first, or second, or even third, on the list of concerns for the future of the movement. Nor is it at the top of the list among conservatives as a whole.

Indeed, for all the political problems that the war in Iraq caused for Republican candidates around the country, if you ask virtually any group of rank-and-file conservatives what has gone wrong with the Republican Party, a majority will point first to out-of-control government spending. Some will say the GOP has abandoned its core, Reaganite values. Some will rue the party’s failure to connect with young and minority voters, and some will say Republicans need to find better ways to address health care, or education. But very few, if any, will mention Iraq, or the Bush Doctrine, or the war on terror in general—the issues most closely associated with neoconservatives.

This must be a frustrating development for all the commentators who, in the wake of November 4, predicted civil war inside the conservative world and predicted further that neoconservatives and traditional conservatives were so different, and perhaps so fundamentally incompatible, that when the glue that held them together—9/11, the unity of purpose that gave rise to the War on Terror, and a Republican presidency—weakened they would be torn apart. But the period of post-Bush reflection and re-evaluation has already begun. And the split between the larger conservative movement and the neoconservatives, while sometimes gossiped about in groups such as the one Bozell convened, has not yet appeared. While virtually anything is possible, it seems unlikely that any serious rift will open up without a deep re-examination of the war. And that just doesn’t seem likely.



From the summer of 2006 until election eve, I traveled to scores of Republican campaign events for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and, before that, for Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudolph Giuliani, and Fred Thompson. In the course of that little odyssey, I met hundreds of Republicans in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other key primary and swing states. Through all of the primary season, and that part of the general election campaign that took place before the economy became the elephant in the room, I noticed a strange disconnect on the issue of the war. The candidates talked about it all the time, and the voters talked about it rarely, if at all.

In August 2007, I traveled to Iowa to spend a couple of days with Mike Huckabee, just before his second-place finish in the Ames Republican Straw Poll established him as an early contender in the GOP race. As a candidate, Huckabee was positively Clintonian in the sense that if you talked to him about health care or education, he would go on forever. Talk to him about foreign policy, however, and his interest quickly waned. In an interview aboard his campaign bus parked outside the Iowa State Fair, he said that people at his rallies and town meetings seldom brought up the war, yet it always seemed to be Topic A at the debates, of which there had already been several. The situation clearly frustrated him: “Among the Republican candidates, there’s really very little separation about Iraq, with the exception of Ron Paul. And yet, we still go back through it over and over and over again, and I just never quite understood why we continued to plow the same ground when there were so many topics we never touched. Do you realize that in four debates we never had a single question on education? Not one. And two on health care, that I can recall.”

Huckabee was right. The Republican debates were, by and large, a long, continuous nod of agreement about Iraq. While it was possible to criticize, say, excessive government spending in the last few years—an implicit shot at Bush that audiences fully understood and accepted—none of the Republican candidates broke ranks comparably on the war. All the major candidates backed the surge, and their comments about Iraq consisted mostly of warnings that Democrats would cut and run if they had the chance and scenarios of the disasters such white-flagism would cause. My guess would be that most of the people who came to the rallies and attended the debates felt the same way.

That’s not to say the war was not a matter of concern. In the terrible days of 2006, Republicans were as daunted as Democrats by the violence and loss of American life in Iraq. In 2007, they at times tentatively hoped for the success of the surge. But at no time did I see or hear of anyone volunteering to re-think the premises of the war, or to place blame on those who advocated it. There was none of what was going on in the Democratic primary race, where the candidates tried to outdo each other in raging against faulty WMD intelligence and in attacking the neocons and their theories of “national greatness.”

Perhaps the Republican consensus on Iraq stemmed from the justifiable desire not to condemn a sitting Republican president on an issue of such magnitude. But George W. Bush is now leaving office, and a debate on the war still has not emerged among Republicans who are subjecting every other past commitment to exhaustive and sometimes lacerating scrutiny. Is there any Republican agitating for a truth commission to investigate the start of the war? Any bitter recriminations about the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy in an age of terror? Any calls for a major overhaul of national security thinking? Not so far.



One reason a split between neoconservatives and the rest of the conservative world seems unlikely is that, even with the problems of the war, they still agree on fundamental questions. The basic belief that has held conservative foreign policy together since 9/11 is that Islamic extremism presents a mortal threat and must be countered with the strongest measures, including military force. Most conservatives would argue that the war in Iraq began as a part of the larger war on terror, and that this larger war is still worth fighting. After the meeting in Virginia, I sent Tony Perkins an e-mail asking him about the likelihood of a split between neocons and other, more traditional conservatives. He didn’t see that happening because of the adhesive nature of the war on terror, although he was chary about the verse in the neoconservative gospel about spreading democracy:

From my perspective, which is common among social conservatives (I am also a fiscal and defense conservative), there was support of the administration’s initial actions in the wake of 9/11 including Iraq. That support was largely based upon the understanding that good and evil are more than moral concepts, they are reality. The rapid spread of radical Islam is an evil that threatens freedom. However, the administration lost support as they moved from eliminating threats to building nations.

Interestingly, Perkins’s words echoed a sentiment heard from an entirely different type of Republican—Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who until the 2006 elections was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the committee, Roberts often fought off the attacks of Democratic Senator Carl Levin and others, who railed against neocons and seemed downright obsessed with the workings of the office of one of their representative figures, Douglas Feith, in the Department of Defense. Roberts supported the war and defended the administration’s reading of pre-war intelligence. But he worried about taking the next step to nation building. In a May 2004 speech at Kansas State University, Roberts endorsed the Bush Doctrine and specifically praised Charles Krauthammer’s phrase, “realistic pre-emption,” but offered a note of caution: “In fighting the global war against terrorism, we need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts—a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy—by force if necessary.”

A few weeks after the election, I spoke to Randy Scheunemann, the former top foreign policy advisor to John McCain. A veteran of, among other things, the Project for the New American Century, generally considered the prototypical neoconservative foreign policy institution, Scheunemann often appears as a villain in left-leaning accounts of the war. (If you Google his name and “neocon cabal,” you’ll come up with impassioned discussions on The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and Democratic Underground.)

Scheunemann wasn’t very happy with his label. “I worked for Jesse Helms, Bob Dole, and Trent Lott, and I guess that makes me a neocon,” he says sourly. But he regards a split in the ranks as unlikely. “There was no debate about foreign policy within the party—somewhat surprisingly—during the year and a half primary campaign,” he told me. “There was nothing like what you saw in the huge debate which tore up the party after Vietnam.” 

Scheunemann noted that the candidate who was the strongest supporter of the war in Iraq, and who was sometimes described as being a vessel of neocon theory, won the nomination. And that candidate, McCain, received his strongest support across the party on the issue of the war: “There is no significant voice in the Republican party—a political voice, as opposed to a think-tank voice—that had fundamental differences with McCain on that.”

In speaking to another prominent neoconservative, Robert Kagan, I got much the same impression. “Whatever splits are going to occur, foreign policy is not going to be one of them,” Kagan told me, adding that the combination of the success of the surge and Barack Obama’s decision to name Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton to top cabinet posts had reduced even the left’s desire for scapegoating. “I’ve noticed already in speaking engagements I’ve done in places like San Francisco that now that Obama has named two prominent war supporters to his cabinet, the liberals don’t want to ask the questions any more,” Kagan says.  “I can’t believe how light the attacks are.” With the “neoconservative war” diminishing in importance among liberal opponents of Iraq, the issue has virtually disappeared, if it ever existed in any serious sense, among conservatives.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that a significant part of the Republican base detested McCain. In fact, it is fair to say that he was the most unpopular candidate since there has been a modern Republican base. But what were the sources of conservative Republican disenchantment with McCain? His positions on immigration and campaign finance, his early votes against the Bush tax cuts and, in general, his penchant for “too much crossing the aisle,” as one NRA-belonging, Palin-loving former Marine told me at a rally in Ohio. Significant by its absence from this list of grievances was foreign policy. On this, at least, there was no distance between McCain and the Republican base.

There always remains, of course, the possibility that some neocons will want to sever ties with the conservative movement, as opposed to the other way around. It’s no secret that some of them, more tightly focused on foreign policy than ever, tend to be more moderate on issues like abortion and gay marriage than the rest of the conservative world and in fact see these issues as threatening their concerns. Some neoconservatives hope to see the Republican Party become a bit less pro-life, a bit less anti-gay marriage, and a bit less inclined to apply religious litmus tests. But they know that if they were to push an agenda reflecting such inclinations, they would tear the party asunder. The fear is confirmed by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. “If there is an effort to remove social issues from the party’s focus by the neocons,” Perkins told me, “then yes, I think you’ll see a major confrontation.” The danger, he explained, is that “younger social conservatives are not that committed to the Republican Party, so if their issues are jettisoned, then the party loses the social conservatives.” Perkins was quick to offer conciliatory words: “However, social conservatives are ready to work with other conservatives to advance the movement.”



At John McCain’s campaign rallies it was not at all unusual to spot one or two young men, casually dressed, short haircuts, looking altogether unremarkable and healthy except for the fact that they walked with a cane. I made a point to talk to them, and there was no need to ask whether a motorcycle accident or a football injury or some other mishap was to blame; the only real question was whether the walking stick was necessary because of something that happened in Fallujah, or Ramadi, or somewhere else in Iraq.

“I was thrown from the [Humvee], took some shrapnel, landed on my spine and mashed it up a little bit,” a twenty-two-year-old Marine sergeant named Jack Eubanks told me after a McCain speech in Woodbridge, Virginia, on October 18. First wounded in 2005, and then, after an 11-month recovery and a return to action, wounded again in 2007, Eubanks had come to the McCain rally to give John McCain his Purple Heart. With the help of a local Republican official, he got to meet the candidate. “I said, ‘I want to give this to you, sir, as a reminder that we want you to keep your promise to bring us home in victory and honor, so it will mean something,’” Eubanks told me he told McCain. “We fought over there, and we want it to mean something. We don’t want to come back and it just be all for nothing.”

It didn’t take a mind reader to see what Eubanks really wanted: reassurance that the war was not a mistake, as so many of his fellow citizens were claiming.  Republicans, who had less at stake in the war than Eubanks, shared the same concern. It was striking that they could have this feeling but at the same time not feel compelled to re-examine the decision to go to war. If Iraq ended badly, they would not blame those who began it; they would blame those who allowed it to be lost.

How the conservative movement and the Republican Party will adapt to all the implications of Obama’s victory in November and the Obama presidency yet to come is still in the balance. Will they be haunted or guided by the ghost of Ronald Reagan? Will the tent they build be big enough to hold a variety of groups that don’t always agree on which issues to rally behind, or tailored for a narrower and more passionately committed constituency? Will peace reign between neocons and more traditional cons?

These questions have already been asked; the answers will only come over time. But despite definitional infighting and political tensions over which issues will take precedence in 2010 and 2012 and beyond, one somewhat surprising fact seems clear: anyone waiting for the conservative movement to break apart over foreign policy will probably be waiting for quite a while.

Byron York is White House correspondent for National Review.