One of my dad’s favorite words when I was growing up was "prudent." He knew he had a wild ‘un and he always used to ask, Is that prudent? Well dad, I didn’t start the Project for the New American Century, did I? Here’s a smart piece at FP by Justin Vaisse saying that the late Irving Kristol was against the 2003 Iraq war but held his tongue, evidently so as not to embarrass Billy the Kid. (Sorta like George Herbert Walker Bush and W):
The main beliefs of the neocons — originated in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article by Kagan and Bill Kristol, reiterated by PNAC, and promulgated more recently by the Foreign Policy Initiative — are well-known. American power is a force for good; the United States should shape the world, lest it be shaped by inimical interests; it should do so unilaterally if necessary; the danger is to do too little, not too much; the expansion of democracy advances U.S. interests.
But what was Irving Kristol’s view on these principles and on their application? Toward the end of his life, the elder Kristol tried to triangulate between his position and that of most neocons, arguing in 2003 that there exists "no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes" (including patriotism and the rejection of world government), and minimizing democracy promotion. But at this point, the movement’s center of gravity was clearly more interventionist and confident of the ability to enact (democratic) change through the application of American power than Kristol could countenance. He kept silent on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while the Scoop Jackson Democrats and third-wave neocons cheered.
This remembrance by James Q. Wilson in the Wall Street Journal makes a related point. Irving was temperamentally more cautious than his son:
[Kristol] did not care what we were called and he gave to one of his published collections of essays the title, "Neoconservativism: the Autobiography of an Idea." He explained why that tendency differs from traditional conservatism: Neoconservatism is not an ideology, but a "persuasion." That is, it is a way of thinking about politics rather than a set of principles and rules. If neoconservatism does have any principle, it is this one: the law of unintended consequences. Launch a big project and you will almost surely discover that you have created many things you did not intend to create.
This is not an argument for doing nothing, but it is one, in my view, for doing things experimentally. Try your idea out in one place and see what happens before you inflict it on the whole country.
Of course Irving got dealt a better hand, the Cold War. After the Cold War ended and the start of the first Intifada, it was almost impossible to make a strategic or moral case for the special relationship with Israel. And neoconservatism lost its charm.
Jack Ross responds:
First off, its a bit of a leap from the article to say that Irving Kristol was in fact opposed to the Iraq War, which he may have been up to a point. But it is very wrong to go as far as to say he was not a neocon in the sense we understand the term now. Indeed, if anything, it was he who jettisoned the neoconservatism of Moynihan and Nathan Glazer (in the 70s an outspoken supporter of Americans for Peace Now and even earlier a fierce critic of anti-anti-Semitism) in favor of the "social democracy" of the Scoop Jackson Democrats, and it was he who taught them to reconcile said social democracy with Reaganism. And this was his vision from the beginning, as I’ve explained elsewhere:
Having said all that, there is still a great deal of truth in the FP article. Irving Kristol at the very least was not a psycho like Podhoretz. The analogy I think is to Chaim Weizman, who opposed the armed struggle against the British and warned Ben-Gurion about the consequences of trying to conquer the whole mandate and expel all the Arabs – in both cases, not out of any second thoughts about the cause they had given their life and ruthless Machiavellian wiles to, but merely out of realism.
