The Neoconservative War against Donald Trump

Trump is a controversial figure with a penchant for saying horrible, horrible things. He has one redeeming quality though…for some reason, establishment Republicans don’t quite like him. Particularly Neoconservatives.

War-mongering Neocon historian Robert Kagan, a key supporter of the Iraq War who also advocated for Syrian intervention, even went as far as to state in the Washington Post that “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton” if Trump secures the nomination. It’s funny how bipartisan the two players can get when certain interests are threatened.

Max Boot, an ardent supporter of the Iraq War, wrote in the Weekly Standard that a “Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power.” He notes that Trump wasn’t particularly fond of having so many troops twiddling their thumbs in South Korea.

Isn’t Trump all for war though? Well, while there’s no indication that he objected to the Bush administration’s Iraqi incursion way back when, he’s openly denounced it as a mistake based on lies. He has also decided not to side with either side of the Israel-Palestine divide, a concept that Neocons could never conscience. “It serves no purpose to say you have a good guy and a bad guy,” he said, and pledged to stay neutral during peace negotiations.

Marco Rubio retorted that “the position you’ve taken is an anti-Israel position…because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith.” There is more evidence pointing towards Israel acting in bad faith than vice-versa, but a willingness to at least stand between both sides, rather than on the side of Israel, would be better than nothing.

Robio has the full backing of Neoconservatives, such as  pro-Israel billionaire Paul Singer; Norman Braman who finances Israeli settlement construction; Elliot Abrams and Stephen Hadley from the Bush administration; and Bill Kristol, who is on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel – the Committee even recently aired an ad that endeavored to portray Trump as an ally of dictators. Why? He had actually argued that American intervention in Iraq and Libya left them worse off; this point should be commonsense, seeing as hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in Iraq alone, and Libya went from one of the richest nations to a safe-haven for groups like ISIS.

On foreign policy at least, Trump’s non-interventionism rhetoric is similar to Bernie Sanders‘, which explains the popularity of the two outsiders; Americans are getting sick of pointless wars that enrich the establishment. Even as Trump calls for a stronger military, he does not call for more spending, and calls out the link between politicians and the military industrial complex. Of course, much of his other rhetoric leaves him open to valid criticism.

50 conservative foreign policy experts recently wrote an open letter condemning Trump. They do raise a valid point:

“[Trump’s] vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence,” the letter reads…

Though one wonders if it is the chance that he could swing towards “isolationism,” which frightens them so, rather than his volatile unpredictability.

Sources: The Intercept, Washington Post, The Guardian

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