‘You can’t make America great again by making it retreat again’ Ruthie Blum
https://www.jns.org/you-cant-make-america-great-again-by-making-it-retreat-again/
In a recent interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the eponymous host asked typically leading questions of his interviewee—in this case, Curt Mills. The purpose of the one-on-one between the two conservative pundits and supporters of newly instated President Donald Trump was to reiterate their shared aversion to the Republican Party’s “war-mongering neocons.”
Carlson highlighted what he sees as the persistence of neoconservative figures in shaping foreign policy, expressing surprise that “over 20 years after the Iraq War, its architects and supporters are still not fully in control of America’s foreign policy, but certainly influential in it.”
David Wurmser, a renowned Middle East policy expert and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is not mentioned by name in the above exchange. But he has been a target of false accusations regarding his ostensibly pernicious undue sway over U.S. foreign policy. In the following Q&A with JNS, Wurmser sets the record straight.
A: Neoconservatives were a group of American liberal intellectuals who began in the 1970s to see a fundamental problem with left-leaning positions. Mining classic philosophy, they essentially had a discovery of civilizational values and foundational ideas that define what made the West—not only in the previous 20 years, but in the previous 2,000—and realized that defending Western civilization was on the table. As a result, they drifted into the camp that was defending it. These figures included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer. For me, the epic neoconservative, who emerged during what came to be called the “[Ronald] Reagan revolution,” was Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Originally on the left, affiliated with the Young Socialists—even giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention—she ended up becoming the symbol of Reaganism.
What defined her and the entire age of Reaganism was a revival of the faith in America’s being a good and proud nation that needed to issue no apologies. It was a reaction to the defensiveness of the post-Vietnam War era, which had descended into constant self-excoriation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, always explaining the global hatred of the United States through “blame America first.”
In any case, I don’t believe there’s such a thing anymore as a neoconservative, and I never was one. Because how could I have been a “new” conservative when I reached the age of political awareness after the movement rightward had already happened? I was born and raised on conservative principles. My mother had been a Czech dissident who fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 with the KGB on her tail. She wound up in Germany in a DP camp, then went to Switzerland and finally arrived in America, where most Czech dissidents headed. Later, I found out that she’d been the leader of the Moravian underground against Stalin.
Q: What was the first presidential election in which you voted?
A: In 1984, when I voted for Reagan. I’ve never voted Democrat since.
Q: You’ve been openly supportive of Trump, both during his first term and again this time around. Why are some MAGA Republicans going after people like you, and what’s behind the split in his base? What’s happened inside the Republican Party to cause the divide?
A: It’s actually what hasn’t happened. There’s no crisp definition of what MAGA is, going forward, and what we’re seeing now is a battle over the soul of the movement. The term-turned-epithet “neoconservatism” became a kind of clarion call on the part of those who hated Israel, were antisemitic or classic leftists like “The Squad.” It became a rubric, and the Iraq War became a symbol of how “evil” the neoconservatives were. Of course, the history of that war has been distorted. The people I was dealing with at the time had a very different vision of how it would progress from the way it’s been depicted by detractors. It was much less a colonialist American vision than an Iraqi one. It was Colin Powell’s vision to go in with 600,000 troops, and then it was Paul Bremer’s idea to have a colonial presence in Iraq to rebuild the country. That was horrifying to many of us. We wanted Iraqis to do the heavy lifting of liberating their country; we wanted them to assume control as fast as possible. Our model was the Free French in World War II.
All that aside, “warmongers” has become shorthand among a collection of people in the MAGA movement—a minority trying to control it—for something we aren’t. There are three groups in this minority. One is made up of outright antisemites, such as Nick Fuentes and, unfortunately, Candace Owens.
The second consists of isolationists who want to withdraw from the world. They believe, for instance, that America’s involvement with Israel causes wars and entangles the United States in them. Though isolationism may have some intellectual validity, it’s a disastrous foreign policy, because you can’t make America great again by making it retreat again. Nor does it work, since the world will come to us; the Middle East will come to us as it has consistently done.
The third group consists basically of Barack Obama types trying to weasel their establishment views inside this administration to slowly guide the ship back toward establishment positions: appeasing Iran, pressuring Israel to concede in order to bring about stability, aiming for a two-state solution, etc.
On the other side, you have President Trump, who made MAGA, who is MAGA; he’s the definition of MAGA. He went to the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s grave before and after the election to get spiritual strength. This is a guy who has no problem with Jews; he surrounds himself with religious Jews. He’s also been very pro-Israel. He filled his entire Cabinet with pro-Israel appointees, who believe in the Judeo-Christian values of the American Revolution.
I can guarantee that Trump isn’t going to write a seven-volume book on the essence of the American spirit—but he embodies it. And he defines half of the political spectrum. That’s why I think that the above groups are going to lose and why they’re being so aggressive.
Q: How, then, do you explain the apparently close relations between Tucker Carlson and Trump?
A: Tucker has a following. During the Obama era, he did some important work helping ground the American idea in the conservative movement in an intellectual way. He ought to be given credit for that. At the end of the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matter literally and figuratively tried to burn down the country, Republicans were falling over themselves to tell the BLM protesters, “We’re with you! We’re with you!” But Tucker used his platform at Fox News to say, “No, I don’t apologize for America; America is a great country.” In many ways, it was the rallying of the flag that turned things around—albeit not enough.
Over the past two or three years, however, he’s deviated to a dark place. Though we say he’s inside the conservative tent, his policies are far more similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s than to Trump’s. I mean, Tucker believes that we [Americans] are the reason that Iran hates us; that we were wrong to kill [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Maj. Gen. Qassem] Soleimani; that we triggered the hatred of America around the world. In other words, he’s essentially apologizing for America—a reversion to the “blame America first” reflex of the left of the late 1970s that Reagan rejected and replaced with a robust sense of unapologetic national pride and American goodness. What is stunning about Tucker is that he had such a position during the BLM riots, but adopts the opposite course in foreign policy.
Take the case of Ukraine, for instance. It’s a very complex issue, much murkier than the left makes it out to be. Though I can understand some of Tucker’s points and sympathize with nervousness on the conservative side about Ukraine, the idea the Russian invasion was the result of the suggestion by some of us that maybe Ukraine should become a member of NATO is not only ludicrous; it’s the same attempt to blame ourselves, rather than [Russian President Vladimir] Putin or [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy or whomever you want to blame. We weren’t seeking to make Russia our enemy. On the contrary.
So, it’s ridiculous to blame America first, which is what Tucker Carlson has been doing. It’s what [President] Jimmy Carter did. For him, foreign policy was a collective apology. Tucker, thus, is placing himself outside of the tent. What’s odd about it is that he’s clearly siding with people who are against the president’s agenda. I wonder about the strategy here.
Q: How do you explain the appointment of Michael DeMino as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East? His statements about Iran and Israel sound completely antithetical to those of Pete Hegseth, who just became his boss.
A: Notice that the people with dubious views have been appointed to the highest level under Senate confirmation, which means they won’t get public attention or be grilled by Congress. That’s the key here. But let’s be real. The right side of the spectrum has its own George Soros: the Koch Foundation. It’s powerful; it has its allies. It’s isolationist and has antisemitic overtones. It has a strong policy of appeasing both Iran and China—another area in which appointees such as DeMino, who is associated with the Koch Foundation, diverge from the president’s agenda. DeMino, too, blames America for the hatred against it, claiming that it all started in 2003 with the Iraq War—as if the region loved us before then.
Q: Since Trump was specific about not wanting Koch associates in his administration, how do you explain DeMino’s appointment? Has Trump not been paying attention?
A: Washington is an immense town with powerful forces working in it, and huge monies from foreign and domestic groups flowing into it to sway the public debate. Because of that, there’s always a natural battle going on. And Trump is managing an enterprise right now that probably has no less than 25 billion parts. For him to pay attention to every last detail would be mismanagement. And Trump, if anything, is a good manager. He knows it’s necessary to delegate. And in any system, mistakes are going to be made. I think that mistakes have been made here and when they’re brought to the attention of senior management, they’ll be corrected.
But that’s the point. There was a quiet effort to bring in people who seek to sabotage the president’s agenda. It’s an attempt to subvert Trump’s stated MAGA policies by quietly bringing in people under the radar, which is why they were just under the level of confirmation, to guide the ship of state off course.
One of the reasons that I worked for people like Cheney was that back then, in the 1980s, Cheney was MAGA. He was the outsider whom everybody in Washington hated. I’m not in his camp now, but at the time, I was fighting the swamp in D.C. Ironically, it’s now Tucker Carlson and the Koch brothers who are the swamp monsters.
These people are presenting a false choice between total American withdrawal from the world and becoming an imperialist colonial power, occupying the entire Middle East—and that’s the “endless war” they seem to think is the only other option. But there’s a third option, the one they’re really attacking: that we find allies in the region that are powerful, loyal and share our values—and we let them win, share the burden and leverage their power to secure American interests. That’s Israel. Letting Israel win—not tying its hands—allows it to gain an alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which don’t care about the Palestinians. They care about the strong horse and wish to align with the force they believe is non-threatening and shares the same enemies. The Abraham Accords are the manifestation of Israeli-Arab strategic cooperation—the foundation for ending the constant, endless wars of America in the region. So, we’re largely disengaging and allowing regional forces to do the work for us. That’s the prescription for having America strong; American interests secure; America respected for standing with our friends; and America not bleeding to death in a colonial war.
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