Who Counts As A Neocon?

Earlier this week, Reihan professed that he still considers himself a neoconservative. In a response to critics, he clarifies his position:

I identify neoconservatism with the belief that U.S. military primacy and U.S. global leadership are valuable and worth sustaining, and also that we ought to define our interests broadly rather than narrowly. This definition encompasses a wide range of foreign policy thinkers, many if not most of whom would eschew the neoconservative label. … Having used the term neoconservative in lieu of stating that I favor preserving U.S. military primacy and U.S. global leadership, I led at least some of my readers to believe that I was advocating all kinds of things I do not in fact favor, e.g., perpetual war, or a sharp increase in military expenditures.

Larison protests:

To still be a neocon in 2014 usually means that one continues to whitewash and justify a war that most of the country wrote off as a terrible idea and a failure (or something much worse) long ago. The fact that Salam isn’t willing to do that proves that he isn’t really a neocon by any reasonable definition of the word, and probably hasn’t been for many years.

He identifies the “belief that U.S. military primacy and U.S. global leadership are valuable and worth sustaining” with neoconservatism, but neoconservatives are hardly the only ones that believe this, and the two are far from being identical. Most internationalists across the spectrum unfortunately “define our interests broadly rather than narrowly,” but what distinguishes neoconservatives from the rest is that they are likely to perceive U.S. interests where almost no one else does.

Millman piles on:

In actual practice, neoconservatives have a tendency to be stopped clocks, hammers that see every problem as a nail. And stopped clocks and hammers are not good guides to policy, regardless of where they are stopped or how hard the hammer. They would add more value to the foreign policy debate if they would return to the empirical rigor of the original neoconservatives in domestic policy, and stop behaving as if they had found some kind of eternal truths.

Salam, given his intellect and his preexisting sympathies, is an excellent person to begin that kind of change within the self-identified neoconservative ranks. But to change, you first have to acknowledge that you have a problem.