Neocons, Neocons, Neocons!

 by  Victor Davis Hanson

After the midterm wipeout, divisive blame-gaming erupted on the Right. One particularly bitter divide was over supposed “neocon” interventionism and the Iran war.

But who are—or were—the neocons, and what is neoconservatism?

The word, clearly, means “new conservatives.”

It was first used to characterize former liberals and Democrats in the 1970s who were turned off by their erstwhile party’s soft-on-crime domestic policies and especially by its cheery notion that we no longer needed to fear Soviet communism. They were even more appalled by Jimmy Carter’s paralytic reaction to Iran’s hostage-taking.

In reaction, a number of public intellectuals and officials—such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, James Q. Wilson, Bill Bennett, and Jeane Kirkpatrick—began supporting Ronald Reagan’s “we win, and they lose” approach to the Cold War and the military buildup needed to restore deterrence.

The neoconservative movement’s post-Cold War agenda was set in 1997 with the creation of the ill-fated, interventionist Project for the New American Century.

The group was headed by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan (both now liberals) and joined, in varying degrees, by a diverse group that included Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Francis Fukuyama, and a host of others.

They called for isolating and, in some cases, removing illiberal regimes that posed long-term threats to US interests, whether in the Middle East, Asia, or the Western Hemisphere. That agenda remained largely theoretical—until the 9/11 catastrophe.

But after that horrific attack, neocons supported removing the terrorist-backed Taliban in Afghanistan and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and establishing pro-American, consensual governments in their place. The public agreed—initially.

The two long, costly wars that followed—one ultimately a humiliating failure in Afghanistan, the other at best a mixed bag in Iraq—largely brought formal neoconservatism to an end.

In reaction, Donald Trump’s MAGA movement promised to avoid so-called forever wars and costly efforts to implant democracies in otherwise alien societies, especially in the Middle East.

Yet Trump was no isolationist; he is instead what many have called a “Jacksonian.”

He embraced the Reaganite idea of limited, one-off preemptive strikes that did not usually involve ground troops, high costs in blood and treasure, or lengthy engagements.

In his first term, he eliminated terrorists such as Soleimani and al-Baghdadi, destroyed the ISIS caliphate, and killed numerous Wagner Group mercenaries. In his second term, he arrested Nicolás Maduro, the communist dictator of Venezuela.

Critics of the current Iran war claim that Trump was captured by so-called neoconservatives—a term they use as a euphemism for a purported malign Jewish lobby that supposedly promotes Israel’s interests over those of the United States.

But those in the Trump administration who supported eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat did so on the Jacksonian assumption that there would be no ground troops, no nation-building, and no costly effort to establish a new regime.

Instead, in the spirit of his first term, Trump sought to end a growing threat with air power and without incurring substantial losses—an approach far removed from traditional neoconservative nation-building.

In truth, there are few, if any, neoconservatives left in the MAGA Republican Party.

Many neoconservatives of decades past retained their liberal views on immigration and abortion. That may be why, after Trump’s 2016 campaign and election, almost all the remaining neoconservatives renounced him. Many of those associated with The Bulwark and others are now proud leftists.

So the current divide is really between Jacksonians and isolationists within the MAGA movement.

Both sides otherwise agree on much of the MAGA agenda—the border, illegal immigration, crime, energy, DEI, defense, and the trans issue—and on almost everything except the current war and support for Israel.

The Jacksonians think the administration’s mistake in the Iran war was not just failing to win quickly but stopping the bombing on day 38, before the nuclear and terrorist threats had been fully eliminated.

Adding insult to injury were the next seven months of endless talks with an Iranian theocracy that had no record of negotiating in good faith.

The isolationists counter that the disaster lay in going to war with Iran at all. They insist that the potential nuclearization of Iran never posed an existential threat to the United States.

So what exactly does the “neocon” smear usually mean these days?

It has become an indirect way for many isolationists to claim that Jews and their Zionist allies have hijacked the Trump administration, betrayed America First, and turned the administration into a tool of Israel.

These accusations are false. Democratic Israel receives 0.05 percent of the federal budget and only 7 percent of annual foreign aid. And even that will end by 2027.

A final irony?

Some who scream “neocon” loudest are more often sympathetic to the anti-Israel, Islamist, and statist base of the new Democratic Party than to the Jacksonian MAGA conservatives they attack from the Right.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/11/12/neocons-neocons-neocons/