Why No One Should Still Be a Neocon

One of the many serious flaws of neoconservatism is its excessive confidence in American power. This routinely leads its adherents into advocating aggressive policies without taking into account the possible and likely consequences of those policies, because they overlook or simply ignore how their policies might go wrong. That’s not unique to neoconservatives, but it is more perilous because they are constantly agitating for U.S. activism abroad. If there is a foreign crisis or conflict, neoconservatives will insist that the U.S. can and must “lead” to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, and they deride anything other than their preferred policy as vacillation and “weakness.” Neoconservatives also routinely overestimate the importance of willpower and resolve, and they imagine that many international problems could be successfully resolved with nothing more than the right application of resolve and an exercise of power.