Shaping US foreign policy
The emergence in recent weeks of a coalition of neoconservative Republicans and former US national-security officials who have thrown their support behind the Democratic candidacy of Joe Biden is an ominous development to those who believe US foreign policy should be guided by the principles of realism and military restraint, rather than perpetual wars of choice.
In early June, a group of former officials from the George W Bush administration launched a political action committee (PAC) in support of Biden's candidacy. The group, 43 Alumni for Biden, boasts nearly 300 former Bush officials and is seeking to mobilize disaffected Republicans nationwide.
The mobilization appears to be having an impact: More recently, "more than 100 former staff of [the late US senator John] McCain's congressional offices and campaigns also endorsed Biden for president," according to NBC News, as well as dozens of former staffers from Senator Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
That Republican support comes in addition to the more than 70 former US national-security officials who teamed up and issued a statement urging Biden's election in November. Citing what they believe is the grave damage President Donald Trump has done to US national security, the group does include some mainstream Republicans like Richard Armitage and Chuck Hagel, but also features notable neocon hardliners like Eliot Cohen, John Negroponte and David
Kramer, who, perhaps not incidentally, played a leading role in disseminating the utterly discredited Steele dossier prior to Trump's inauguration.
These are not merely grifters or desperate bids for attention by unscrupulous and avaricious Beltway swamp creatures. Though there are those too: the so-called Lincoln Project, helmed by neocon operative Rick Wilson, which is an outside group of Republicans (including former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele) devoted to defeating Trump in November.
As historian David Sessions recently tweeted, "Basically nobody in liberal circles is taking seriously the consequences of the fact that the exiled cadre of the Republican Party are building a massive power base in the Democratic Party." The merger between Democrats and neocons is not merely confined to the world of electoral politics; it is already affecting policy as well.
Over the summer, in response to The New York Times' dubious "Russia bounty" story, Democratic congressman Jason Crow teamed up with Republican congresswoman
Liz Cheney (daughter of former US vicepresident Dick Cheney) to prohibit Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee also collaborated to pass an amendment that imposed restrictions on Trump's plan to withdraw troops from Germany, showing, if nothing else, that the bipartisan commitment to the new cold war is alive and well.
It is noteworthy that while there has been considerable pushback to economic neoliberalism within the Democratic Party in recent years, thanks, mainly, to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the advocacy of reformers like Elizabeth Warren and the increasing popularity of economists like Stephanie Kelton, the same cannot be said for foreign policy.
Biden has evinced an openness to being "pushed left" on social and economic policies if he is elected president, but on external affairs he still largely operates within the standard Washington foreign-policy playbook.
If anything, on foreign policy Democrats have moved rightward in recent years, having fallen not only under the spell of "Russiagate" but also increasingly under the influence of neocons and other former Bush officials who have pushed that discredited narrative for their own ends.
The Democrats have also displayed a rather supine obeisance in regard to the country's intelligence community, in spite of a multiplicity of well-documented lies or half-truths that would at the very least justify some skepticism about their claims or motivations.
Nobody should be surprised.
The neocons had been signaling their intention to flee the Republicans as early as 2016 when it was widely reported that Robert Kagan had decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president and speak at a Washington fundraiser alongside other national-security fixtures worried about the alleged isolationist drift within the Republican Party.
Indeed, the Democrats welcomed the likes of Kagan and fellow neocon extremist Max Boot with open arms, setting the stage for where we are today: a Democratic presidential nominee running to the right of the Republican nominee on foreign policy. Missing: whither the progressives?
Over the past few US election cycles, progressive Democrats have increasingly challenged the party's prevailing neoliberal bias on domestic economic policy. Equally striking, however, is that they have been delinquent in failing to provide an alternative to the hegemonic influence of militarists and interventionists growing within their party regarding foreign policy.